Resonate is a new media festival of music, visual arts and digital culture, held annually in Belgrade, Serbia. Ragnar and I took the time to head over and check it all out and, in review, we’ll definitely be coming back next year!

Resonate workshops

The 3-day festival is mainly focussed on talks from industry artists, lecturers and educators, but there were also workshops, screenings, panel discussions and live performances. The workshops were on a range of topics from creating musical applications with Processing and Pure Data, right through to programmatically controlling ARDrones. Sadly we didn’t get to take part in any of these as the limited number of places were taken up very quickly, (something we’ll do better at next year!) but from what we saw by cruising around the main space, people were having a lot of fun, with some very interesting audio/visual results.

A real highlight for us was the other attendees, all from a range of countries, backgrounds and disciplines, all doing incredibly interesting work and sharing a passion for types of work on display at the festival. So, it was a joy to spend the early evenings in a selection of Belgrade’s many fine restaurants with friends old and new. Seriously, the food and drink in this country is insanely cheap and super tasty. Special mention goes to Šešir Moj (translation: My Hat) for the finest combinations of meat, fish and potatoes, accompanied with traditional Yugoslavian song and story telling!

The evenings featured live music from the likes of Pantha du Prince, Mouse on Mars and a slew of local and international DJs. The venue for the late night action was more often than not Building Kluz – a disused shopping centre with grand decoration and a slightly post-apocalyptic ‘gutted’ vibe, which complimented the pounding minimal techno just perfectly…

When returning to the conference venue in the mornings after, slightly bleary eyed and in need of a good coffee (Belgrade loses a point there, I’m afraid) we were treated to a huge range of truly inspirational and experienced speakers. Highlights for me were the talks from Spaces of Play, Memo Akten, Kyle McDonald, Golan Levin and Casey Reas.

After-parties at Building Kluz

Spaces of Play really made me think about what makes a game…a game. Experimental titles such as 4 Minutes and 33 Seconds of Uniqueness (where the only interaction with the game is starting the game), The Stanley Parable (which takes user interaction, decision making and whimsical narration to a whole new level) and Proteus were really fascinating to learn about.

Kyle McDonald presented a thought provoking and informative journey through a range of his portfolio pieces, and also highlighted the importance of artists sharing code which overcomes technical difficulties, so that the community as a whole can focus more on the artistic side of creative coding. Experiments such as keytweeter, where for an entire year every single keystroke of Kyle’s was automatically posted to Twitter, offered a refreshing dive into the philosophy behind all of the creative applications of technology and made me consider the ‘why’ as well as the ‘what’.

My only criticism of the festival would be that a large percentage of the talks were extremely portfolio-centric, with artists simply taking us through their work recent, piece by piece. This isn’t such a problem when much of said portfolio is of the highest quality imaginable, which it was, but I would have liked to see more in the way of discussion regarding the big ideas behind the art in conjunction with the art, itself. Granted, the panel discussions were better at this, but there’s nothing quite like a captive audience listening to an artist’s deeper motivations behind their work.

This, however, is a small criticism. On the whole, the festival was a fantastic event, and we’ll definitely be attending next year. I would highly recommend that you do, too.