This year's Flash In The Can in Amsterdam presented its attendees with a brand new venue and a diverse range of very inspiring speakers. With a bigger location (although now slightly farther from the city center) the event now offered room for one and a half times as many people to attend, which definitely was a good thing.
Tuesday featured talks by the likes of (among many others) André Michelle, Grant Skinner, GMUNK. A little after midnoon a frenchman in his late twenties walked up to the stand in the blue hall and introduced himself as Matthieu Bessudo, better known under his pseudonym McBess (mcbess.com). Many of the attendees present may have been somewhat surprised to learn that this very calm and seemingly peaceful guy actually creates the super-crowded and very vibrant artwork that McBess is known for (also including the creative for this year's Flash In The Can). In his session McBess showed some of his early and later works and shed light on his work-process, which on the spot turned into a very interesting live drawing session where he asked the audience for 5 things they liked, combining them into one drawing (beer-drinking, pudding-eating dinosaur with boobs on a bicycle anyone?).
Just after 5, Ben Radatz led the attendees through the work and work-process of MK12 -- including work on the opening credits for the James Bond movie Quantum of Solace.
On wednesday Mike Creighton kicked off the second day of the event in the red hall with his presentation entitled "Harnessing the Abundance", followed by names such as Carlos Ulloa (creator of Papervision3D) and Robert Reinhardt (author of the Flash and ActionScript bibles). Also very mentionable was Thijs Bernolet from Little Miss Robot hacking Shawn Pucknell (main FITC guy) his Facebook account -- during the presentation (more about that on the FITC blog).
FITC Amsterdam was closed off by Evan Roth in his session about open source, viral media, art that isn't boring and waiting for Jay-Z to call you on the phone. I hadn't seen Evan before but immediately found his presentation to be one not be missed out on. The talk ranged from huge digital/interactive graffiti on tall buildings, to hacking an airplane-seat so that the person in front of you won't put it back, to editing N.W.A.'s 'Straight Outta Compton' to only include the cuss-words.
All in all, although already a great event, Shawn and the rest of the FITC people managed to turn Flash In The Can Amsterdam 2011 into an even more varied and overall better happening -- hats off!
Photos courtesy of Tim, one of the people behind SpringFestival.
