DIGITAL CULTURE TRADESHOW IN BELLARIA
by Giuseppe Pennisi
In it’s fourth year, the annual Digital Culture conference has become the most important event for digital creative types in Italy. The event is held in Bellaria, near Rimini on the Adriatic coast, a popular European holiday destination.
At the request of organizers, I agreed, with pleasure, to hold a VR workshop at this year’s conference. Shen accompanied me and helped out on the technical side, preparing tutorials for the various stitching applications, and Lele, a freelance photographer who has worked with us for two years, rounded out the team.
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As the past few months have been very hard due to a continually increasing workload (weekends have lost their meaning), this event was a greatly welcomed change of activity.
Driving to Bellaria, we stopped by chance in a beautiful village unknown to us before. Medicina is a village from the middle ages rich in history.
We ate in a “locanda” suggested by street workers. In Italy, especially, one can be assured that truck drivers and street workers know the best places for genuine food that is good and cheap. The space was originally the connection between two convents and later became a fish store, woodworking facility and finally, about 50 years ago, was transformed into its current role of locanda.
Although the food was good, Shen fell sick soon after lunch and spent the next two days in bed in our hotel. Poor Shen! Poor Pennisi too, all alone to face the workshop! All the prepared material is virtually unusable without him there to help. In the end, all went well thanks to help from Lele and Omnik Pampakian, director of Foto-imaging in Milan, who seemed to have a telepathic connection with Shen back in his hotel room, curled up in the fetal position.
A group of highly motivated and creative photographers animated the workshop with lots of questions and contributions. Some workshop attendees are deeply radicalized in our industry, such as Martino Agnoletto, an engineer creating panoramic tripod heads. He works closely with Agno’s and Massimo Tosello, who is professor of photography at the Urbino University. They all made highly professional and valuable interventions that raised the quality of the workshop.
Many other workshops and seminars were held during the three day event in the Congress Center. Corridors became discussion spaces for many small groups sharing their experience and making interesting connections. The ground floor hosted the exhibitors with their products, and all the beautiful hostesses reminded us of the limits of the virtual world.
Giuseppe Pennisi is the Senior Director of Photography for VRWAY.
Email: giuseppe.pennisi@swiss.vrway.com
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