Interesting2007 was useless (and that's a good thing!)

And I mean that in the best possible way! I'd been looking forward to this conference for a while now, and was one of the lucky 'first 50' people to buy a ticket. What attracted me most about it was that it wasn't going to be like any other old conference. You know, the boring ones, with the long list of speakers, where really the only thing you want to do is sneak off and play hooky. And boy, was Interesting2007 different! I sat glued to my seat the whole time, mesmerized by people opening their hearts and talking about what they were passionate about and the best thing: it was completely use-less. And I mean that in the literal sense. It had no use. I did not learn anything that I could not have lived without. No particular impact on my day to day professional (well, ahum, student) life. But boy did it have an impact on me. This is what life (and conferences) is/are supposed to be like. No big fuss, no big poo-ha, just real life people talking about real life things. Or in some case not so real. Or life. But incredibly fascinating, heart-warming, exciting and interesting.

Things I never knew: how to split a big log, how to change the world for a fiver, whether video games can be art, how post-modernist food can be, what Ibsen and the Muppets have in common, what pipes and tubes can do, how nice nice things can be, how to make a better erotic film, how the Oprah show works behind the scenes, how much work and thought goes into creating the Spy Exhibit at the Science museum, that Cezanne had a phobia for touching people, what parkour is, that you can really make a saw sing, how there is absurd in the everyday normal and vice versa, how everyone's an expert in something, how you can analog blog, how physical becomes more important as virtual becomes more important, how comics have metatext and how wonderful it is to be inefficient.

The one weird thing for me was that I felt I was crashing someone else's party. It was all planners, creative types and then ehm... an MBA student. I kept to myself a bit, not wanting to acost bloggers who I've been reading for a while (that probably because I still have admits weekend fresh in my mind, where I was very lost for words when people mentioned they read my blog, I didn't want to do that to others) and in awe and kinda starstruck of other people. And had an acute attack of shyness. Anyway. Nice to see everyone anyway. 

Thanks Russell, for coming up with the idea and organising, thanks to all the speakers, you were all wonderful. A plethora of reports about, read reports here, and here, and here, and here and here and here and here. And on technorati here. And Flickr here.