Resonate festival in Belgrade: Bringing artists from all over the world to Serbia.
It was my first time to be there, see some of my highlights:

Nicholas Felton came as an unexpected surprise speaker. In a tiny little venue in the outskirts of Belgrade a tbd-guest was announced. This made us suspicious and we walked all the 3,5 km in the blazing heat of the serbian sun just to find out who it might be: We were rewarded with interesting insights on how Nicholas Felton works and composes his visualisations.

Back in town we had a look at Studio Moniker, a studio from Amsterdam doing simple but nice artistic projects, like this video below celebrating the end of the mouse click with a collective swarm-video:

http://donottouch.org/

Andreas Schlegl presented his collective syntfarm, “which explores and preserves expressions and structures of dynamic (eco)systems on our planet”. In particular he presented his project Synboutique.

 “In SYNTBOUTIQUE, you will be able to interact with fantastical allegories through videos and rapidly prototyped replicas of objects, tools and landscapes that are found and used by people who don’t have access to information technologies, electricity and mass media, and are still living in a mutually beneficial relationship with their surroundings.”(Source: http://www.isea2008singapore.org/exhibitions/air_syntfarm.html)

http://www.syntfarm.org/ 

My favourite speaker was Kyle McDonald who presented Flapchat, a work made by his students.

“FlapChat is an interactive web app that allows people to engage in video chat while flying over the screen. Each user is represented by a small bird with a video screen inside it. Using a standard webcam, users can flap their hands to control the bird and fly inside the imaginary chat world.”

(source: http://flapchat.net)

I can not think of any other city I know which is so full of contrasts: A big ruin, next to an orthodox church behind a top modern data visualisation studio, surrounded by a very special south-east-european atmosphere.