Tom Revill drew a picture of the “scuttle bugs” that featured in Phil’s “Global Hockets” project. They were awesome, controlled by performers hidden above the stage, they interact with each other on stage.

There’s a clear case on top of wheels (so you can see the workings). The speaker on the top emitted sounds of night animals.

Friday, Saturday and Sunday, I’m at the Aotearoa Digital Arts Symposium (ada2009), which is being held at Victoria’s School of Architecture and Design.

ADA is a charitable trust (“We finally became charitable this April” says Zita, the chair) that has formed out of an email discussion list and a distributed support network populated by a group of digital artists here in New Zealand. The yearly ADA symposium is now in its 6th year. It helps keep build and nourish this “uncomfortably small but cozy community” (says Zita: “I don’t mean ‘uncomfortably small’ in a really uncomfortable way”) by facilitating a face-to-face get together of folks who are otherwise perfectly happy to converse and collaborate virtually.

The symposium also helps bring in new people to this community (like myself!), and they try to be as open as possible to new ideas and conversations. The three signature elements of the event seem to be: The free lunch (nom!), friendly and open events, conversational approach.

This ‘conversational model’  seems to me to be quite similar to what I’ve seen at several recent conferences – a growing trend towards interactive, participatory, short presentation sessions – encouraging as many people to get up and speak as possible. It can be challenging to compress your ideas down into 5 minute talk, but it also narrows the focus of talks down to the most important elements, and lowers the barrier of entry to those who might not otherwise feel like they can prepare for a full session.

The feel of the conference is very grass roots and comfortable (and I loved how the plates and mugs for lunch have been sourced from a local thrift store), and everyone is very friendly and happy to help. I went to workshop sessions yesterday on Arduino and Quartz Composer, and despite being such a newbie – there were great people to give me tips and get me started!

It’s still possible to just drop in on the conference (which still has today, tonight, and tomorrow left to go) for a very small fee – so check out the programme and see if anything takes your interest! (You can follow our conversations on twitter).