Barcelona's long-running OFFF festival for cutting-edge digital art and culture finally touched down in New York this year, taking over a good portion of Borough of Manhattan Community College's campus in lower TRIBECA. This fest featured a good swath of their usual top-shelf speakers, and a growing lineup of digitally-infused performance art pieces.

OFFF has become a very diverse and well-balanced show. The list starts with the usual suspects, top commercial artists like Hillman Curtis and Neville Brody, Flash masters like Josh Davis, Erik Natzke and Hi-Res, then is beefed up with a few of Hollywood's top graphics names and this year, a large array of commercial motion houses. Experimentalists like Amit Pitaru and Craig Swann season the mix along with the wild Reactable – a screeching, pulsating, ultra-futuristic musical instrument. Finally OFFF ups the conference ante with an element of live performance art, dance and music. Other ideas blended computer programming with furniture and tile design, and we even got a thesis on the way the great leaps in the histories of art and physics have uncannily mirrored each other.

Having lived in the haphazard, festival-happy, do-what-you-please city of Barcelona for a spell, I enjoyed seeing NYC get a taste of their cheerful madness. This came complete with the usual Spanish/Catalan rough edges (or very laid-back maybe?) including an onstage power outage, the usual shuffling of acts and drifting schedule, and one sexually-explicit dance performance that drove a number of people from the theater. But despite the bumps, things still felt tidy and professional, bolstered by a swank iMac lounge, Sponsorship from Adobe and Stash Magazine, free Josh Davis prints courtesy of HP, and of course the personal touch and years of experience brought by Hector & co. Great show guys, and thanks for bringing it to the U.S.!

Motion... ethics?

The real meat of this year's conference was a very solid focus on Motion Graphics. Industry leaders like Psyop participated in a panel discussion, which addressed themes of responsibility in the uses design is put to. Besides this new twinge of ethics, there were some interesting new directions as well. A PSA shown by one dashing young studio called Buck (they did the graphics for An Inconvenient Truth) seemed to indicate a shift for graphics shops one step closer to full-fledged animation houses – more in the vein of a homespun Pixar than the usual swishy-flat-graphics broadcast fodder that's been heavily played out over the last few years.

I really enjoyed watching Motion Theory detail their creative process on pieces like HP Hands and Beck's fold-in video. This is a company that shows a clear awareness of their relationship to art and artists, vis-a-vis the corporate lieges footing the tab. While definitively commercial and highly aware of that fact, they manage to produce work that is consistently groundbreaking, thoughtful and rich with detail.

Slightly disconcerting though, was gMunk's latest, which although visually amazing as ever, lacked that same sense of maturity. This guy is without doubt one of our generation's most talented visualists, even his earliest work stole the show at a film festival I co-curated years ago. But his latest batch featured a gleefully gory, Dexter-like hacking of animal body-parts (he said he was angry after a break-up), and raised a toast to war with a Hummer spot tagged "game on." The work was excellent as always and Bradley implied that he'd given into doing the spot to get the chance to work with whatever big-shot agency hired him, but it all left a bit of a bad taste in my mouth.

As a rebuttal to my take on things though, film titles- & effects-wizard Kyle Cooper directly addressed this subject, reminding that beyond worthy causes and so forth that there is something truly noble in simply doing what you do well, with heart and sincerity. He's right of course, and I appreciate that he brought this up. This said, designers certainly should be equally excited to have a say in things – most simply just by choosing who and what to lend their talents to. I think, or hope, that this is a very positive, healthy trend that should be encouraged, but along with a tempering dose of Mr. Cooper's sage wisdom.

I missed seeing Rob Chiu and a number of other motion-graphics gurus, as is the way with these conferences.

The Flash product, and other experiments..

Offf presented a good lineup of Flash luminaries including Hi-res, Josh Davis and Erik Natzke. It was also a pleasure to see Richard Galvan present the upcoming crop of Flash features: the sleek update to the animation timeline (better late than never?), support for columnated flowing text (double finally!) and the big one, native 3D player support for Display Objects as rotatable 2D planes. He ran out of time and didn't get to a few others shown at Adobe MAX, such as built-in IK (inverse kinematics) and faster pixel-level drawing for texture-mapping and photoshop-like filter effects.

Talking to him after the presentation I learned that Richard has a keen awareness of exactly where each feature is at currently. We chatted about low-level animation mechanics of the Flash Player, and I found out that the holy grail of a time-based player is indeed on the distant horizon, but that each rev will need to be a small step toward this goal. The new Flash timeline features meld After Effects, Premiere and Live Motion, and from what I've seen I have to say that they are nailing this long-overdue upgrade with great design decisions and a level of usability we've never seen in Flash. Kudos, team!

To top things off, I really enjoyed seeing independent minds like Jonathan Harris and Amit Pitaru chugging along the bumpy road of grant-funded – and sometimes unfunded – personal projects. Harris kept a complete photographic record of an adventure to a whaling camp, with a continuum of one-or-more photos every 5 minutes reviewable via a heart-monitor-styled timeline. Pitaru reveled in the characteristics people from various countries showed using his 3D sound-sculpting device, showed a video of James Patterson at work using a novel 3D sketching tool he'd invented, and showed his successful attempt to bring video games to the severely disabled. He also presented a thrilling live collab mashing up Presstube animation with modern dance, also very inspiring. Another dance piece thrown in the OFFF mix by a company called Derivat, "Flowers of Romance," sexed things up a bit but ultimately became tedious and lost a percentage of its audience. The final live act of the conference was a series of dazzling animated "video paintings" by Takagi Masakatsu, accompanied by the artist playing a grand piano against a backdrop of sequenced electronica, another interesting foray into new territory, which we've come to expect from OFFF!

Here are some snapshots from OFFF NY 2007:

The Reactable, a futuristic musical instrument. I got to mess with it at the Sonar music festival in Barcelona last year. It's hard to play but an incredibly novel interface that really works. So I set out to meet the guys who created it, had lunch with them in the Gothic quarter and went up to see their lab – which has over 20 people working on similarly interesting projects! Amazing. Since then it's been taken on tour by none other than Bjørk herself.

Lunch with friends including Kenneth Berger (CS3 team), Ellen Wixted (After Effects team), Richard Galvan and Kristan Jiles (Flash team), plus the guys from Interspectacular, Michael Uman and Luis Blanco.

Chain Reaction – part of the Smash-up Project, an animation/dance collab between Presstube (Amit Pitaru and James Patterson) and Animals of Distinction (Dana Gingras and Sarah Doucet).

Richard Galvan shows off new Flash 10 timeline and 3D-rotated video, with player controls still functional.

Takagi Masakatsu accompanies his video paintings on piano

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