On The Tech Interview: Mark Nagurski

What role is CultureTECH playing as part of the City of Culture 2013?
“Within the City of Culture programme there’s a lot of interesting and exciting things happening. We wanted to make sure digital, gaming and animation, played a part as well. We ran a pilot event for CultureTECH last year. This year, we built it out from three days to a full week, and we’re increasing it to an expected audience of about 30,000 people.”

What are CultureTECH’s goals?
“First and foremost, we want to make sure people have a fantastic time. We’ll have a huge number of bands playing, digital arts exhibitions, gaming tournaments. At the same time, there’s a conference strand, workshops and seminars that are a bit more industry focused. They cover everything from music technology to digital theatre.”
The theme for this yearʼs CultureTECH conference is “Telling Digital Stories”?
“A lot of the interesting things happening in technology at the moment are not about 0’s and 1’s, but interesting ways that we can use content. Content broadly comes from some sort of narrative base. If it’s a piece of animation or a game it has a storyline. We want to explore how we take storylines, apply digital technology, and come up with something new and interesting. We want to strip out the technology and talk about the craft. At South By Southwest, over the last few years, the conversation had been about mobile apps, location aware services, social media. This year, the conversation was all about visual art, storytelling, music. Those same tools we’ve been talking about for years are now applied in new and interesting ways.”
What’s CultureTECH’s tie-in with Glasgowbury music festival?
“Glasgowbury are going to curate and host our Saturday picnic in Derry’s Guildhall Square. It’ll be free. We’re working with them to put together a really interesting and eclectic line-up. It’s one of about half dozen music events that will happen across the week.”
How about the Minecraft gaming tournament?
“They’re basing it on Hunger Games. Every hour, a group of around 16 will start playing on a specially crafted course and kill each other off. Whoever is left will move on to the next level. There are some big prizes, live commentary, and a big screen.”
And the Other Voices collaboration with CultureTECH?
“When Other Voices came to Derry this year we talked to them about potential tie-in’s. We devised the idea of an Other Voices Challenge. Other Voices set a brief, which can be downloaded from the CultureTECH website. Anybody can compose a solution to that brief and pitch an idea. One of them, for example, is how they might engage more meaningfully via social media. We’ll bring the top six ideas to CultureTECH in September. Other Voices will pick their favourite two, who will get €5,000 in cash and the opportunity to work with Other Voices for three months, then go to Dingle and show off their work there.”

CultureTECH takes place from
September 9 - 15 in Derry.