Unofficial Guide to South By Southwest 2013

First up on the Next Stage is the introduction to our exciting recruiting meet up series: I Met My Agency @ SXSW!
A unique form of career development, this agency speed dating session lets agencies pitch themselves to you, the qualified job seeker. After the fast-paced pitches, move over to the Meet Up Pavilion at 12pm to network with the agencies and the career-minded for the first edition of this daily recruiter meet up series.
Current agency participants for SXSW 2013 include Duarte Design, Edelman Digital, Fleishman-Hillard, POP, Razorfish, R/GA, Resource, SapientNitro, Threespot and Waggener Edstrom.
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The popular perception of digital and social media is that it’s ephemeral. Disposable. Mere one-offs, designed to be consumed and forgotten. But creative people are experimenting with storytelling across digital and interactive platforms such as Instagram, Twitter, and Tumblr, to tell stories that sustain engagement and evolve as their audiences grow. This panel, moderated by Kristen Joy Watts of R/GA and featuring some of the most compelling storytellers on the web, will explore the best ways to keep an audience engaged over time. The panelists – Kenyatta Cheese who was one of the creators of Know Your Meme, Sarah Kramer of The New York Times who created the Emmy Award-winning series One in 8 Million, and Paul Octavious, a photographer and artist with the popular series #samehilldifferentday – will describe the unique challenges and benefits of building an audience on their platform(s) of choice, their creative processes, and how their narratives evolved over time.
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The Hidden Room Theatre is proud to present Robin Jones’ mind-bending interactive time-travel pulp play THE GIRL WITH TIME IN HER EYES! Become a volunteer test subject for an emerging technology that allows you to witness and document a mystery that happened sixty years ago. Change the fabric of history as you untangle clues and avoid deceptions. The Hidden Room is joined in this performance by their UK sister company Look Left Look Right who will be teleconferenced live from London. Come back with us as we travel through crime.
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Meet Heather Knight, Electrical Engineer and Roboticist, and her robot, Data. Heather designs unique interfaces between people and machines that incorporate body language, personality, humor, temperament and spectacular stylings. Leveraging her research, Heather will explore the ways psychology, expressive emotion, behavior system design and art influence the positive evolution of charismatic technology.

In an age where highly capable machines enter our daily lives, social robotics focuses on how machines can empower people – not replace them. Machines that fail to interact appropriately with people run the risk of becoming irritating and unwelcome. However, when personality and charm are added, functional machines can not only empower people – they can engage, inspire, elicit trust and foster bonds with their human partners. Brought to you by IEEE.
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Bike Hugger's Built is back for SXSW 2013 with another Make and Tell event. This audience favorite features a series of talks by people who create, reveal their design process, and bring their inventions to SXSW.
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This panel featuring Peter Hoddie of Marvell, Morgan Knutson of DropBox and Stephen Spencer of MAYA Design will explore the challenges of creating digital devices in a fun way. Rather than sit around and prognosticate on what makes products great or talk about the latest crop of cool gadgets, this interactive panel will come up with concepts for new digital devices in real time. We'll do that by preparing grab bags of parts. The panel participants will pull out a collection of parts, and come up with new product ideas on the spot. Audience participation will be encouraged to share their ideas. This will provide a basis to discuss all aspects of digital device design, including functionality, target market, cost, industrial design, third party dependencies, etc. Most of us are on the receiving end of completed products. This panel will be a fun way for attendees to gain insight into what it takes to come up with a realistic, great idea.
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Join Media Lab research scientist Henry Holtzman, and master’s students Dan Novy and Janice Wang, who will discuss examples of Media Lab work on immersive experiences.
Henry Holtzman’s Information Ecology group is creating physical spaces where both real and 3D projected objects and sounds can coexist with people, and in which we can interact with these objects unencumbered with special glasses or headphones. In addition, they explore how objects can embody emotion through their shape, texture, and color, and create objects that can vary their emotional output to suit a story, situation, or memory.
Dan Novy’s work on computational immersive displays examines the difference between how we’re conceiving immersion now compared to how we did, say, virtual reality in the 90s, by exploring emotional and perceptional engagement rather than pure technological overload.
Janice Wang’s research explores how food can be a tool for creating memorable experiences involving multiple senses. For instance, music can change our eating experience by altering our emotions during the meal, or by evoking a specific time and place. Similarly, sight, smell, and temperature can all be manipulated to combine with food for expressive effect.
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How are we, as media-driven consumers, inspired by a cause or motivated towards social change? In this discussion Theo Ianuly and Geoff Stanfield of Gist Lab will bring together musician Ryan Bingham, Peter Glatzer (SHFT), actor Adrian Grenier (SHFT), Stephen Fox (Drink Water) and Lisa Pike Sheehy (Patagonia) to delve deeper into what it takes to engage and mobilize the masses for the greater good.
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With the rapid rise of photo-hungry social networks Pinterest and Instagram (and their subsequent effect on the more-established Facebook and Twitter,) branded content is compelled to become less verbal and more visual. For years, lifestyle brands have made significant investments in developing social voices. Our panelists include brands that have done this successfully- Natanya Anderson of Whole Foods Market, Jean Scheidnes of Neiman Marcus, Suzanne Schloot of kate spade and Pinterest/Instagram power user Bonnie Tsang. As language takes a backseat to image, brands must extend that effort to their "visual voice."
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A year ago at Coachella, 90,000 fans had their collective minds blown when a “virtual” version of the late rapper Tupac Shakur joined Snoop Dogg onstage for a live, original performance. 15 million more viewed the performance online in the next 48 hours. Why did this performance have such a seismic impact when digital characters had appeared in many movies, and illusions of live performers had been created with projections many times before? Ed Ulbrich of the Academy-Award-winning visual effects studio Digital Domain sheds light on the intrigue behind the phenomenon, the digital human creation process the company perfected over many years that led to virtual Tupac (and next, to virtual Elvis), and the implications of this new form of entertainment on music, filmmaking, ethics and entertainment.
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Vicky Boone Casting is holding an Open Casting Call for actors at SXSW. Are you interested in acting in features films in Austin? If so, please submit your headshot and resume to sxswcasting2013@gmail.com. Vicky Boone is casting several feature films this spring and will use these casting sessions to connect with new actors from Texas or beyond. Interview slots will be 5 minutes each. Please bring your short reel to the audition (on dvd or online).
Vicky Boone’s recent casting credits include Terrence Malick’s Untitled Austin Project, Peter Landesman’s Parkland and David Lowery’s Ain’t Them Bodies Saints. Other favorite casting projects include Malick’s The Tree of Life and Scenes from The Suburbs directed by Spike Jonze in collaboration with Arcade Fire.
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“Anonymity” is a much-ballyhooed buzzword. But the complex issues of anonymity and authorship are far from unique to the Internet age. We’ve been here before.
Turn back to 17th century Europe, when publishing was a less-than-classy enterprise. How uncouth! Still, anonymous works were circulated and reviewed. There was authority without authorship, engagement without ego. But after the French Revolution, an “Age of Personality” was born. We’ve still basking in it.
Of course, it's more complicated these days. Anyone can slap a name on a blog post. But one can also eschew authorship. Pseudonymous posting is de rigueur because technological platforms make it easy, and the Supreme Court has continuously protected anonymous speech. But for how long?
Nabiha Syed, a First Amendment lawyer, and Katie Engelhart, a historian and author, will explore historical norms alongside today’s pitched battle over real-name policies. What space do we have today for the ever-prolific Anon?
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