Tonight in rainy Barcelona I had the opportunity to visit the 18th edition of Art Futura, which aside from exhibitions, performances and workshops also features a series of conferences around the theme "The Next Web". This first evening included a diversity of Spanish and international perspectives on where we are heading, including talks by Steven Berlin Johnson on his latest project Outside.in and Daniel Huebner, the Director of the Second Life community.

The participants, Artur Serra from I2CAT (ES), Enrique Dans (ES), Juan Freire (ES) (whose presentation slides are available on his blog), Hermano Vianna (BR) and Hugo Zaragoza from Yahoo! Research (ES/USA) provoked a lot of thought for debate around our increasingly complex relationships with virtual space and how we use (or do not use) our online connections to enrich our physical "real world" connections.

Reflections on the future of the cultural sector in relation to these debates were implicit, as issues of copyright, community-building, content-generation and networking were prominent in all talks.

More in depth reports on tonight's discussions and the exhibitions will follow over the next days...

Note: more presentations take place tomorrow and Sunday - check the website to see if they will be streaming any of the talks live as they did tonight.