Its been a long while since I've been to the ICA, but I was tempted back by Webby night. Rather that do a complete write up, Tom's got an excellent overview.
ou are invited to a meeting of 'the cream' of the British web, the evening has no real agenda besides 'chatting and seeing what happens'.
So, what sort of set-up do you expect?
Well, the free vodka was a good idea, but putting everyone in a room with pounding music so you can't hear what is being said is possibly not a good idea. Add in the fact that the room is incredibly dark, so half deaf people like me can't lip-read and you have a badly thought out location.
So what do us incredibly intelligent 'cream' do? Clever buggers to a soul, we all decamp outside where it is well lit and there are tables.
…And then the DJ followed us out into the light and pounded us with stupidly loud Dance. For the second time while surrounded by tech people the suggested solution was to disconnect the speakers.
As Tom points out it was meant to promote the Webby awards by showing off some of the previous winners from the UK. So we had…Regine from We-make-money-not-art.com sharing her inspirations, Shooting people showing off short films (the last one which lands directly between porn and art) and Joel Veitch who is the man behind rathergood.com. Yep we've all seen those crazy animations at some point across the web. I find them a pain to watch but end up watching them because people send them around the office. Anyway, like Tom said it was a good night simply for the people I met. As usual you can find the videos on Blip.tv. Enjoy! specially the end of shooting people and when the heckler gets told to shut the fcuk up.
