So, to Amsterdam for PICNIC ’07.
With the strap line “Uncork your Mind” and heavy sponsorship from the likes of KLM, KPMG, Lost Boys and Heineken (notably unavailable and personally missed in the event’s main bar) PICNIC – now in its second year – bills itself as more a festival than a conference.
And it very nearly gets there.
In addition to the main conference sessions and workshops there are also audio-visual events across the city’s main music and arts venues (including De Balie, bringing on unwelcome flashbacks to a particularly messy panel I participated in seven years ago) and a transplanted version of New York’s “Come out and Play” urban games event.
So yes, they do it well. If there’s one downside (other than the lack of Heineken, though this in part alleviated by the presence of local rival “Brand”) then it’s the issue that all these events face: however stellar the speaker list there’s never enough actively actionable content.
PICNIC delivered on the high profile speakers but all too often all the high priced ticket money got you was just the showcasing of latest work or the uncritical promotion of latest books, business models or (stand up Richard Hytner, Saatchi’s global #2 dude) rhetorical slices of trendy jargon. Nevertheless, some of the highlights nearly made up for this. Here are three:
1. Arriving late and seemingly disoriented to his 15 minute “PICNIC Green moment,” actor – and enthusiast for all things green – Woody Harrelson talks to the topic of endangered redwoods. Or rather “ancient redwoods” – he seems unable to decouple the trees from the adjective and this lends a certain air of comedy. An air maintained by his stand out line: “If only those ancient creatures could talk…” Class.
2. Uber-hacker Pablos Holman of Komposite.com demonstrates the weakness of most everyday encryption techniques by performing some live exploits Yes, it’s the expected thing in these sessions, but the modern day phone-phreakery of hacking someone’s voicemail and changing the message is always good value. And this was Cory Doctorow’s answer phone message. Great stuff.
3. “Cult of the Amateur” author Andrew Keen takes an almost aggressive and confrontational stance against David Weinberger’s evangelical view of the semantic web. Possibly Keen – whose thesis is that blogs deliver damagingly superficial observations of the world – is driven to this aggression by the sight of his audience blogging his words in real time. Or possibly he’s aware that a hard-line stance helps shift units.
Either way, it’s not everyday you hear the terms “philosopher” and “humanist” hurled as insults…
