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After working as a freelance designer &amp; digital producer, in a studio (Soleil Noir) or with an advertiser (EMI Music), Adrien PIN co-founded the Digital Studio &#8220;Merci-Michel&#8221; at the end of 2012, with Antoine Ménard &amp; Pierre Hagège. Their vision: to offer an innovative approach to digital marketing, mixing interaction design, storytelling and creative technologies. Merci-Michel defines itself today as a &#8220;Digital Gamification Studio&#8221;, with an internationally recognised expertise and more than 130 awards won to date.

Adrien Pin

&#8220;Coastal World&#8221; is a gamified 3D web platform, created for the American bank Coastal Community Bank, in order to communicate its partnerships with innovative fintechs and neo-banks. Through this case study, we will present the behind-the-scenes of this production, from the briefing to the design and manufacturing stages, both at the creative and technical levels. More broadly, we want to show how gamification can bring value to marketing and digital communication issues.

"Coastal World" case study — blurring the line between digital marketing & gaming

La Bourse

Merci Michel

Ytasha L. Womack is author of the critically acclaimed book Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci Fi &amp; Fantasy Culture. 
An author, filmmaker, independent scholar, and dance therapist, she lectures and creates experiences in 
Afrofuturism and the imagination around the world. Among her achievements, she cocurated the Afrofuturism Festival at Carnegie Hall in 2022 and
was an artist-in-residence at Black Rock Senegal. Other works include Rayla 2212, A Spaceship in Bronzeville,, and the upcoming books The Afrofuturist 
Experience and the graphic novel Blak Kube. Her films include the Afrofuturist dance short A Love Letter to the Ancestors From Chicago and the romantic 
comedy Couples Night.

Ytasha Womack

This workshop will rethink humanity centered approaches to both creating 
and living in a world where we increasingly rely on technologies. Informed 
by Afrofuturism and dance, this presentation will encourage building community 
and rethinking space and identity.

Afrofuturism: Claiming our Humanity in Tech

Alex Verhaest studied in Brussels at Luca School of arts, where she is a guest professor since 2015. She was part of the new media arts collective &#8216;Platform for urban investigations&#8217; with whom she participated in group-shows at the Museo de la Ciudad de Mexico, the Van Abbe Museum in Eindhoven and the Museo de Arte Moderna in Salvador da Bahia. In 2009 she decided to focus more on her own practice and to leave the collective. Her work has since been exhibited at numerous institutions amongst which ZKM in karlruhe, HKW in Berlin, and Bozar Brussels. Her installations have been collected by MMCA Busan and are part of the Akzo Nobel collection. She won the New Face Award at the Japan Media arts Festival and her work has been awarded with the prestigious 2015 Ars Electronica Golden Nica. In 2019 she graduated valedictorian from Le Fresnoy, studio national.
Verhaest’s work operates on the juxtaposition of animation, videogame and cinema expanded. With each new film, Verhaest dives into what it means to make films in a multi-screen post-Nintendo society.

Alex Verhaest

In March 2020, the world came to a screeching halt. We were forced to pause, look around us and reconsider: where exactly were we heading? What were we looking for?
A flurry of articles appeared about aspirational new world views. And depending on the type of Facebook friends you had, the alternatives presented were either dire or hopeful. Some wanted to go back to the Arcadian cliché of the suburbia of the fifties, while others pined for the now closed hedonist hub of the city. “Like” or &#8220;don’t like&#8221;, there was only one certainty; Change was coming, for better or worse. 
How to think about Utopia? How to think about Dystopia? Where do our ideas about this come from? How had people thought about Utopia before this apparent apocalypse? Are we ever right? 
In Eutopia Unbound, Sofie Verraest describes how the idea of “a good place” and the description of it within famous, infamous or even less read books, ensures that stereotypical patterns of the imagination are activated. Those patterns circulate in a culture and are perpetuated through movies and art and plays and music that move us and annoy us and thus those patterns sneakily nestle themselves deeply into our collective subconscious. The things we keep and collect in a culture are the means by which we shape our past, future and present, for better or for worse. These artefacts shape the framework by which we define our likes and dislikes around a more complex reality. They shape the lens through which we see the state of the world. The talk will investigate how Sofie Verraest’s Doctoral thesis Eutopia Unbound formed the basis for my video game ad hominem.
Thanks to the support of the European funds FEDER, this conference is exceptionally proposed to you free of charge by making the request at the reception of the festival, located at the entrance of the Marquee.

Ytasha Womack

AboutYtasha Womack

ConferencesAfrofuturism: Claiming our Humanity in Tech

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Alex Verhaest

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Merci Michel