king talk

NODE10 has opened its gates! From now till saturday there will be lots of interesting sorkshops, lectures and exhibits from various genres of generative and interactive arts.

As part of the exhibition at the MA* our Quasar Interactive and some other amazing installations are awaiting you to come play with them.

The main focus of NODE10 are Workshops. They range from tinkering with Fritzing to physics-based animation and projection mapping. Of course most of it based on the graphical programming environment vvvv, which makes it real easy to generate amazing media environments. So if you are in the area, make sure to drop by and enjoy some workshops.

Tomorrow I’ll go into more detail about what is shown here…
But for now I’m off to enjoy the opening event.

Today I stumbled upon an entry at UX-Blog which reported about a review of the upcoming book of Steve Johnson. It‘s about the process of innovation and how people and companies can create a process for innovation. He says, that innovation isn‘t one mysterious thing popping out of nowhere. Every innovation is a sequence of small novel steps with many people involved. There isn‘t a lonely creator having the genious idea. Real innovation happens when different visions come to life, collide and result in a bigger breakthrough. The medium internet has tons of information and offers you a big network of innovative thinkers and makers (though, it also can be very distractive). If you are able to connect the advantages of various media (like books, web, movies, etc.)  you provide a basis for innovation.

One last note: Besides the fact that Steve Johnson is a great thinker, the sketching style of his videos is really enjoyable.

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