Sometimes I keep wondering what I am doing with my life. Flying over to Barcelona to spend 4 days in dark, overly crowded theaters (sometimes even sitting) doesn't seem much fun.

The only reason I ended up there was a sluggish application for the CAN+OFFF Workshop. Then, suddenly sitting between Aaron Koblin, Mr. Doob and 10 other hard core interactive media experts was an unexpectedly awesome experience. Too sad, our new version of Tooll2 was not ready enough to be used and so I spent the day learning about Kinect, Blender and geometry conversion tools. I learned a hell of a lot, and thus it was a very nice day. But missed the opportunity of showing off and to defend Windows as serious design platform of realtime content.

Of course the average media style the conference was just my cup of tea: They featured most of my favorite vimeo-artists. Legends of motion design like Onesize, Physalis and Onur Senturk. Still, the repetitive bombardment with state of the art physics simulation, heavy editing and camera shake left me with a certain feeling of emptiness. Like the early years of the demoscene when you got some extra kudos for rending 2000 faces with phong shading. Quite frankly, most animation had nothing to say. After a couple of hours, every channel (how beautiful it may be) that lacks information just become noise.

From the 100+ animations/presentations I saw over the days, Physalis was probably the most euphoric. These guys certainly seem to enjoy their work somewhere between motion graphics and hardware tinkering.

The most motivating talk was definitely the one by Stefan Sagmeister. This time with a longer and updated version of his TED talk about happiness. I love his energy, logic and humor on how to approach real world topics. Thus, giving him the final slot of the conference was a perfect decision. Of course I know that you go to a conference for meeting people (a already knew of the the animations), but of all things I am scared of, approaching strangers is probably my biggest fear. If "having guts" makes you happy, I will try my best at the OFFF 2012.