Gabrielle (principal of Buscada) is co-founder of Urban Encounters, a project on the dialogue and practice of visual urbanism. The Urban Encounters conference is now in its 3rd year. This year’s event takes place May 29, 2010 at Tate Britain.

Buscada collaborates with Urban Encounters to curate, participate, organize and publicize the event through multiple media.

Visit urbanencounters.org for more information
Follow Urban Encounters on Facebook

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Urban Encounters: Routes and Transitions
Symposium
29 May, 2010, 10am – 7pm (with reception)
Tate Britain

Tickets: £25 (£15 concessions) Please visit Tate Ticketing.

Download the Routes and Transitions poster

Urban Encounters: Routes and Transitions explores the dialogue and practice of visual urbanism to bring together international researchers, academics, photographers and artists concerned with the transitional nature of contemporary urban space. It will be of particular relevance to those engaged with urban image-making, analysis and research. This third annual conference will address how photographic practices and archives intersect with an understanding of local and global routes as “places”, considering the temporality of place and the cross-cultural juxtaposition of locales.

This conference approaches the city as a palimpsest of routes and its panels will consider local, global and remembered routes through film, photography and other visual urbanisms. Considering the cultural geographies of migration, change, place, identity and the process of making transitions, the conference will facilitate an on-going interdisciplinary dialogue about the growing field of urban visual practice, method and enquiry.

This symposium is the center of the Urban Encounters Festival, which takes place in several UK-based and international locations this spring, including the London-based galleries Photofusion and Viewfinder, and at the events Urban Encounters: City to Sea at Bognor Regis, UK and Urban Encounters at the Festival of the Image, Manizales, Colombia.

I just returned from the Digital Hollywood conference in Santa Monica, CA, I talked on a panel which was trying to understand how to best leverage video archives and assets for both large media companies and smaller non-profits.

I showed the PBS video platform on which I was the design lead. I discussed how the new tools we developed give PBS access to their own rich archive, and allow them to program in a new way online. These online video platforms in effect allow PBS to return to being true network producers: categorizing shows by content topics, not by the time-slots of linear TV. They are now able to create new channels of content by combining new and old shows with valuable web content for context.

Highlights from the panel

Broadcasters are now broadcasting full episodes with much success and reaching new audience instead of cannibalizing old ones.

On the panel, a member of the South Park production company shared some really interesting insights about how their viewers watch South Park online. He explained that full episodes are a big hit online, and that people watch all seasons equally, so it is not just catch-up TV.

A 12-year-old today did not watch Season 1 when it first aired, so it is now new to them. This is a phenomenon of long term video archives: a  stream of younger viewers discover content for the first time, while other viewers tune in for nostalgia.

Digital Hollywood is on multiple times a year at different locations.

Find out more at: get URL :http://www.digitalhollywood.com/

Kaushik