CANNES, France - Some of the most interesting work shown at Milia '98 was designed by students and artists trying to illustrate their world or to simply create something for aesthetic pleasure.
At the conference's New Talent Pavilion, 27 teams representing 12 countries displayed their projects for all to see. To get there, participants underwent a tough selection process in which they competed against more than 160 project submissions. The projects include computer worlds based on surreal artwork, fresh renditions of classic literature on CD-ROM, and interactive dance videos and family albums.
Dante's Inferno
Four Spanish art students used Dante's The Divine Comedy as the basis for a CD-ROM that includes original text and a multimedia interpretation. They selected the text, said 22-year-old Elisabet Garau Cima, because its ideas about hell are timeless.
"It's a universal play," she said. "It's written in the 14th century, but if you read it now it's actual. ... We like the play because his interpretation of hell is very static."
Viewers start in a surreal valley where sounds from a lion, panther, and a wolf represent the sins of pride, ambition, and luxury. Moving through the program almost like a game, viewers find pictures representing various ideas about hell.
In one area, which depicts Dante's view that those who commit suicide would be punished in hell by becoming trees for all eternity, Driftwood-like stumps sprout from a field of bones. Here viewers get confronted with modernity through images of Marilyn Monroe (singing "I wanna be loved by you..."), Jim Morrison, and James Dean, all icons who died young and fast.
They also diagramed the way Dante envisioned a concentric hell. So far the project - which was done to fulfill a graduation requirement at the University Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, Spain - remains a demo because its producers haven't finished illustrating all the parts of Dante's hell. They say they will finish the project if a sponsor can be found.
Tuomas Honka, who grew up in Finland during the '50s and '60s, created something he said is not for sale and never will be: an interactive family album showing life near the Arctic Circle.
"Family history is my hobby," said Honka, 44, a student at the University of Lapland in the town of Rovaniemi. "My project is a real project. It's not for sale."
To create his album, Honka sorted through 11,000 black-and-white photos taken by his father, as well as newspapers and music from the times. Snapshots taken when Honka was young serve as links to color pictures taken of his triplet sons, who are now 5 years old.
Honka's interactive album shows how life has changed - when Honka was young his family would visit neighbors by cross-country skiing, but now they travel by snowmobile. But it also illustrates how some things have stayed the same - saunas were and are still an important part of Finnish life.
Rendering Escher
The world created by Denis Ketelaars is a stark contrast to Honka's. Ketelaars, who recently graduated from the Hochschule der Künste in Berlin, Germany, set out to render a 3-D computer world based on the work of Dutch artist M.C. Escher.
After looking at Escher's art, which presents three-dimensional pictures in two dimensions, Ketelaars said he thought "Whoa! What would it be like to walk in this planet?"
Ketelaars, 29, created a tetrahedron-shaped planet in shades of black, white, and gray. Viewers roam through it and come upon various rooms. The rooms contain Escher's pictures, and with a click or a drag viewers can manipulate them to see how they were created or change the scale.
Ketelaars started the work as a graduation project and worked on it alone. But complications with finding a way to create 3-D art and some of the tedious work involved led Ketelaars to find a partner in the end.
"My best friend helped me the last month because he was afraid I would not go to bed," he said.
Many of the projects on view had elements that were similar to those found in games, even if they were created as art. Two British students at Middlesex University created an interactive dance piece.
David Johnstone made a series of drawings that were animated by partner Andrew Clark and paired with original music. Against a white background and without on-screen buttons or other distractions, an elegant figure moves across the screen. Viewers can interact by making the figure move backward or forward or stop.
"It's meant to be very peaceful," said 30-year-old Johnstone. "When the music's on you're supposed to have a glass of wine and enjoy it."
For these artists and the others selected to display their projects in the New Talent Pavilion, there's more at stake than getting a place in the Milia spotlight. It can also provide an entrée into the business world.
Opening Doors
Being selected to exhibit at Milia helps open doors, said Grethe Mitchell, who exhibited there last year. Mitchell is one of the thousands attending this year's five-day conference, which bills itself as the largest content-focused event in the multimedia industry. She is here to participate in a pilot project designed to pair creators with venture capitalists and potential clients.
Mitchell had worked for more than 15 years in the film and TV industries when she decided to get a master's degree in interactive media at Middlesex University. During her studies from 1996 to 1997, she began working on what would become Kinonet, an online information and communication system designed for film producers. Script updates can be logged quickly and made accessible to the entire crew, and crew members who are on location can keep in close contact with others back home.
Her system, which is being used by Working Title Films, runs on a private web site and is designed to be used on multiple platforms and even in places without the latest technology.
"My concern was to have something useful in any country," said Mitchell. "If you're going to shoot a film in Morocco or in Eastern Europe where the phone systems are not that good you can still use it. And you can always make it more powerful if you have the equipment."
