As Sofia Boer, Marketing Manager, remarked at the end of the event in front of an audience of partners and friends of the company, it is not easy to explain to our relatives the work we do, and a day like IDEA can undoubtedly help us to do so Because at the event organised by Prase Media Technologies on 27 October, we have not been talking only technology… or rather, even technology, but above all about its role in the daily lives of people, of more and more people, and how technology helps us to achieve our goals and to empower our ideas and actions
But let’s start from the beginning: IDEA is Prase’s autumn event to which we have quickly become accustomed, already considering it a regular event, dedicated to customers, certainly, but also to friends of the company, offering the opportunity to share ideas (precisely) for the present and the future. The morning was opened by Davide Buonasorte, the company’s Rental&Broadcast Sales Manager, who, with a story about the freediver Majorca and his inexhaustible drive to go beyond limits, gave voice to the wonder we experience when we experience something magical – regaining the surface after a long freediving session – thus drawing an ideal parallel with the extraordinary experiences that technology makes possible today.
He thus introduced Nicholas Boscarello, a freelancer in the esport sector, a $540 million market by 2022, based on technology and capable not only of creating new professions – journalists and commentators, specialised rooms, etc. – but also of generating an ever-growing community of enthusiasts. – but of generating an ever-growing community of fans. In 2022, a Twitch event had 2.78 million viewers… enough to challenge television sport. The spectacular aspect of esports also characterised the speech by Christian Biondani, television director, as he himself said much more used to being behind the scenes than to making speeches: the example of the Eurovision Song Contest, which saw him at the forefront, served him to tell us about the relationship between art-technology-time in major events. Thanks to time code (and ad hoc solutions that manage automations) it is possible to determine the timing and movements of light, effects, sounds, stage movements, etc. According to Christian, time code is a philosophy of life: to raise the bar, to support creativity… but also to sleep peacefully.
Patrizia Stella de Masi, lighting designer and President of AILD, told us about her lighting masterplan for the ancient village of Al-Basta, in Saudi Arabia, one of the country’s main historical sites: the combination of a precise study of Islamic culture and the observation – stone by stone as she told us – of the environment gave rise to a project that reconstructs the suggestions and luminous emotions of the past with contemporary means.
Giulia Silvestri, sound designer, also told us about emotions, in this case awakened by sound settings, and in particular about the relationship between emotion, sound and the brain, and also how it can be used professionally. The level of involvement of an immersive, multi-channel sound setting can in fact be applied in product placement, as research by the Politecnico di Milano has shown: people in the presence of immersive sound stimuli are more involved, more attentive than those, in the same environment, who were not subjected to them. Sound, Giulia concluded, certainly determines our emotions, but probably also our choices.
Jacopo Di Crescenzo of Aelion Project, took us on a dive into the world of mapping for marketing purposes, without forgetting creativity and art, concluding with the encouraging sentence ‘before we had great ideas and not the technologies, now the technologies are there’.
Last but not least, Bruno de Rivo of e45, architect specialising in the design of work spaces, opened his speech by quoting basketball star Michael Jordan, who said in an interview that he had been wrong so many times but was so successful because of it. Coming back to us, Riva brought us the example of the project for Google in Zurich, in which the assessments of the actual usability of the spaces had not been centred: as a result, places designated for certain uses were not being used, in favour of others being used ‘improperly’. Turning the page, we come to a more recent project for Spotify: the very fact of having everyone involved sit around the design table, from the company’s contact persons to external collaborators, from the installers to the painter, made it possible to create spaces that meet the needs of those who use them, from inclusivity to neurodiversity theory to acoustics. And the best ‘proof’ of a good project is precisely that the spaces are used for what they were intended.
Once this morning of insights and IDEAS was over, we all re-emerged as Majorca and, thanks to Prase’s proverbial hospitality, we had a pleasant lunch break; which was not really a break at all, because networking moments are often as important as those that are overtly work-related.
In the afternoon the guests were accompanied, divided into groups due to the large number of attendees (so much so that this year the event was repeated ‘on a delayed basis’ the following day), to the company’s many large or small rooms, transformed into as many examples of applications of integrated technologies in the most diverse contexts, from Retail to Control Rooms, from the conference room, small or large, to the museum. Guided by Prase product specialists and the many guests from the brands distributed by the company, we not only saw – or reviewed – the latest innovations but also observed their applications. In particular, much interest was aroused by the presentation of Q-Sys, a novelty distributed by Prase Media Technologies a few weeks ago, a configurable audio-video control platform built on a modern IT structure on the Cloud.
