Project week result of seminar with Julien Ducourthial alias o+ro.

Main task in project weeks at Merz Akademie is to develop idea and result within one week.
We have the chance to work with guest tutors and to improve our aim to work fast and effective.

Julien is a famous pixel-artist and came up with the idea to work with the handheld game "Pikix" and pixel software "Promotion" for generating visuals to do some kind of vj-party.

My topic: "Los Caballos", inspired by Robert Rodriguez' movie "Desperado". The visuals include some mexican gangsters, kind of desert-landscape, a title, health- and ammo-bars, crosshairs, etc...
All just as if this would be a game where you have to shoot rude caballos.

Julien's documentation can be found here.

Processing seminar in 1st semester with tutor Arne Michel.

Within one week he taught us how to work with the open source graphics-programming environment "Processing" and we did some trial and error.

The first shown applet is even mouse sensitive, the second one just tries to be matrix-like and look, how beautiful the last one is :)

Surely these are no masterpieces in dealing with code-based design, but as my very first steps ever on working with any code i am very proud of them.

See applet number one, two and three.

Results of 3rd semester seminar with famous media artist Yunchul Kim.

We were concentrating on physical computing with use of "Arduino" and "Max/MSP". After a full semester of trying out hard- and software, the soundtube is our final result.

It uses magnets and inductors to play sounds, which are coming to the tube via a common music amplifier.

So, if one takes the tube and tilts it a bit, then the magnets inside maybe are curling in an inductor and then a sound is playing. Additionally one can even feel the sound and thus achieve the haptic layer of music.

Played sounds are extracts of famous german tv-ads and are playing very gentle. With this project we try to give an answer to nearly ubiquitous and loud ads all around us in daily life.

First project before soundtube was our great pencilrobot. We had two approaches to produce him: to let him visualize sound input but also to let him draw, what one draws on his laptop's trackpad.

Beautiful DIY work with a lot of gaffer-tape and wodden sticks. At least we celebrated our very first pencil robot exhibition :)

First semester work in film & video Pathway.

These small movies are for sure no professional work, but as my first steps in the area of film & video i think they achieved their right for existence.

"Super 8 Experiments", several stop motion projects within 2 days, are made during a workshop on history of film & video with Uwe Kassai. Shot in the park of Merz Akademie and at Stuttgart's Staatsgalerie, they caused a lot of work, but was big fun to work with this old material.

Summer 2008 we had a theoretical project week with Johannes P. Osterhoff with the title "the final frontier".

With literature of Bolter and Gromalla, Blythe, Hellmann and Klein, we thought a lot of the huge metaphor of space within computer interfaces.

As final work we additionally were producing a nice little video for the project presentation... 6:33 min full of space wallpapers, screensavers, etc. :)

All this in the wellknown layout of the bavarian late night tv show "space-night", which only shows pictures of space accompanied with strange music.

I don't think students of Merz-Akademie liked our presentation, but i was very pleased of the amount of hypermediacy in our "interface night".

Second semester markup-scripting and web development seminar with Dragan Espenschied.

For me as noob in new media and typing code, this seminar mainly was to learn html, css, js, php, etc. for further development.

Topic: after mass-media coverage of nearly everything during Football WM 2006 in Germany, I tried to give fans in bars and pubs some focus.

One could upload or link any picture or youtube video for achieving a place in the kneipenliga-album.

Unfortunately this project isn't very successful until today, but it gave me huge ambition to go further in web development. Visit kneipenliga here.

Private web project in 2008.

With some friends I started to design textile prints for selling stuff via spreadshirt 1 year ago.
Main audience of the web-shop are young people in the regional area around our hometown and thus the theme often is about regional topics, especially about the located 300m high radio antenna tower, which is somehow the town's landmark.

The website for this project implements the web-shop of spreadshirt and tries to give an intuitive navigation through the motives and crew members.

Logo and Design of the website again are using symbols and colors of local recognition.

Visit senderama here.

Private web project in 2009.

Because of the actually quite negative mass media coverage of hip hop culture, i found an official club for the aid of hip hop culture with some friends in 2005.

After 3 years finally i made this small website to inform about the club and give a little image gallery of recent events.

Visit sendercity here.

Private web project in 2008.

My personal blog informs about recent activities at Merz-Akademie and about other personal interests.
It is bilingual and the design is based on a common wordpress-template. It tries to come up in old game-console aesthetics, while typography of the title is inspired by the movie "Tron".

The blog should be part of my personal web-appearance, combinded with fuckflickr-gallery, and finally now with my online portfolio :)

See my blog here.

Survey in infovis-seminar with Jörg Frohnmayer in 2009.

For being able to deal with non-fictive data during the seminar, we did a survey on topics of design and studies for the students at Merz-Akademie.

Thus we developed this website using php, mysql and lots of forms.

The design takes Merz-Akademie corporate design and implements some web-pirate aesthetics for producing an adequate image of new media students.

Wiimote-Masters semester project with Prof. Olia Lialina in 2008/09. Its huge.

Main topic of the seminar was the coexistence of online and offline representation of anything.
Thus we were reading a lot and developed both, an offline event and the associated online representation.

The offline event is a tennis championship using wii-console. You are playing in double-teams against each other while standing face to face.
Thus we developed special screens, marked the courts with white tape and split the video signal for two-side projection.

Online representation was divided in three stages: before, during and after.
Before: short introduction and registration form, where you were able to register alone or in team. Singleplayers were automatically added to next or last singleplayer. Everyone could see his name or teamname immediately after submitting registration in the schedule.
During: projection of the online schedule, which we filled live with winners and losers.
After: additionally slides and a video.

Design: is based on the fact, that nintendo always tries to show people how much fun they have with their friends if they buy wii console. But the real situation nearly is the opposite - people are buying wii and feel bored playing alone after work. With dark colors and flickering console light & text we tried to catch people at the state of their emotional situation and give them what they need - an event with lots of people having fun of playing wii together.

See first Wiimote Masters website and videos of 2008 and 2009 event.

With my homie and talented photographer Sebastian Beierle i did this photography project in 2009.

We made a photo shoot with a friendly dj-duo, "the instruementalities", for whom i do graphic work since few years.

They mix old school hip hop, funk and breaks. To fit these music influences, we arranged the shoot in an old abandoned leather factory.

Essay on "Streetart vs. Society" in
Dr. Jürgen Riethmüller's first semester seminar on propaedeutics, 2008.

In german language it focuses history & discussion. It asks how new york subway graffiti can be art, and in context with a new german "graffiti-law" how they will be able to coexist with justice and society.

Read pdf file of full essay in german language here.

Private print work for friendly DJ-duo from 2005 to 2007.

Since i got to know the two guys i do their graphic work. This includes CD covers, promo shirts, flyers and placards.

They play old school hip hop, funk and breaks, but also produce their own music.

First semester typography and exhibition design project week with Stefan Silvestri from gebr.silvestri, Amsterdam.

I worked on a fictive exhibition about Kurt Schwitters. Theme was his poem "Cigarren (elementar)" and the fragmentation of words in it.

The architecture of the exhibition should be as much fragmented as the placard and the poem itself. Working only in greyscale and with letterblocks everywhere, i think this would underline the work of Schwitters quite well.

Second essay in second semester, another time on topic of graffiti, but this time in context of aesthetic culture theory.
Written in german language during Michael Hirsch's seminar on culture theory focusing aesthetical theories.

It is about the aesthetical value of new york subway graffiti in relation to the studies of Arnold Gehlen and Immanuel Kant.

Read pdf file of this essay in german language here.

Additional semester project work in Prof. Olia Lialina's On & Off project, 2008.

After we finished all Wiimote Masters work, we still had several weeks left, so Michael and me dealt with the fictive use of Tobin Tax.

But again because of time we weren't able to finish this beautiful and very interesting work.

Context of the topic: James Tobin was an american economist and suggested a minimum tax of 0,1% on device transactions after the breakup of Bretton Woods System in 1972.

His intention was to stabilize with the tax income national economies of the whole world. But the tax isn't installed until today because of too big differences in national law and political stuctures.

We saw this topic as a very fascinating one, especially for infoviz, because you have to deal with a fictive phenomenon. But finally because of the complexity we again weren't able to finish it. All we got in the end was much more insight in financial things and certitude of the difficulties you would have to achieve a positive effect, caused by very different opinions on the tax.

Project week on Information Visualization held by Lutz Dickmann in 2008.

Lutz gave us first insight in the field of infovis, datamapping and techniques.
After a hard working theoretical week I made this rss visualizr project together with Michael Ruß. Unfortunately we weren't able to finish it, but we had a nice approach and we really plan to make it work.

Here now our style proposal for design and structure of it: We researched 15 rss feeds, 5 of each continent, which we coloured related to a common interpretation of the olympic rings.

We were planning to parse the feeds for keywords and to visualize their proportions using the processing environment. But at least after we were able to read the feeds with processing and did first steps in programming the visuals, the week was over and daily work deterred us from finishing it until now.

SCUTER IN A BOX is an interactive box with a magnet stick.

SCUTER IN A BOX makes you feel the music. Really :)

Based on Arduino, Max and the special physical attributes of magnet and inductor, SCUTER IN A BOX lets you not only hear the music, but additionally lets you feel it via the magnet stick.

If you want to use SCUTER IN A BOX, you have to insert any coin and then you have about 3 minutes to glory in a randomly selected song of a famous boom boom producing formation.

SCUTER IN A BOX is the result of a project week, led by media artist Yunchul Kim in spring 2009.

Project week work in 2008.

Held by Vinca Kruk of Metahaven Design Lab, the project was about an urban chess game in Stuttgart, which we played against another project group led by Gon Zifroni of Metahaven.

First we were discussing about social topics in Stuttgart and then were developing the pawns for the game which were printed on DIN A0 posters.

Then we began to produce the posters and started to play. We were not expecting to finish the game within only one week (because every move was also associated with a hung up poster in the city), but at least our black team won the game and we all had a great project week!

See the project website.