Last night about 25 people gathered at i-camp in Munich for "Update the Upgrade!" - an informal evening of short presentations about what people are up to at the moment. It was organised by the Upgrade! München team, at the suggestion of artist Susanne Wiegner, who was one of five presenters during the evening.

I opened the evening, speaking about UpStage, the 101010 festival, and my current project, the networked performance make-shift. I'd just had a meeting with Martin Eisenbath about the DownStage research project he is embarking on, looking at how to redevelop UpStage's foundation in order to make it more easily extensible, so Martin also spoke about this. Then followed Marlena Corcoran, who gave an illustrated reading of her new work, Edward King, which she is beginning to develop for the 111111UpStage Festival. A great taste of what's to come ...

Susanne Wiegner was up next, showing her recent 3D animation films based on poems by Robert Lax. Her background is in architecture, and she is using architectural modelling software to spatially explore text - what lies between the spaces of the letters and how this other world can be visually opened up within the context of Lax's words. Then one of the organisers of the evening, Tamiko Thiel, spoke about her augmented reality work. She has created visual environments that work in existing smartphone apps, and then used these to undertake guerilla interventions in locations such as MOMA. Last up was a presentation about Sub-Bavaria, a searchable wiki site documenting Bavarian history.

The evening had begun with cake (it was Marlena's birthday) and ended very slowly with much drinking and talking. It was a very good environment for networking, conversing, catching up and sharing our work - a welcome change from trying to catch up with overly-busy people and brief conversations at hectic festivals or conferences. We should do this more often :)