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Top 10 Creative Events & Conferences in 2021 – Selected

Julia Ciaciek Julia Ciaciek
December 8, 2020

Top Creative Events in January

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ESNS 2021

January 13-16, Virtual Event

#festival #music #media #digital #community

Eurosonic Noorderslag (ESNS) is a non-profit, European artist only, 100% showcase festival and music conference.

By day an international music conference takes place in the conference centre, with 150 panels, keynotes, interviews, workshops, dinners, pitches, parties, presentations and meetings on the latest developments in the European and international music, media, production and interactive industry.

By night, during the two showcase festivals, musical talents have the chance to present itself to an international audience of music lovers and professionals.

CTM Festival 2021 Transformation

January 22-31, Berlin, Germany (Hybrid)

#festival #film #music #art #design #culture #change

The annual CTM Festival is a music and visual arts event held in Berlin, Germany.

The 22 year-old festival stands out for its conscious pairing of daring artistic content and adventurous club experiences with an in-depth discourse programme, framing today’s sounds and music cultures within a shifting, hybrid global society.

Most Contagious America 2021

January 27, Virtual Event

#conference #marketing #branding #advertising #creative

Most Contagious is the flagship event series of Contagious, delivering vital advertising insights and trends to help you hit the ground running in the year ahead.

For the first time, there will be a Most Contagious APAC edition for the Asia Pacific audience on 24 February 2021.

Top Creative Events in February

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IFFR 2021

February 1-7, Rotterdam, Netherlands (Hybrid)

#festival #movie #film #cinema #production #international

The 50th-anniversary edition of International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) will take place in an hybrid and extended format in 2021.  The festival will be held in two parts – 1 to 7 February and 2 to 6 June – connected by a series of events in between.

Six festival days will be dedicated to IFFR’s main competitions – the Tiger Competition, Big Screen Competition and Ammodo Tiger Short Competition – as well as the Limelight lineup of avant premieres, and a fully online edition of IFFR Pro Days for industry professionals.

Pause Fest 2021

February 3-5, Virtual Event

#festival #creative #innovation #business #digital #diversity

Pause Fest 2021 is a festival for business and creativity and brings diverse intelligence together to fuel the next generation forward. Hear from the world’s leading minds in a high definition transmission of the future.

The event creates a culture for creators and innovators to come together and share their projects, knowledge, passions, and insights openly, freely, and generously for the benefit of the entire community.

Avant Première Music + Media Market 2021

February 14-18, Vienna, Austria (Hybrid)

#tradefair #conference #culture #tv #film #media #production #music

Avant Première Music + Media Market is a trade fair, market place, conference and networking event for music + dance films. As the meeting place for a specialised industry, it unites 600 international experts + decision makers from major public + private broadcasting stations, streaming + VOD platforms, distribution + film production companies and performing arts institutions.

This year’s edition will be held in a hybrid format. The on-site event will take place at Austrian Federal Economic Chamber in Vienna, Austria. At the same time, all participants will have online access to the entire screening + conference programme.

MuseumNext Digital Summit 2021

February 22- 26, Virtual Event

#conference #museum #digital #transformation

The Digital Summit is a one-of-a-kind event sharing insightful talks, actionable ideas and unexpected connections to help you to do your best work.

In a year when digital has played a vital role in museums speakers will offer pragmatic, real world insight into how they overcame the challenges of pivoting to digital.

MPTS Virtual Preview Festival 2021

February 23-25, Virtual Event

#festival #media #broadcast #technology #production

The Media Production & Technology Show is the must-attend event for the media and broadcast industries.

MPTS Virtual Preview Festival provides the industry with an opportunity to engage, connect and learn before the actual live exhibition in May.

Covering all aspects of content creation, including pre-production, production, post and distribution, MPTS is your opportunity to discover current and future trends impacting all areas of the broadcasting industry.

Top Creative Events in March

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ILMC 2021

March 3-5, Virtual Event

#conference #entertainment #music #festival #creativity

ILMC is an annual gathering of professionals involved in the global touring, festival and live entertainment industries.

This year’s edition will take place online, with three full days of networking, meetings, keynotes, events and showcases. For this virtual edition, and for the first time, ILMC will be open to both members and non-members to register.

Forward Festival 2021

March 12, Munich, Germany (Hybrid)

#festival #creativity #design #art #photography #communication

Forward is all about connecting, exchanging and being part of an exciting experience. Within six years, the festival has become a platform for the entire creative industry.

This year it’s about to be more interactive than ever before, for the first time ever Forward Festival Munich is going to be hybrid.

SXSW 2021

March 16-20, Virtual Event

#festival #creative #film #music #art #culture #technology

The South by Southwest (SXSW) Conference & Festivals celebrate the convergence of the interactive, film, and music industries. Fostering creative and professional growth alike, SXSW is the premier destination for discovery.

Featuring a variety of tracks that allow attendees to explore what’s next in the worlds of film, culture, music, and technology.

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Fundraising 5 hours ago

London-based AI laboratory Ineffable Intelligence has emerged from stealth with a $1.1 billion seed round at a $5.1 billion post-money valuation, the company confirmed on 27 April 2026. The financing is the largest seed round ever raised by a European company and one of the largest first-money-in rounds in the global history of artificial intelligence. The round was co-led by Sequoia Capital and Lightspeed Venture Partners. Participating investors included Nvidia, DST Global, Index Ventures, Google, and the UK Sovereign AI Fund, the British government’s recently established vehicle for backing strategic AI capacity on home soil. A bet on a different path to general intelligence Ineffable Intelligence was founded in 2025 by David Silver, the former Vice President of Reinforcement Learning at Google DeepMind and the principal architect of AlphaGo, AlphaZero and AlphaStar. He is joined by three further DeepMind alumni: Wojciech Czarnecki, Lasse Espeholt and Junhyuk Oh. All four have spent the past decade at the frontier of reinforcement learning research, the discipline behind some of the most consequential demonstrations of machine learning over the past ten years. The company describes its objective as building a “superlearner” — an AI system capable of acquiring knowledge directly from its own experience rather than from human-generated text or imagery. “Our mission is to make first contact with superintelligence,” Silver said in a statement accompanying the launch. “We are creating a superlearner that discovers all knowledge from its own experience, from elementary motor skills through to profound intellectual breakthroughs.” The framing is a deliberate departure from the dominant industry trajectory. Most leading AI laboratories, including OpenAI, Anthropic and Google DeepMind itself, have built large language models trained primarily on the corpus of the internet, then refined that training with human feedback. Ineffable’s wager is that the marginal returns on scaling text-based pretraining are diminishing and that the next leap in capability will come from agents that learn endlessly from the consequences of their own actions, in much the same way AlphaZero learnt the game of Go without studying any human matches. Why $1.1 billion at seed The size of the round is unusual even by the inflated standards of the 2026 AI capital cycle. Two factors appear to explain it. First, frontier reinforcement learning at the scale Ineffable describes is computationally extraordinarily expensive: the company will need to operate vast simulation environments and train very large models against them, an undertaking that consumes capital at a rate closer to physical R&D than to traditional software. Second, the round signals a strategic move by Europe’s investor and policy ecosystems to retain the most ambitious AI researchers on the continent. The presence of the UK Sovereign AI Fund alongside Sequoia, Lightspeed and Nvidia is the clearest expression of that intent. The British government has publicly framed the investment as a bet on breakthrough AI that “can discover new knowledge”, positioning the country as a willing co-investor in domestic frontier laboratories. For Ineffable, the implication is access not only to capital but to compute, regulatory engagement and the still-resilient academic talent base around UCL, Oxford, Cambridge and Imperial. Founder pledge of historic scale Alongside the funding announcement, Silver disclosed that he is committing 100 per cent of any personal proceeds from his Ineffable equity to charity via the Founders Pledge network — described by the organisation as the largest pledge in its history. At the round’s $5.1 billion valuation, that commitment could ultimately exceed several billion dollars if the company succeeds. It is a meaningful gesture in a sector where the reputational stakes around concentrated AI wealth are escalating, and one likely to be referenced in subsequent founder-led commitments. Implications for the European AI landscape Ineffable’s emergence reshapes the European AI map in three concrete ways. It establishes London as the home of the continent’s largest-ever seed-stage company, complicating Paris’s recent narrative of frontier-AI primacy after Mistral’s earlier rounds. It validates a thesis — that reinforcement learning, not transformer scaling, is the next frontier — that has lately been losing capital share to language-model incumbents. And it confirms that the UK government is now willing to act as a balance-sheet co-investor in domestic AI laboratories, a posture much closer to the French model than to the predominantly grant-based regimes elsewhere in Europe. The execution risk is non-trivial. Reinforcement learning at frontier scale has historically required years of careful environment design before producing competitive systems, and Ineffable’s “first contact” framing sets a high bar against which it will be judged. But for now, with a billion dollars on the balance sheet, four of the discipline’s most accomplished researchers in the founding team and a sovereign co-investor at its back, Ineffable Intelligence is the most heavily resourced new entrant in the European AI cycle. Sesamers covers European fundraising rounds across deeptech, fintech and AI. Source: tech.eu.

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