king talk

I spent a great inspiring long weekend at this year’s Ars Electronica Festival in Linz. Together with my project partner Jochen Winker we had the great opportunity to be part of it as artists by contributing with our bachelor project.

But of course there was much more to see during the festival (some exhibitions are actually still open until 09/11 in case someone want’s to go there spontaneously). The thing I like most about that exceptional festival for media arts, is the mixture of exhibitons, conferences and events. You can both see impressive artworks and learn amazing things from specialists of all areas of arts and science.

This year the topic was “Repair – ready to pull the lifetime” (or in German: “Repair – sind wir noch zu retten”) so it was all about brining our word forward and helping it to solve the major crisis we had or we are heading to. A big diversity of different speakers and topics provided the audience with knowledge from areas of design (e.g. a talk from munich based train-design-pioneer Alexander Neumeister about mobility) to science (e.G. an outstanding and exciting talk about neuroscience from LMU Prof. Ernst Pöppel) and many many more. Fortunately all of the talks were recorded and should be online at Ars Electronica’s vimeo channel soon.

Of course the festival also stands for one of the most important awards in media arts – the golden Nica. This year’s winner in interactive art was a group around open-frameworks inventor Zach Liebermann who developed an inexpensive eye-tracking solution for a paralyzed graffiti artist – The Eye Writer – which is not only one single product but also an initiative to help that artist and many others to express themselves again. A great work wich totally deserves the price and also fitted very well into this year’s topic “Repair”. For more informations about the awards, winners and categories just head to the Prix Ars Electronica website.

One point I want to mention for people who have been at the Ars Electronica Festival before:
This year the festival organizers had the opportunity to hold the event in an old tobaco factory which provided an interesting venue for the artworks.
I guess the things that profited the most from the industrial surrounding where the Cyber Arts projects which really looked much better there then in some modern art gallery like the OK-Kunsthaus were the exhibition normally takes place.
Unfortunately the talks, lectures and conferences where the ones who really suffered from the venue. Obviously there was no real space that could be used for talks so the main area for the symposiums was located in a room which hat massive pillars that prevented the audience to have a clear sight to the speakers .They tried to fix that with a notable amount of hd-screens and projectors but it was still not perfect compared to the conference hall at the Bruckner House where the talks normally takes place.
Nevertheless the biggest advantage was to have nearly everything in one place and not spread throughout the city how it was done in the last year. Actually you only had to leave the factory for some special events or for the Ars-Electronica-Center. A point which made it much easier to switch from talks to exhibtions or to see everything in a much shorter amount of time.

For me the most impressing exhibtion was the Cyber Arts 2010 which showed most of the prix winners, destinction awards and honorary mentions.
There are three projects I really want to point out in the next days and which impressed me the most. Interestingly only one of them is interactive. Perhaps I am just to much inside that field now so that i am not that easily impressed anymore – which is really a pitty. But still: stay tuned for these 3 great pieces of art.

The OFFF 2010 review for those of you who missed out on this years events that took place at the digital creation conference at ‘La Grande Halle de la Villette’ in Paris between the 24th – 26th June. Both myself and the Envis team were in attendance and here are a selection of the key highlighted speakers from the event.

—– Craig Ward —–

Processing particles motion test from Craig Ward on Vimeo.

Craig Ward is a British born typographer / designer currently living and working in New York City, USA.

—– Julien Vallée —–

OFFF Paris 2010 Sponsors titles from Julien Vallée on Vimeo.

Julien Vallée is a Canadian born creative currently residing in Montreal, Canada.

—– Dvein —–

Dvein @ OFFF 2010 from Ruben Gonçalves on Vimeo.

Dvein are a group of Motion / Animation geniuses based in Barcelona, Spain.

—– NON-FORMAT —–

Non-Format from Etapes on Vimeo.

Non-Format are design house based in London, recognised since they formed in 2000 by their directors Kjell Ekhorn (Norwegian) and Jon Forss (British).

—– SOSOlimited —–

We’re Sorry from Sosolimited on Vimeo.

SOSOlimited are a collective of talented audio visual designers focusing mainly on interactive installations and fun weird stuff. Currently based in Cambridge, MA, USA.

—– The Mill —–

The Mill are a large scale visual FX team coming out of London, New York and Los Angeles. They were responsible for closing the festival this year and they did so with a nice group presentation focusing primarily on their post production work they did for Nike on ‘Write the Future’. An advertisement spot that notably took the Internet by storm at the beginning of the this years World Cup.

Nike Write The Future from Wieden + Kennedy London on Vimeo.

They went on discussing the ‘making of’ and did a nice job of showing alot of the thought and design process. Storyboards, to the use of the massive tool used for realising large scale crowd environments alongside the VFX they covered throughout such an enormous project. They called it the biggest VFX advertisement ever made. Funny enough i believe them.

OFFF Paris 2010 Titles from OFFF on Vimeo.

To end our review; above we showcase the OFFF titles designed and produced by ‘The Mill’ for this years festival.

The second part of our workshop CODE = DESIGN took place in Graz last weekend. This time we focused on the ways in which code could be used to generate print content. Many thanks to all the participants and congratulations for your great results! We created a Flickr set for them and you can also see them in the slideshow below.

Check out this report from Campus Party Madrid! Earthwalk is featured on 1:03, followed by Quasar Interactive on 1:16.

By the way, if you speak spanish, feel free to post a translation of the report in the comments!

Thanks to the big ashcloud coming from this vulcano with that extraordinary name my flight to Munich was cancelled today. The flights for tomorrow haven‘t been delayed yet, but you never know. The alternate transportation could be by bus. 20 hours from Madrid to Munich? We will see…

We uploaded some »behind the scenes« pictures of Campus Party Madrid to flickr. Some official pictures and video will be uploaded after we arrived back at Munich someday…

We wanted to get some feedback on our iScraper application. So we grabbed a video camera, an iPhone and went to Marienplatz, the central spot in Munich. See iScraper in action in the video!

We spent the better part of last weekend in Graz with the fine students of FH JOANNEUMs information design department. They were taking part in a workshop on Processing and the general idea of computed and generative design.

Our basic idea was to present the students with snippets of code that can be combined in different ways in order to foster creative use of programming languages.

The outcomes quite frankly exceeded our expectations. You can explore them in their full variety in this flickr set.

Congratulations to all participants for what you achieved:
Christoph Mauerhofer
Franz Ferdinand Kubin
Gianna Tatzel
Julian Kogler
Lisa Weishäupl
Magdalena Kahr
Moritz Rzehak
Roland Mariacher
Thomas Raggam

We hope you enjoyed the two days as much as we did!

We had a chance to drop by at STROKE01 yesterday evening. This event was officially described as »Urban Art Fair«. First thought was: Urban Art at Munich? Does that fit? And yes it did!

They have a broad range of works from popular artists like eboy, flying förtress and castle magazine to upcoming artists which could be hot in the next years…

If you are close to Munich and have some time you can visit STROKE at the old BMW dealer at Dachauerstraße 92 till tomorrow. The location is pretty nice and appropriate for the artwork.

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While you are reading this culmination of words, we are heading to Linz, checking out the ARS ELECTRONICA FESTIVAL. We will provide you with more information, after this short break…

Tonight, the Olympiapark in Munich exploded. Kudos to the pyrotechnician who engineered this spectacle without setting any major visitor site on fire (though he probably did cost the city a couple of carbon emission credits). Anyway, I was once again reminded and amazed what a huge attraction the mastering of fire – an otherwise destructive element – has to lots of people.