Seeed in Taiwan

Yesterday I watched an unusual presentation from Escher Tsai from Taiwan. It constituted the first of three keynote speeches at this year’s Pixelache festival.

According to the Pixelache site, he

devotes himself into digital art research, promotion and creation. He was project manager of Acer Digital Art Centre, planner of many digital arts creation and centre, host of Digital art exchange platform, creative director of microplayground.

He talked a lot about the work he and Dimension+ have done for the makers of Hello Kitty, and then moved on to talk about artists’ use of open source software and hardware in Taiwan.

His talk was ostensibly about Playaround workshop, which was founded in 2008. This

educates local people with its core spirit, free, open and share FLOSS (Free / Libre Open Source Software). Applying untraditional methods to sharing knowledge and teaching new media art courses has successfully open up unexpected opportunities for people from different backgrounds. Playaround, Technomad, DIWO Culture and Space Colonization are the previous four workshops that have encouraged local enthusiasts respectively. Pure Data, Open Lab and Bioart communities in Taiwan were formerly supported and educated by these free culture workshops.

He showed a lot of slides, many of them featuring Hello Kitty. This was the slide that interested me the most:

Should you be interested, you can find a few more random details from his talk here.