Guest Talk – Lisette Titre-Montgomery

This week’s colloquium will feature video game Art Director and Manager Lisette Titre-Montgomery who will speak on “Video Games: Development and Diversity”.

Date: 03 Nov 2017 (Friday)
Time: 6:30 pm
Venue: M6094 Future Cinema Studio, Run Run Shaw Creative Media Centre, 18 Tat Hong Avenue, Kowloon Tong

Topic: Video Games: Development and Diversity

Abstract:
Lisette will speak on game design and development, the international game industry, and on the importance of diversity in art, science and engineering.

About the Speaker:
Lisette Titre-Montgomery is an Art Director/Manager with over 17 years of industry experience. Her artistic skills include special effects, character modeling, and texture painting. In addition, she has also managed global art teams in Japan, China, Australia, India, and the Philippines. Lisette has contributed to some of the industry’s highest profile games, including Tiger Woods Golf, The Simpsons, Dante’s Inferno, Dance Central 3, SIMS 4, Transformers Age Of Extinction. Her most recent project is with Double Fine leading the art development for Psychonauts 2. Ms. Titre-Montgomery’s passion is being a diversity advocate for the game industry. She speaks publicly about how game based curriculums are the key to engaging today’s youth in S.T.E.A.M education and careers. Lisette has been a keynote speaker at N.A.S.A., Intel, Black Girls Code, Girls Who Code, and Soledad O’Brien’s Starfish Foundation. She has also been named One of the Most Powerful Women in Tech by Business Insider. She was most recently honored to be invited to The White House to work on initiatives to improve diversity in tech hiring and inclusion.

To find out more about Lisette Titre-Montgomery, please check the speaker’s pages.

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Guest Talk – Gregory Girard

We will have Photographer Gregory Girard in our next colloquium held on 24 Oct 2017 (Tuesday) to give a talk on the topic “HK:PM. Photographing the City One Night at a Time”.

Date: 24 Oct 2017 (Tuesday)
Time: 4:00 pm
Venue: M6094 Future Cinema Studio, Run Run Shaw Creative Media Centre, 18 Tat Hong Avenue, Kowloon Tong

Topic: HK:PM. Photographing the City One Night at a Time

Abstract:
Greg Girard will be talking about his latest book of photographs, “HK:PM. Hong Kong Night Life 1974-1989”, made on early visits to Hong Kong in the 1970s and later during the 1980s when he moved to the city and eventually called it home for 15 years. HK:PM is a record of a young photographer’s nocturnal wanderings through the city, including the bars, tattoo parlours, hotels and nightclubs, and the people who inhabit them. Other scenes depict the pre-dawn emptiness of the city’s streets and alleys bathed in the artificial colours of neon rendered on film. Although the pictures were made in and of the moment, after thirty years or more they serve a new role as an unintended document of Hong Kong’s unique streetscapes, signage and built environment. They also explore many of the themes that Girard would later develop in book-length projects such as “City of Darkness” (1993) and “City of Darkness Revisited” (2014), about the Kowloon Walled City, and “Phantom Shanghai” (2007), looking at China’s largest city as it raced to make itself modern again. Girard is visiting Hong Kong for the launch of “HK:PM” and an exhibition of his photographs at PMQ in Central, Oct 27-Nov 12, sponsored by Blue Lotus Gallery.

About the Speaker:
Greg Girard is a Canadian photographer whose work has examined the social and physical transformations in Asia’s largest cities for more than three decades. Based in Shanghai between 1998 and 2011, Girard’s photographic monograph, “Phantom Shanghai” (Magenta, Toronto, 2007), with a foreword by novelist William Gibson, looks at the rapid and at times violent transition of Shanghai as the city raced to make itself modern again at the beginning of the 21st Century. “City of Darkness Revisited”, released in 2014, revives an early collaboration with co-author Ian Lambot, and updates their original book, “City of Darkness: Life in Kowloon Walled City” (Watermark, 1993). His latest books, published in 2017, are “Under Vancouver: 1972-1982”, by The Magenta Foundation; and “Hotel Okinawa” which examines the social and physical landscape of US military bases and their host communities in Okinawa, published by The Velvet Cell. Other titles include Hanoi Calling (Magenta, Toronto, 2010); and In the Near Distance (Kominek, Berlin, 2010), a book of early photographs made in Asia and North America between 1973 and 1986. His work is in the collection of the National Gallery of Canada, The Art Gallery of Ontario, the Vancouver Art Gallery and other public and private collections. He is represented by Monte Clark Gallery, Canada. In addition to book projects and gallery work Girard is a contributing photographer to National Geographic Magazine

To find out more about Gregory Girard, you can check out the speaker’s pages.

Guest Talk – Jürgen Hagler

In our second colloquium session on 20 Oct 2017 (Friday), we will have the Professor Jürgen Hagler come in to discuss the topic of “Animating interactive spaces”.

Date: 20 Oct 2017 (Friday)
Time: 4:00 pm
Venue: M6094 Future Cinema Studio, Run Run Shaw Creative Media Centre, 18 Tat Hong Avenue, Kowloon Tong

Topic: Animating interactive spaces

Abstract:
The presentation will address the subject of expanded animation in the context of gaming and playful activities and will focus on co-located interactive environments in large display settings that allow the interaction between multiple actors. Inhabiting and modifying those spaces is granted via natural mapped interfaces that incorporate technologies such as position trackers and mobile devices. However, several design challenges in regard to animation arise when conceptualizing and creating experiences within the context of co-located and interactive playful environments: the issues under consideration will be the mapping of the actors’ actions, their representation within the virtual environment, as well as new forms of narration via interaction. Based on research projects and various artistic projects for the Deep Space at Ars Electronica Center, Linz novel approaches of animation in interactive spaces will be discussed.

About the Speaker:
Juergen Hagler currently works as a professor for Computer Animation and Animation Studies in the Digital Media department at the Hagenberg Campus of the University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria. He became the programme coordinator for the Digital Arts master’s degree programme in 2009. Since 2014 he is the head of the research group Playful Interactive Environments with a focus on the investigation of new and natural playful forms of interaction and the use of playful mechanisms to encourage specific behavioural patterns. Since 2017 he is the director of the Ars Electronica Animation Festival and initiator and organizer of the symposium Expanded Animation.

To find out more about Jürgen Hagler, you can check out the speaker’s pages.