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 whole design concept of the decoded conference is based on a graphic coding of words. The code creates generative forms which represent the name of the speaker, mottoes or any text you want.

The visual coding concept consists of few specified rules for each single letter. The basic geometrie is based on a triangle, each corner stands for a letter within the prompted word. All characters are located on a specific angle of a circle depending on the last position. Triangles are always built on two existing corners together with the currently created vertex. Furthermore this means that new triangles always have a same side with the previous triangle. For shaping the generative appearance the triplets of letters are therefore more important than single letters.

Color and shapes are based on the letter frequency in german. The letter »E« (17,4%) occurs more often then the a »Q« (0,02%) for example. For this purpose the guiding principle is, that less frequent letters need a more noticeable graphical change. Coming back to our example the »Q« has a more saturated color than the »E« which is setting an emphasis within the whole generative structure.

If you want, you can try to type in your own name:
http://decoded-conference.com/generator

It‘s almost two days ago that we launched the decoded conference, an event which will interconnect people from the field of design and programming.

The decdoded conference is focusing at the development process of interesting projects within the limits of design and code/technology. The projects should be inspiration and build a base for further discussions. At this conference we will online show projects, that have been done or which have been prototyped already. Ideas and visions have to be brought into reality. The conference will foster the cultural interchange between the fields of design and tech. Topics and projects about generative design, gaming and human computer interaction will be presented by the speakers.

Our featured speakers are:
Mario Klingemann – Schönes aus Code
Moritz Stefaner – Ästhetik von Information
Benedikt Groß & Hartmut Bohnacker – Generative Gestaltung
Tilman Reiff & Volker Morawe – Games, Art & Testosterone
Massimo Banzi – Tinkering with Arduino

Like the decoded concept itself the the organisation team is a mixture of the fields of code and design. we as envis precisely, a design studio for interface and interaction design, are organizing and hosting this event together with our nerdy coding friends from reppa.net. We are looking forward to see you there…

You can find more information about the conference and ticketing at
www.decoded-conference.com

The people over at deviantART have a nice new HTML-Webapp called Muro. What does it do? It allows you to draw artwork using semi-generative brushes, that give any stroke a very unique appeal. Also, it has been done entirely without Flash, so it will also work on most mobile devices.

Our WordPress Article Count says this one ist number 250. Time to celebrate over one year of news and stories about Interface and Interaction Design mixed up with a little bit of envis. For the next 250 blog posts we wish that we can provide you with some information about hot and new and sometimes weird stuff again. At the moment we are preparing the relaunch of the envis-precisely website. We‘re confident that we will get it going the next weeks. The blog will be redesigned too, so watch out!

Today I found out about a new community which is a driven site for Artists, Designers, Makers, Builders, or anyone interested in the world between electronics and code. Its name is bildr, at this site they are rethinking the ways in which DIY sites have previously approached this world like instructables or make:projects and so on. Typically, the approach has been to showcase an individual’s project, while including instructions that would enable a user to create a duplicate. bildr’s method is quite different. Instead of focusing on individuals’ projects, bildr features community-written, collaborative articles that can be used as the foundation of an individual project. The articles come in two forms: Components and Modules.

On the one hand you have Components – (for e.g. an ADJD-S371 Color Sensor) show you how to connect and use an individual component. These pages also include code when needed. On the other hand you have Modules as mini-projects. These are all about how to make one thing. Like making an electro magnet, or sensing distance.bildr is about simplifying information to help you get your ideas made as quickly as possible. If you want to join bildr, just log on to bildr.org an register your seat at the public beta.

If you want you can try it with invite code: bildrInvite76f3

via make magazine

As the year marking the 90th anniversary of the establishment of the Bauhaus, 2009 is an appropriate year for an exhibition dedicated to the examination of the social networks of the Bauhaus movement.
In preparation for this project, biographical details of all of the members of the Bauhaus, as well as their individual personal relationships with other members, will be systematically structured and entered into an online research database.
The impressive volume of information resulting from this effort will then be presented in three dimensions within this illuminated 4×4 meter cube at the Bauhaus University in Weimar.

The exhibition then becomes an immersive yet highly-structured digital archive rich with historical details. Complex interrelationships will be made more accessible through the implementation of an innovative graphical interface. All visualizations of the complex network are drawn directly from the research database and presented in an intuitive computer-generated form. At an interactive digital tabletop, spectators can furthermore examine individual parts of the greater network in more detail.

more information at Impuls-Bauhaus

If there’s one entertainment device that people know and love, it’s the television. In fact, 4 billion people across the world watch TV and the average American spends five hours per day in front of one*. Recently, however, an increasing amount of our entertainment experience is coming from our phones and computers. One reason is that these devices have something that the TV lacks: the web. With the web, finding and accessing interesting content is fast and often as easy as a search. But the web still lacks many of the great features and the high-quality viewing experience that the TV offers.

Google TV is a new experience for television that combines the TV that you already know with the freedom and power of the Internet. With Google Chrome built in, you can access all of your favorite websites and easily move between television and the web. This opens up your TV from a few hundred channels to millions of channels of entertainment across TV and the web. Your television is also no longer confined to showing just video. With the entire Internet in your living room, your TV becomes more than a TV — it can be a photo slideshow viewer, a gaming console, a music player and much more.

Google is working together with Sony, Logitech and Intel to put Google TV inside of televisions, Blu-ray players and companion boxes. This is an incredibly exciting time for TV watchers, for developers and for the entire TV ecosystem. By giving people the power to experience what they love on TV and on the web on a single screen, Google TV turns the living room into a new platform for innovation. We’re excited about what’s coming. We hope you are too.

What is that again? Flipboard? What is it? It‘s the world‘s first social magazine. It‘s inspired by the beauty and ease of print media, Flipboards mission is to fundamentally improve how people discover, view and share content across their social networks.

Flipboard began a quest one week ago. Going to transform how people discover and share content by combining the beauty and ease of print with the power of social media. Flipboard also announced the immediate availability of its Flipboard App for iPad?, a social magazine that brings to life the stories, photos, news and updates being shared across Twitter and Facebook.  With over 1 billion messages posted every day, social networks are quickly becoming the primary way people discover and share content on the Web. The result is a huge influx of incoming messages and links people must sort through across multiple web sites just to stay up to date? said Mike McCue, Flipboards CEO. They believe the timeless principles of print can make social media less noisy, more visually compelling and ultimately more mainstream.

Designed from the ground up for iPad, Flipboard creates a magazine out of a user‘s social content. Simply launch Flipboard and flip open the cover to get started. From the Table of Contents readers can view their sections and personalize the magazine. The Facebook and Twitter sections let readers quickly flip through the latest stories, photos and updates from friends and trusted sources. Because Flipboard renders links and images right in the magazine, readers no longer have to scan long lists of posts and click on link after link – instead they instantly see all the stories, comments and images, making it faster and more entertaining to discover, view and share social content.

Flipboard also lets readers easily create sections around topics or people they care about. You can choose from Flipboards suggested sections on topics such as sports, news, tech and style, with content hand-curated from popular and interesting Twitter feeds. Or, create an entirely new section by searching by topic, person or Twitter list to make Flipboard even more personal.

Start reading your magazine by downloading Flipboard. You can follow them at www.twitter.com/flipboard.

We reported more than a year ago about the cookie-sized, computerized tiles that can be stacked and shuffled in your hands called Siftables. Last year Siftables was a research project initiated at the MIT Media Lab. Since then they have all finished their graduate work, and last summer they formed a start-up company called Sifteo. With support from True Ventures and the National Science Foundation, they are now hard at work developing the next generation of the technology to bring their vision of Siftables to the world.

This year they’ll be creating games, reaching out to developers, working with manufacturers, and running beta tests with players. They look forward to continuing to get to know everyone, and to working with you to create the future of play. In addition to this you should follow the Sifteo blog, because this start up is going to be hot. They will be on sale this year… Watch out!