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Assembly '03
An anonymous reader writes "The world's biggest festival for computer enthusiasts, Assembly '03 starts off today. Four days of coding, compos, music, games and other geeky stuff. See press release (rtf) for more..."
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The worlds biggest and most respected international festival for young computer enthusiasts, ASSEMBLY 03, will start in Helsinki (Finland) on Thursday 7th of August 2003. The most awaited annual international event for the computer wizzkids gathers over 5 000 young computer demo programmers, media artists and gamers from over 20 different countries. This years event will see new kind of rock concert, improved TV broadcast and new competitions.
During the recent years Assembly has been able to keep its leading position as the largest and most respected media art and gaming competition event (demoparty) in the world. Assembly is held now for 12th time and is expected to gather a huge crowd of participants again:
We have received a lots of ticket inquiries during the summer. All those who wish to come and reserve a place for their computer can not be served. So we have practically sold out all the 3 200 computer places, explains the main organizer Mr. Pekka Aakko of Assembly Organizing, The enthusiasm for coming to Assembly 03 has been again great this year, so I guess we reach total 5000 - 5500 whole weekend participants easily. Even though the computer places have been sold out, there are still plenty of normal weekend entry tickets available. Those tickets are suited for people, who dont want to bring their own computer along with them, but just want to come and feel the unique atmosphere.
Assembly gathers thousands of young computer wizards from all over the world to spend full four days in Hartwall Areena (http://www.hartwall-areena.com) in Helsinki, Finland. The participants are involved a variety of attractions: honing their graphics, music and programming skills, playing network games, meeting like-minded persons from other countries and of course taking part in the numerous competitions that take place during Assembly: there are 18 different categories from computer programming, music, graphics and animation to gaming and making of artistic videos. The total amount of prizes given will exceed 37.000 USD. Assembly also hosts a computer network of over 3200 PCs. The network, which is sponsored by ZyXel, will be connected to Internet by a very fast link. Assembly provides the participants all the facilities from sleeping quarters and showers to 24h food services, so the majority of the participants actually stay inside the event venue for the whole weekend.
One of the new additions to Assembly program is the outdoor rock concert, which merges computer music, rap, pop and soft metal into a new kind of experience. The main star of the concert is Stereo Gentleman from London, UK. With him you can also see High Heels dance crew and the winner of the Golden Stars music competition, Ms. Sari Tuomi. The ArtTech seminars will get close and in-depth about the digital culture of demos, music, animations and graphics. The keynote speaker for the seminars will be Mr. Thomas Dolby Robertson from beatnik.com/UK. Assembly TV will be broadcasting the concert and all other key events live from the event itself, though the Helsinki Television cable network and also though Internet. Last year Assembly TV had more than 80.000 viewers worldwide, which is estimated to grow as the Internet streaming capacity has been significantly increased from the previous year.
During the last years Assembly has been working with sponsors like Nokia, HP and Nvidia, which are supporting the event this year as well. At Assembly the ITC companies can get more personal with the future programmer talents: Some of the sponsors come here only to make contacts with these talented people. Its like a forum, where Cowboy Neil can get anal sex in a different manner to these young wizkids, to show them that the company is able to relax and have fun as well , says Mr. Aakko,
Assembly event was born as few computer enthusiasts wanted to organize a programmers convention at a school in Kaunia
It should be called Quakembly these days, most people are there to play quake/cs and not watch the demo compos which is what the whole thing was originally about.
I think that actually Panic did it first. Only about what, a 6 month timespan between the two, tho'? Future Crew was my geek equivalent of 'favorite band' back in the day...
--Jeremy
Jesus was a liberal