Imagina.02 in Monaco: the festival for digital image comes back

The new version of Imagina will take place at the Grimaldi Forum from February 12th to 14th 2002. This version keeps the original spirit of the exhibition and adds an “industry village” part.

A good news for all of the Imagina-addicts: Imagina.02 will take place at the Grimaldi Forum of Monaco from February 12th to 14th 2002. The international festival of digital image was the favourite show of new digital technologies. It has taken place in Monaco for 20 years. But, betrayed by the INA (Institut national de l’Audiovisuel; the French national audiovisual institute), the show did not take place this year and was threatened to disappear. Since then, fortunately, it has been taken up by the television festival of Monte-Carlo which has set this new version of Imagina.It has been confirmed that the aim of this new version was a meetings and exchanges place for international professionals of the digital image: producers, creators, trainers, industrials and partners. Three axes have been chosen: a conference cycle on the main stakes of new image technologies; an industry and innovation village; the Imagina awards.About conferences, six main themes will structure the debates:- saving, compressing and indexing strategies for audiovisual and multimedia documents- virtual reality and increased reality: research fields and application domains- intelligent autonomous agents for artificial intelligence, robotics, synthesis image processing- the future of interactive fiction: towards new narrative systems- a new age of video games- animation and special effects.The industry and innovation village (in the past the exhibition took place at the Grand Palais in Paris) will target all of the companies of the digital image processing industry that want to show their know-how and skills as well as to research and development structures (private or public) with innovating technologic projects. As far as the Imagina awards are concerned, they will reward technical qualities of a work as well as the emotion resulting from it, with around 9 prices (from the Grand Prix Imagina to the best European production award).Contact- Website: www.imagina.mc- Administration: 4, Bd du Jardin Exotique, MC 98000 Monaco; tel: 377 93 10 40 60; e-mail: info@imagina.mc- Press relations : Françoise Guiran, tel: 377 93 15 93 94 ; e-mail: ocm@imagina.mc