The Arcade Games:

Feed (Ronja Adler and Gabriela Vasquez):

Feed is an experiment to show that education and games can work together. You can learn a lot, while playing. The goal of the game is to achive the highest score before the time runs out.
The main character of the game is a hamster who has to catch healthy food.
Each Apple gives you 1 point, and 5 seconds more to play. The sweets are charged with 5 points, but also reducing your time by 15 seconds. So you have to figure out, the correct nutrition for the hamster, to have a long playing time.
When the time runs out its time to sleep for the little guy. The last screen shows how the game ends. You can see your score and the beginning of a new day , just click your mouse to play again!

Lustiges Hamster Spiel from Steffen Mitschelen on Vimeo.

*—–
Steve Shooter fresse gesteuert (Simon Ruber):
Steve Shooter seems to be a classic arcade game. You play Steve Jobs and have to save your apples. When you’re good enough, you can try to attack your biggest enemy…

The special part of this game, comes with the gameplay. In our first Version, Steve was controlled by the mouse movement, but in the latest release, you can make him move with your face (thank god for opencv face detection).

*—–
Slurm (Benjamin Glock):
You are a slime. And all you want is to get rich! Thus you are collecting money and diamonds. This little game is inspired by a classic arcade game and made in the pathwayweek at merz-akademie.

*—–
Datavis (Denise Hoffmann and Sabrina Montimurro):
Our project is about data visualisation. Processing reads the data in real time from the internet. This could be useful for weatherinformation for example.
In our project we used data about the frequency of letters in different languages. The first frame shows an overview of five languages German, English, Italian, Swedish and Turkish. By pressing the space bar youcan switch to he compare mode. In this mode you can type the single letters and compare them. In the last mode you have the direct comparison between the different languages that you can choose by typing the numbers.

*—–
Glitch Generator (Manuel Nädele and Simon Baer):
A processing sketch made by Manuel Nädele and Simon Baer, which enables the user to demolish the images he loaded into the sketch. Beneath transforming or pixelating the previously chosen image in various ways, it is possible to add some randomly generated glitches or pixel errors. This way, a demolished image can be created and saved afterwards as a jpg-file.

*—–
AR Clothing (Melissa Otto):


As a woman, you know this problem very well. You get up, and your next destination is your bathroom. And you will have to spend a long time there, because – you don’t know what to wear! As a solution to this problem, I devised this program, with which you can digitize your complete garderobe.
Get on your computer or phone, select your top, base, shoes and
accessoires and compose quickly your today’s outfit. Now the walk to the bathroom will only take a minute.

*—–
(Ralph Gvozdenovic):
My project consists of two seperate works: a classic arcade space shooter and a prototype focusing on the possiblity to represent tridimesional space in a 2D environment.

The arcade game features three layers which move at different speed and make up a dynamic background. In front of this background at the left-hand side of the screen the starship controllable by the player is shown. Hostile spacecrafts leap into view from the right-hand side of the screen and move left at a fast pace. If the approaching enemies pass the players starship and leave the screen unharmed the player loses points. The user can hinder them by moving in their line of sight and shooting laser beams at them on keystroke. He gains points then and can set a new highscore.

The second work, the prototype, shows a white room in which the player takes in a fix possition. By moving the mouse, the player can overlook a range of 180° in front of him. The rooms perspective ajusts to his movements and creates the illusion of tridimentionality.

*—–
Interactive glitch app (Frederik Kindervater):

The interaction is based on several arrays, tileCounts and a map function. By moving the mouse across the screen you can change the different tileCounts. When the mouse reach the right side, the picture is completely glitched.
The tileCounts are changeable by pressing 2,3,4, etc. .

Interactive Light Bar is a project created by Constanze Link during her 6-month internship at Limbic Media.

The intention of Constanze’s project was to expose the Canadian audience to a visualization of European electronic and deep house music. To do this Constanze created a coin-slot interface that selects from one of 10 music tracks. For each track Constanze created a custom light design using 148 individually addressable multi-color LEDs. The LEDs are refracted through glass jars and bottles to create complex and beautiful patterns that move in sync with the music.

Enjoy!

Interactive Light Bar from Limbic Media on Vimeo.

To celebrate 20 years of the WWW as we know it, students and teachers of Merz Akademie had a party in the tradition of browser cakes. We decided to bake Mosaic cakes.

Muffins by Ronya Adler and Steffen Mitschellen

Globes by Saskia Aldinger

Melissa’s and Denise’s cake

Wine cake by Rene Tackenberg, really delicious!

Olia Lialina’s #mosaic_cake

proud Olia Lialina with her Mosaic cake

Olia’s cake, making of

Olia’s cake, making of

Olia’s cake was possible due to support and supervision by @TheBooyahCook. Thank you, Emma!

Ronja&Steffen’s muffins, making of

Ronja&Steffen’s muffins, test

Rene cuts his browser cake

Olia cuts her browser cake

Danja Vasiljev ate a node

Raquel Meyers ate another node

Students ate the globe

At the table

Mosaic was attending its own party

Surfing with Mosaic today is difficult

Happy Birthday, NCSA Mosaic!

We love you, Mosaic! And we will always remember you!

Trailblazers #5 took place on 3rd of February 2013, the last day of Transmediale festival, on the stage of Cafe Global. It was a wonderful event. Experienced surfers, including such celebrities as Lorna Mills, Anthony Anthonellis or Aram Bartholl made their trails from Amazon to Pirate Bay, from Instagram to flickr, from http://www.lol.com/ to http://www.nooooooooooooooo.com/ And all this without Google and without keyboard! Just by following the links.

The absolute winner: Mike Kotsch of http://mikekotsch.de/
2nd place: Pieter, founder http://www.todayandtomorrow.net/
3rd place: Aram Bartholl http://www.datenform.de/

You can book Beautiful Zeroes and Ugly Ones to organize the Trailblasers contest at your venue

see also

gallery on google+
report on todayandtomorrow

Slacklining is a application made by Charlotte, Constanze and Laura that simulates the popular activity of slacking inside our VR environment.

We additionally had different variations of interaction methods realized in many other applications. There have been made various applications from technical behaviors like drumming to some kind of moorhuhn shooter.

Download App (send the apk to your gmail account)

With FoodU students of the Merz-Akademie can check out the daily menu of Merz-Cafeteria and DaCapo Restaurant in one simple Android-Application. FoodU was designed and Programmed by last year’s 3rd Semester New Media course in Object Oriented Programming, guided by Jan Schäfer.

Today user engagement is one of the biggest challenges in user interface design. Marina Gröpel’s bachelor’s project “Gamification als Bildungsprinzip” (“Gamification as a principle of education”) explores the possibilities of a gamificated social network and didactic tool that augments education by motivating students to discover literature and tutorials. While self-responsibility was always an important aspect during the development, Marina’s web app “edu.game” also tries to suggest new content and new ways of improving skills based on the progress of its users.

The final results were a wireframe-prototype and a clickable mock-up. She analyzed and used different gamification mechanics, such as: scores, achievements, game-like aesthetics, avatars and usage of personalized data.

Darja Daut, Susanne Müller and Lisa Hofmann staged the history of David Hasselhoff’s personal webpage.

How would it look in March 1993? July 1996? On Geocities? During the Dotcom craze?

The students investigated the styles of Web 1.0, Web 2.0 and current aesthetics of cloud computing. However, the most interesting part of their work might be their recreation of a blind spot in web historiography: the obscure, under-researched time in between the burst of the Dotcom bubble in 2001 and the rise of social networks in 2006.

Christina Xu, co-founder of Awesome Foundation and ROFLcon (Boston) gave a talk in Stuttgart on the 31st of October — “The Power of User Error”

“So we have the people who just create, and people who just use, but what about all the people in the middle who come up with innovative ways of using the technology? Consider the early Twitter users who imported the hashtags and @s from IRC and made them so popular that they’re now part of Twitter’s official design terminology. These people are still users, but their use patterns blaze trails for others. And any user can become one of these, like a school of fish turning in random directions! A lot of our ROFLCon guests follow this pattern; they are people who somehow started a trend among other users.”

Do You Believe in Users? This question, asked in the legendary 1985 movie Tron, nowadays would have to be asked with a smile, as a nostalgic remark about the days when “apps” in neon costumes competed with each other and their users in racing games — but instead it is gaining earnest relevance.

Three years ago in the introduction to the Digital Folklore Reader we asked “Do you believe in Users?” to emphasize that the personal computer must be regarded as a medium with a cultural history shaped more by its users and less by its inventors.

In this lecture series we raise the question again, for the sole purpose of reminding that computer users do actually still exist, along with their right to understand how their computers, big and small, work. This is essential in times when interaction processes got way too smooth, pleasant and invisible, when designers and developers don’t even talk about interfaces, but about emotions people (not users) should feel by experiencing (not using) their products.

We’ve invited five speakers, whose academic, artistic, curatorial and archival work make personal computer and its user visible again.

Wednesday, 31.10.
“The Power of User Error” Christina Xu, co-founder of Awesome Foundation and ROFLcon (Boston)

“So we have the people who just create, and people who just use, but what about all the people in the middle who come up with innovative ways of using the technology? Consider the early Twitter users who imported the hashtags and @s from IRC and made them so popular that they’re now part of Twitter’s official design terminology. These people are still users, but their use patterns blaze trails for others. And any user can become one of these, like a school of fish turning in random directions! A lot of our ROFLCon guests follow this pattern; they are people who somehow started a trend among other users.”

Wednesday, 14.11.
“Hackers and Suckers: Understanding the 8-bit Underground” Anders Carlsson (goto80), musician (Göteborg)

Discussions of 8-bit art and music is usually framed in words like limitations, nostalgia and reappropriation. The lecture will examine where these discourses come from and suggest better concepts, that are also useful in modern computing. By combining his long-time personal experience as a musician with research in low-tech hacker cultures, Anders Carlsson’s ideas about man-machine creativity is both controversial and pragmatic.

Tuesday, 04.12.
“Where are the Files” Jason Scott, archivist and computer technology historian (New York)

“And what happened in the last decade or so, is that an awful lot of computer history is in danger. A lot of it has been deleted. In fact, if you step back and look at it, the loss of data has moved to epidemic proportions. I use the term epidemic specifically here; I mean that there is a mental condition to accept the loss of data as the price of doing business with computers. And beyond that, the expectation that data will be lost, and the spreading of this idea to the point that data loss becomes no big thing.”

Tuesday, 11.12.
“Useless Things”, Niklas Roy, artist (Berlin)

Niklas Roy uses art in order to explore technology. The outcome of his research are mechanical sculptures, electric machines, interactive performances and electronic devices. Before concentrating on making art, he worked as director, as 3D animator and as visual effect supervisor for several international film productions.

The Project deals with the remediation of archives, collections and exhibitions. It is a collaboration with the civic Archive „Les Archives“ in Bruxelles. The theme of the work is the Grand Place and its eventful history, “Trois Hommes- Une Grand Place”. The goal was to enable users to continue their visit to the exhibition on-site,on the Grand Place, by developing an android application. Taking advantage of the sensoric features of mobile-devices, such as camera, web-access and orientation-sensors, the proto-type of the application augments a visit to Grand Place with digital exhibits and enables the user to receive additional informations on other exhibitions, events or public transportation. The Grand Place itself becomes a part of the Interface.

Daniel Kurfess finished his studies with a 3D interactive journey addressing threats to the openness of the internet and net neutrality.
In the article “As We May Think” (published in 1945), Vannevar Bush described a machine for the organisation of knowledge in which documents were not filed hierarchically, but connected associatively.
His idea of the Memex accompanied the development of the internet, which today extracts all kinds of contents from archives, libraries and museums worldwide like a universal brain that has the potential to make information available to all.
As We May Forget is a cyberspace dystopia, a cautionary tale of a broken internet. It was inspired by Jorge Luis Borges’ “La biblioteca de Babel”.

In the interactive experience the user is forced to play the role of a spectator who falls through the grim structures of a dysfunctional cyberspace library, barely able to assume control or catch a glimpse at the contents the library hides behind solid bars.
The only places he can get some rest are the latrines on each floor.
The library is cyclical, the fall of the visitor is never-ending.

Playable Version will follow. Made with Unity and Autodesk 3ds Max. Title track “Dark Day” used under license from Alice Hive.

Denis Hofmann and Thomas Notschka put together detailed tutorial to
help you make proper 3D plots with the Makterbot.

The videos are split into two main parts.
1. The modelling with rhinoceros 4

2. How to prepare the Makerbot for printing

This tutorial is from students for students hope u will enjoy.

The Makerbot was donated to Merz Akademie by Aram Bartholl. Shirin, Artur, Olia and Jörg finished the assembly early summer and thanks to Shirin‘s soldering skills we had nothing to resolder. After the first functional test we had problems with the print shifting from the plate, but step by step we got successful in printing 3D object

The project uses hypervideo techniques to allow users access to documents from the Archives of the City of Bruxelles (Archives de la Ville de Bruxelles).

Josha’s interactive video is based on scenes filmed inside the archive by film-student Mona Mohr and a collection of documents from the archive. The hypervideo interface allows experiencing archival records through the eyes of the film author and her view of the archive space. The goal is hereby to make the usually invisible storage space part of the visual interface through which the document is retrieved. The narrative structure is based on the different archive premises and their interconnection. Stairways thus became important filmic paths that interconnect the different floors.

The general rationale behind “Open Hypervideo” is to use film in the way text is used within hypertextual networks like the World Wide Web.

In his thesis, Joscha describes general principles of hypervideo on the web and as interface for document access.

In a recently published interview for VideoLectures.NET, he outlines a possible future of the project and web video per ce.

Final project by Ulrike Schock: Digital Media in the Exhibition Design in Ethnology Museum.

Digital media is used in more and more museum for the presentation and information transfer. How far is it possible to use digital media to support the museums exhibition design? And at which point do they destroy the mission and objectives of an museum? These are the questions asked in Ulrike’s thesis.

Bilum is an interactive installation for an ethnographic museum, which makes it easier for visitors to access the important information about a string bag made by hand in Papua New Guinea, without putting the original object into the shadow.

You can also consider visiting another page without an end made by Shirin — Cat Tail, Tailfinity

Kristina Spurgat, a student of the Timeline project, finished her In-car Computer Technology Timeline. Six leading automobile industry brands were compared, seven innovations examined. A beautiful interactive SVG chart, though it can be a bit depressing for fans of German automobiles.

///The game intends to generate attention with young players and fans of the platformer genre due to its specific looks and game play. ZOMBASE offers a special incentive for female players: The main character is a powerful girl, the story focuses on social relationships and tensions between different characters. ///

You play as the teenage-girl Lizza and battle your way through the streets of Megalocity which are overrun by zombies. Your only weapon aginst the zombified citizens is your ghettoblaster. By playing the right track and combining it with a visual input (jump your jumping rope) you make your enemie’s heads explode!

See the process and the result at http://duragram.tumblr.com/

Daniel Kurfess invites you into his Glitch Gallery. Look around, discover
the different exhibition pieces—but be warned: The more you get drawn into
the White Cube’s winding corridors, the more the glitches begin to leak
out. The gallery itself transforms into a glitch until it penetrates all
space and eats its visitors who become part of the exhibition in the
process.

The interactive experience was created with Unity and is available for
free on Mac, Windows, Android and for all browsers (via Unity plugin).

Website: http://nm.merz-akademie.de/~daniel.kurfess/white-cube/

Google Play:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.Daniel.Whitecube

The representation is shown within a 3D stereoscopic environment while the user interface is a website that remote controls the representations of the VR application.

Tho recent projects that could make us revise “Computer Power and Human Reason”

Scott
Kristina Spurgat: “Scott is a left-over of the old technology, an old computer looking for some attention in a world full of new technologies. When Siri was introduced, Scott decided to make some use of voice recognition himself. Scott however is nothing like Siri. …”

The Future of Eliza
Saskia Aldinger: “This installation shows 2 computers, having a psychoanalytical conversation as freaky Hal9000 and psychoanalyst Gerty.”

If you are into music, adventure and file sharing, you should definitely try www.audiochopsuey.com by Oliver Rübener, a new platform to exchange audio files. Its core is a tool that chops your MP3 Files into little pieces and puts them back together in a new order so everything sounds like noise. However, the process works like a not operation, so running it twice will restore the original sound file. Neither GEMA nor SONY and BMG can prevent the sharing of audio files containing noise.

Cyberfeminism is back!

Saskia Aldinger — professional internet amateur — presented her new project, the photo series Daughter of all Demos. Saskia as Douglas Engelbart, Saskia as Ivan Sutherland, Saskia as scientist of the future as imagined by Vannevar Bush. The history of computers and user interfaces is dominated by great men. But Saskia is greater.

During the presentation one could try to be Doug herself. Was not that difficult.

beer there or be square!

It can be read online through a typical imageboard interface. Other options are free PDF dowmlod and print on demand at lulu.com.

The book introduces the history of trolling on- and offline and how 4chan, the “best and worst place” on the Internet, became its new incubator. Stefan is brave enough to teach his readers how to be a troll and how to defend yourself against trolls.

Stefan gives his definition of what trolling is on page 35:

Trolling is the act of disrupting people for personal amusement or the amusement of many.

This book is required reading for anybody interested in a differentiated discussion of trolling. Forget your prejudices about anonymity, hostility and jerkiness of trolls. Trolling is a art.

Problem?

The Book

Research

Research

Research

Interface

Happy New Semester!

Our Pathway completed the research on user interfaces for mediaglobe. Mario Doulis, Jörg Frohnmayer, Stephan Schröter and Joscha Jäger developed different scenarios for the mediaglobe research project. The focus was on the generation of different novel interface elements for the Semex video search engine programmed by the HassoPlattner Institute.

Additionally to the web interface for video retrieval we developed an
stereoscopic 3D explorative sound search for video archivs.

Johannes Osterhoff from Hasso Plattner Institue published a Tec-Note on the IVDW 2011 conference where the Merz Akademies part in the interface development was acknowledged.
Presentation sheets

Happy Graphics Interchange is a perfect tool to make your own Animated GIF party. It helps you to find GIFs. Then it provides an interface to collage them, to scale and rotate. The next step you get an HTML code to paste wherever you find appropriate. The Disco section inspires you with the examples of what is possible.

Happy Graphics Interchange is Theo Seemann‘s final project. It follows his thesis “Having fun with 01″. In this paper he researches what Media Literacy (Medienkompetenz) means (and how this term is used and misused) and he suggests possible ways to achieve it.

You can get it for free at the market.android.com

“Back to Web! An app that gets you back to surfing!
This is a mobile App that launches you into the web, again. It will show you a variety of websites and lets you add your own sites. No Walled Gardens!
Due to the rise of the Apps the web is changing. While you are connected with the Internet all the time, the web itself gets less and lesser attention. Most of the time online, you are caged in Walled Gardens. Those are closed networks, only linking to itself. Think of Facebook and almost every news app.”

A lot has been written about this most controversial tag in the history of markup languages. Already in the year it was created, usability experts announced that it breaks fundamental rules of hypertext and navigation. It was hated in the end of the 1990′s and neglected in the new millennium.
In March 2011 W3C finally removed frames from the HTML5 standard.

Strange enough, this news caught up with our group right in the moment when we found out that frames would be the best solution for one obscure effect we wanted to achieve. It motivated us to to give a close look at this now officially dead technology and further experiment with it.

Enjoy the projects and documentation of the /FRAMESET exhibition at http://nm.merz-akademie.de/frameset/

In the seminar at Merz Akademie in Stuttgart we found ourselves between the once reduced styles of Susan Kare and the currently opulent Apple icons, between the by-nature minimalistic Kindle Interface and the shiny iBookstore and since WWDC2011 took place on Tuesday, the whole seminar was overshadowed by iCloud and the imagery that came with Steve Jobs keynote.

The project documentation is available at http://www.johannes-p-osterhoff.com/interface-art/uncanny-valley/
And at http://in-the-uncanny-valley.tumblr.com/
And http://www.flickr.com/photos/johannes-p-osterhoff/sets/72157626952531028/

more on this deadrop

Works and artists of the Speedshow Fun is Back:

Save My Job by Stefan Krappitz
http://nm.merz-akademie.de/~stefan.krappitz/savemyjobus/
Is your Boss uncool? Don’t want to miss a job or get fired because of the pictures of last nights crazy party? On savemyjob.com you can easily make them safe for work.

Ghost Town by Daniel Stäbler, Arne Hübner, Theo Seemann, Chris Heller
http://nm.merz-akademie.de/ghosttown/
An elegant and bitter response of Communication Design students to the paranoia that swept across Germany. It is a research of the new image (and new imageries) of Germany and you are invited to participate in it.

The MIDI Opera by Manuel Bürger
http://www.themidiopera.net/
“The MIDI Opera” is composition and interpretation at the same time
were the perception of sound quality depends on the listener’s computer configuration.

Booty Clipse by Dennis Knopf (aka Tracky Birthday)
http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=DennisKnopf
“wtf???? i dont see no girl” tragiik

Google Car by Linus Suter
http://codewelt.com/gcar
Google street car in trouble

Last MIDI Background by Sebastian Schmieg
http://www.kingcosmonaut.de/lmb/#4
LMB takes you on a journey through an almost forgotten web that is loud, colorful, often “personal”, and doesn’t care about standards.

Google by Johannes P Osterhoff
http://google.johannes-p-osterhoff.com/
Google is a public online performance during wich I document all my search queries made with the search engine of the same name. The performance started on January 1 and will end on December 31, 2011.

Flexible Dancefloor Disco by Saskia Aldinger
http://nm.merz-akademie.de/~saskia.aldinger/peep2/
Your last chance to learn to dance properly. (drag the frameset!)

Fun is back! on Aram Bartholl’s server.

Linus Suter
TypoSnake
TypoSnake is an interactive flash game coded in ActionScript 3. All your favourite fonts are there, but moving very fast.

Chris Heller, Michael Ruß, Theo Seemann
VisualBraille.ttf is a font that combines tactile and visual experience. It is based on a standard Braille font and can be read visually. Featured in a newly published book — Typoversity.

Stefan Krappitz
The Typoquiz “Which Font are You” is a german psycho-test to determine, which font fits your character most.

Mario Jäckle
Fast and thrilling Music Video to the Song “Anti Anti” from Bonaparte. Made with After Effects and much time.

Saskia Aldinger, Jan Wenger.
PXLoon
Typography installation . Huge QR code decoded with black balloons.

Contestants of 2011:
“Epic Fail Guys”
“Der Türke und LSD”
“Cubes in Space” (best outfit)
“Konsorten” (the winner)

8bit Hero by Oliver Rübner and Susanne Riexinger:

8bit Hero is a prototype for a game, where you have to hit “notes” on a midi keyboard or on your pc keyboard in the right moments, to increase your score, played to a 8bit song like the Tetris theme. The next note will always be anounced with a white outlined block.

Tickle Me! by Charlotte Hofstetter, Laura Lasinger und Constanze Link:

The aim of the Processing game, which we developed, is to collect all the candy with as few clicks. The difficulty is to bring the “Tickle Me!” element to the corresponding positions, because it moves with a random speed. After four clicks, you lose.

Malgedöhns by Kristina Spurgat, Sascha Mickeleit und Lisa Hofmann:

Malgedöhns a drawing program with which you can draw lines in 9 different colors, change the thickness of your pen (4 different thicknesses) and stamp over the canvas with different types of stamps (e.g. a hat, a fish, a crown…). an eraser is included to remove any lines and stamps not wanted. the “clear” button allows you to clear the canvas completely and start a fresh drawing.
when done, the “save” button will save your picture on your computer and allow you to look at it forever.

Videogrphics by Arthur Musalimov:

Boob Pong by Shirin Sparr:

“I wanna be the airmen” by THomas Noschka and Denis Hoffmann:

Hey guys,
“I wanna be the airmen” is a game which is programmed in Processing . You
have to rescuer the airman from the flocks. Those flocks are flying over
the playing field. You can control the airman with your mouse movement.
Have Fun

Students explored the field of stereo photography and learned how to compose high quality stereoscopic pictures. For the presentation they combined the static pictures with our immersive virtual reality system.

A lot of ideas were tried, some of them on the border of legality and sanity.
Our winner Jan Wenger however decided to tap into the long tail of internet
commerce and create website templates for small gaming clans (aka “e-sports
teams”). In quick interviews with scene members he found out that most designs
for them are based on wishful thinking rather than their real needs or ideas.

Based on his findings, Jan created simplified designs that pick up elements from
the era when clans first represented themselves in the underground web; but
arranged in a spacious and tasteful way.

He sold a lot and deserves his new clothes!

Traditionally, in Germany people are very serious about privacy and data
protection. With the advent of social networks, millions of users exposed
embarrassing photos to anybody daring to look. A seemingly unsolvable conflict
was created:

How could you still be cool, hang out with friends in rancid clubs and the
trashy dormitory, but at the same time avoid being fired because your boss sees
on Facebook you’re just getting drunk every day?

Holy Stefanius, Patron of Online Privacy, (aka Stefan Krappitz) comes to the
rescue with Save My Job! It allows to cover
all up the awkward details of how you spend your free time — with elements of a
good upper-class live. Before, with tools like Blingee, you could only add fun
stuff. Now you can add prestige, education and style.

Impress not only your boss, but also your friends and relatives!

Student Marina Gröpel’s Hot Or Hotter serves as a battleground in between Facebook Likes (hot) and flattr donations (hotter).

The hottest person taking part (order by “clicks”!) will win all the flattr money at the end of the month, so don’t wait and upload your photo!

If you want to contribute to Jupi’s well-being, donate one Euro via Paypal and a yummy goodie will drop down for him to chew on! Fully web enabled e-commerce remote controlled automatic hamster pleasure!!

Remember that hamsters are active during the night mostly, so schedule your visit after the sun sets in Germany.

While big software companies like Apple and Google are trying to unify these narratives to controlled, boring AppStores, individual exchange of monetary values, brought forward by Paypal or flattr, is certainly a form of communication. And how can you connect deeper with somebody than by debugging and cracking their software?

Now you can get all this from the same person at Lostdoor: An browser version, shareware, and instructions how to crack the binary.

Bernadette’s design project — programmed in HTML5 and CSS3, according to the newest and hottest standards, but in notorious dot-com style — is Wired’s Timeline of Predictions. 18 years of proclaiming computer revolutions and the same 18 years of kissing goodbye standards and technologies. Scroll the bar and notice that Wired has buried the WWW already two times.

Web-Design and -Development by Dragan Espenschied

Peepshow by Olia Lialina

One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age is a research blog started by Olia Lialina and Dragan Espenschied in January 2011. The idea is to collect, comprehend and document artifacts of amateur web found in and through the Geocities Torrent.

The free web hosting service Geocities.com was founded by “Beverly Hills Internet” in July 1995 — exactly the time when the web left academia and started to be made by everyone of us.

Soon it became one of the most popular and inhabited places of the WWW and stayed that way through the second part of 1990?s. In January 1999, on the peak of Dot.com mania, it was bought by Yahoo.

The new millennium proved Geocities to be a bad investment. Having a page on there became a synonym for dilettantism and bad taste. Furthermore, the time of personal home pages was counted, being replaced with profiles on social networks.

Ten years later, in April 2009, Yahoo announced that they are going to shut down the service.

On the 26th of October 2009 Geocities seized to exist. In between the announcement and the official date of death a group of people calling themselves Archive Team managed to rescue almost a terabyte of Geocities pages. On the 26th of October 2010, the first anniversary of this Digital Holocaust, the Archive Team started to seed geocities.archiveteam.torrent.

On the 1st of November 2010 Olia and Dragan bought a 2 TB disk and started download the biggest torrent of all times.

Well, the reality is not so exciting. The milk glass constructions are just houses, blurred by Google on request of the house owners who think that exposing their facades on the Internet can harm their privacy.

Ghosttown is an elegant and bitter response of Communication Design students to the paranoia that swept across Germany. It is a research of the new image (and new imageries) of Germany and you are invited to participate in it.

Ghosttown is a project made during Attention Design workshop, given by Manuel Burger

In the practical part he implemented one of his ideas: “Augmented Reading”. It augments the static information of print-products like newspapers, magazines, books and the like by providing additional (digital) information (e.g. videos or updated information). This information is presented according to what the user is currently reading.

For more information visit www.raumnutzung2020.de or
www.augmented-reading.de and try it yourself.

Photo documentation on Johannes P Osterhoff’s Flickr.

The Merz Akademie present their results of remediate research project from the 19 to the 21 november at Württembergischer Kunstverein in Stuttgart. The projects supervised by Mario Doulis are the following:

Reverse Remediation #0 – Interacting Space
Interaktives Filmmuseum: Sebastian Otto
Raumkrümmer: Jörg Frohnmayer
Alterung in virtuellem Welten: Benjamin Wingert

Reverse Remediation #1 – Interaktive Archive
Interaktives Archiv: Joscha Jäger
Interaktives Archiv I Video: Benjamin Wingert
Interaktives Archiv II Virtual Reality: Benjamin Wingert

Reverse Remediation #2 – Machinima Interactions
Machinimas zum Video „Collateral Murder“: Ulrike Schock
Machinima-Site: Daniel Kurfess
Persona 0.1: Andreas Reich
Zamani: Julius Schäufele
HITMAN Machinima: Jasmin Sipahi
Machinima Experiments:
Marina Gröpel und Daniel Kurfess
Fußball und Vorurteile: Ulrike Schock
Gilgamesch: Jens Kefer
Stuttgart12: Daniel von Büchau
Comrades!: Salvador Cobo-Jimena
Machinimizer: Jan Schäfer
Niebelungensage: Benjamin Pausch

On the 13th of October 2010, the Beautiful Zeros and Ugly Ones invited Users “to surf the classic way” for the third time.

16 teams (more than 20 surfers) registered. This time the trails were really difficult. Only very experienced and devoted web users managed to come from www.facebook.com to www.joindiaspora.com, from www.ursula-von-der-leyen.de to www.zuguttenberg.de, and from www.das-neue-herz-europas.de to www.kopfbahnhof-21.de.

In the 9th final round two surfers had to start from a particular funny moment in a youtube video on cloud computing and arrive at lufthansa.com. NM student Stefan Krappitz managed to come there first, leaving the geturl team stuck at the Lufthansa’s facebook profile. See the photo finish proof!

You can look at the photos in the gallery, there are more. And while the documention video is in development, watch animated GIFs: Final Seconds of Trail Blazers#3, Triumph

On he 7th of July 2010, Wolfgang Schneider presented the CodeVis Tabe to the group of Beautiful Zeros and Ugly Ones. It is a a device that makes you learn to make up decimal numbers from 0s and 1s. In 2012, when computers take over, it will be a very demanded skill. Those who can do it will find good jobs and patrons.

To test your binary skills and experience other projects come to Merz Akademie on the 13th of October. See details and registration for Trailblazers #3.

Due to widespread support for unicode characters you can now post Zalgo-Images anywhere you want. Using the Zalgo Image Creator you can convert any black and white bitmap image to a text image, which you can post anywhere you would usually write text. For example you can post the Zalgo-Image as a comment on some website, spice up details in your user profile or send text images by instant messaging services.

The character image is composed of basic characters and special Zalgos. Zalgos are characters from the unicode character space, and are used by foreign languages to build compound letters. The special property of a Zalgo character is that it has no horizontal spacing. There are different classes of Zalgos, some are placed above, beneath or stay at the center of the normal character. Using a special image processing technique the program can approximate any image using only these unicode characters.

Supports most common image formats, e.g. BMP, JPG, PNG or TIF.

After exploring new options of CSS 3 and HTML 5, students deconstructed Picasso’s Guernica and reconstructed it with CSS3 transitions. You can see it and listen to it here: id.merz-akademie.de/guernica/, better you do it in Safari or Chrome.

Thank you Roman, for being here and for the nice words about us.

She wisely notices: “Conformity is generally, NOT seen as a modern thing… yet corporates who pride themselves on their ”support” of individuality, symbolize that very thing as a blind, deaf, speechless stereotype Unisex. Wonderful. That’s about the equivalent of telling your mother, that you want to declare your independence with a belly button ring, because everyone else is doing it. (Which of course NEVER works)

And yet… on the up Side, today’s User barely notices, he’s so busy fitting his personality into any creative space the makers of his transparent interface have allotted that purpose: from the ‘Favorites’ entry to his personal Profile foto; he will NOT be just another Icon in the crowd !”

More beautiful projects, images and course materials are documented at the dropshadow blog
P.S. by Johannes p. Osterhoff

The Media producers Antony Rayzhekoff and Emanuel Andel made experiments with natural user interfaces. The students learned how to handle the this.play touch interface and programmed an interactive presentation based on the processing library. Some results of the workshop are documented here.

The Beauty and Lacks of Limitation project is documented now:

http://sites.google.com/site/thebeautyoflacksandlimitation/

Surf the classic way

from amazon to piratebay

nm.merz-akademie.de/trailblazers/surfing/wednesday/140410/20h/teckstrasse58/container/beer

The selected projects are.
Botpoetry from Michael Russ, Speak and Fips from Julian Bingman and the great Zalgo Project that unfortunately isn’t officially released yet.

The preview picture of Max Bense can be shown thanks to Jonnie Doebel and Stadtbücherei Stuttgart.

Web Development by Dragan Espenschied

Beautiful Zeros and Ugly Ones by Olia Lialina

Jury’s statement (in German):

“Das Projekt verwendet html, midi und animgifs, digitaler lo-tech in einer Reduktion aufs Wesentliche und vor allem aufs Unwesentliche. Das Projekt baut eine Art „Universal Videoclip“ oder ist ein Retro-Internet-TV. Es kann aber auch als Inteface zu einem dynamischen Archiv gesehen werden. Das Steuerelement ist in Form einer Rakete gebaut – der Autor nennt es ein Cyberspace Shuttle. Der Midisound spielt emotionslos und die gesampelten Grafiken der angesteuerten Website fliegen von rechts nach links durch das Browserfenster. Selbstverstaendlich ist die Site auch interaktiv. Sites die midi-sound verwenden haben in der Regel entsprechende Grafiken und Bilder die in dem von Sebastian Schmieg designten Environment perfekt zur Geltung kommen und bei jedem Song eine Hitzewelle an Assoziationen erwecken. In Zeiten der esoterischen ITunes Visualisierungen, Dolby Digital und der totatlitaeren Flash Massenbewegung ist Last Midi Background auch eine Hommage an die Digitale Folklore Arbeit der in Stuttgart ansaessigen Net.Art Avantgardistin Olia Lialina und an den auch in Stuttgart lebenden bodenstaendigen Kuenstler Dragan Espenschied.
Die Jury gratuliert! “

-Tobias Leingruber (and Dragan Espenschied) invited everybody to join Ursula von der Leyen-Fanclub.

-Theo Seemann Flaged RFID !

-Florian Kroener gave an insight into audio CAPTCHAs.

-Michael Russ read Bot Poetry.

-Christopher Heller made a Tribute to the URL.

-Esra Bayrak proposed manga CAPTCHAs.

-Julia Boeger made us all create our own surveillance cameras with Camy and Friends.

-Stefan Krappitz opened a service for those who doesn’t trust the WWW –
PaperTrust.

-Olia Lialina
Crystallized and Embossed all the semester.

Presentation:

Testing:

Edited by Olia Lialina & Dragan Espenschied
Designed by Manuel Buerger

Texts and projects by: Cory Arcangel, Julia Böger, Manuel Buerger, Helene Dams, Dragan Espenschied, Jörg Frohnmayer, Mark Grimm, Christopher Heller, Yunchul Kim, Dennis Knopf, Stefan Krappitz, Florian Kröner, Tobias Leingruber, Olia Lialina, Leo Merz, Bernadette Neuroth, o+ro, johannes p osterhoff, Isabel Pettinato, Michael Ruß, Theo Seemann, Alexander Schlegel, Bert Schutzbach, Siegfried Zielinsky

17cm × 25cm, 288 pages, six kinds of paper, loads of colors, + CAT POSTER

Language: English (83,21%), German (16,79%)

Published November 2009 by merz & solitude.

Digital Folklore reader is the best Christmas’09 gift!

“With the current generation of operating systems the drop shadow effect entered the graphical user interface to a new extent. In this context it raises not only windows from background wallpapers; it also stands for a visually enriched interface that strives towards three-dimensionality. Loaded with rich imagery, photorealistic icons and pseudo three-dimensional configurations the graphical user interface yet remains tied to its ?at medium.

Bewildered by this paradox, the graphical user interface leaves the office it was made for and becomes a pop culture phenomenon.”

Jay Botler, the author or “Remediation” and “Windows and Mirrows”, books we study intensively in projects and colloquia, is among the speakers!

On the 4th of November at the Stuttgart State Library Alvar and Dragan will recapitulate 10 years of unstable links and collaborative writing.

German announcement:

Mittwoch, 4. November
19.30 Uhr, Mörike-Kabinett
Tell.net: 10 Jahre Assoziations-Blaster
Ein Klassiker der deutschen Netzliteratur aus Stuttgart feiert Geburtstag

Der Assoziations-Blaster ist Verlinkungsmeister, Anführer der Google-Trefferlisten, Hüter von fast einer Million Textbeiträgen und eines der bekanntesten deutschsprachigen Netzliteraturprojekte. Alvar Freude und Dragan Espenschied, Netzkünstler und Schöpfer des “Blasters”, feiern Geburtstag und erzählen über die Wechselwirkung ihres Projektes mit der sich verändernden Kultur des Internets. Sie zeigen, welche Visionen vom “Netz” Wirklichkeit wurden und welche es vielleicht noch werden. Exklusiv vorgestellt wird an diesem Abend auch die neue Version des Assoziations-Blasters. Eintritt: € 4,-/ 3,-

The folks of Upgrade Berlin, Aram Bartholl, Jamie Wilkinson (Skype) and I will present FAT Lab projects and I will show new works, all around the title “Skate the Web”. The work will be on display until 18th of nov. at Betahaus Berlin.

FAT tunes for Schmuse ‘n’ booze right after the presentations!!
[...] more on http://fffff.at/skate-the-web-exhibit-in-berlin/

Bis Samstag!! Tobi”

You can read about it in German and in English.

To see really good communication design and socially significant work you should visit Isabel’s final project — Viral Candy Shop.

The selected projects are.
Botpoetry from Michael Russ, Speak and Fips from Julian Bingman, Papertrust from Stefan Krappitz and Happytube from Jens Natzschak.

• how to build a camera with a matchbox and tape
• DIY KITS && THE GODFATHER OF HOW TO
• HOW TO find fonts by using Google

and

HappyTube was realized in the 2nd semester web development course. Here are the links to the other exciting projects.

Tagwall: http://tagwall.de.vu

Wemob: http://wemob.de

Weemind: http://weemind.de.vu

Scrawl: http://reichsing.de

Guide Shaker: http://guideshaker.de.vu

Der längste Arm der Welt: http://der-laengste-arm-der-welt.de.vu

Knockout Kings: http://knockoutkings.de.vu

Avacom: http://avacom.de.vu

Christopher Heller, Michael Ruß and Theo Seemann finished their portation of Marioland on a 3D environment with real intuitive input devices – your own feet! The main aim was to produce a super natural interface. Thus the application, made in Jörg Frohnmayer’s VR-seminar with TCL and Lightning, uses tracking of your feet while you’re walking in front of a 3D Powerwall. Project Natal go home .

Based on Arduino, Max and the special physical attributes of magnet and inductor, SCOOTER 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 SCOOTER 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.

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

May 5th
Curt Collinsworth, Frog Design, Stuttgart
Branding in a Digital World: Making User Experiences Unique

May 12th
Auriea Harwey Michael Samyn, Tale-of-Tales, Gent
High Tech Art for Low Tech People: Creating Elegant and Emotionally Rich Videogames

26th of May
Aram Bartholl, Datenform, Berlin
Are You Human?

June 2nd
Victor Zwimpfer, Hochschule Luzern
Interface als Aktantenkopplung

June 9th
Peter Gloor, MIT, Boston
Von Hypermedia zu Collective Intelligence

June 16th
Hans Dieter Hellige, Universitet Bremen
Medienkombinatorik vs. Disappearing Computer: Lehren aus der HCI-Historie

Interface Design ist keine neue Disziplin. Die “Maus” wurde 1968 der
Öffentlichkeit präsentiert. Das “Graphical User Interface” etwa, basiert
auf Entwicklungen der 1970er Jahre. Und seit fast 30 Jahren wird
Software für Desktop-PCs und Gamekonsolen entwickelt. Doch kaum meinten
die Designdisziplinen, die sich erst spät in diesem Bereich engagierten,
in den 1990er Jahren, ihren Platz in der “digitalen Welt” gefunden zu
haben, diffundierte “der Computer” als zentraler Betrachtungsgegenstand
des Interface Design in unterschiedliche Kontexte, Gegenstände und
Situationen.

Die bis heute praktizierte Aufgabenteilung in Front- und Backend, die
von einer Unterscheidung zwischen Oberfläche und Funktion, Look and
Feel und tatsächlicher Anwendung ausgeht, ist daher längst nicht mehr
sinnvoll aufrecht zu erhalten. Interface Design-Experten muessen sich
gleichzeitig mit der Gestaltung unsichtbarer Vorgänge, Datenverbindungen
und deren Repräsentation in Produkt- und Screendesign auseinandersetzen.

Die Ringvorlesung Happy Front End möchte einen Einblick in
aktuelle Aktivitäten von Designern und Künstlern im Bereich Interface
Design geben, Ansätze aus der Forschung in diesem Bereich vorstellen und
einen Ausblick geben, wie sich Interface Design zukünftig definieren wird.

In the project students of New Media/Interface Design Pathway at Merz Academy developed a multi-touch environment and several applications to make first experiences with multi touch systems in an experimental manner. Possible application areas were shown, analysed and realized as interface concepts.

Read more about the project on the strudents multi-touch blog

Everything changed early 2009 when Holy Stefanius, Patron of Graphic Designers, (at that moment Stefan Krappitz, a student of New Media/Interface Design) released his Flyergenerator.
From that moment on a flyer could be made in 1 second. And not only one. Millions of flyers — just with one click: 300dpi!

Life became an endless party. And they lived happily ever after.

Denis Knopf’s final project –Youtube channel Bootyclipse, got the Prize for Online Art at the 22nd Filmwinter Festival 2009.

No wonder, Bootyclipse is one of the most interesting web project of our time, a beautiful statement on current video culture, amateur aesthetics and an answer to the question “What is net art today?”

Read more in the Infinite Seance article by OL.

Security by Obscurity by Prof. Olia Lialina

Be there or be square!

Along with the text Helena made a gorgeous visualisation (diagram? or family tree?) of the relations between major online cat memes. Icanhashistory is bright, subjective, formalistic and doesn’t throw light on the topic at all. That makes it extremely spectacular and valuable.

Icanhashistory will be on display at Filmwinter festival this year in Online/Offline art section, along with the works of other NM students: Michael Russ, Dennis Knopf and Tobias Leingruber.

China Channel offers internet users outside of China the ability to surf the web as if they were inside mainland China. Take an unforgettable virtual trip to China and experience the technical expertise of the Chinese Ministry of Information Industry (supported by western companies). It’s open source, free and easy.

Check Tobi’s blog for the press coverage of the project and other news from the world of addons.

On and Off — Prof. Olia Lialina
Keywords: Online event online, offline event online, online event offline.

For those 1000 users, the WEB 1.0 PROJECT generated their first personal website out of their studiVZ profile. Using only their public profilenumber, it was possible to receive their private informations and pictures.

However the maintainers of StudiVZ couldn’t see the artistic value and
installed technical measurements blocking this incredibly useful piece
of software on 3rd of July 2008. Users only had time to free around
1000 profiles from the database in the first few hours after going
live. It’s a pity that the demand for a more colorful, personal web can
again not be met.

However, maybe Web 1.0 will inspire you to stop feeding social
networks and create your own ones. All you need are some links to your
friends’ pages. And stylish background images.

Another group of DIY enthusiasts made an electronic machine that produces analog sounds only.

Work in progress:

More stuff at gieskes.nl

During this semester’s pathway week, Julien Ducourthial (also known as otro), one of the main designers and VJs currently active in the home computer underground, came to do a workshop with NM students.

He introduced them to a rich digital visual culture that is developing in parallel to “classic” graphic design around the special features of computers and their displays. Many designers are now searching for a way to be really authentic and true to their medium, otro for sure already found it.

See here some outcomes of the workshop, images and sounds were used for a handheld-powered VJ-show.

Complete documentation is on micromix.

David Ziegler and Felix Barth have build out of Sonic a VR Arcade Game that must be played with your own body movement.

David Ikuye and Wolfgang Schneider have experimented with spatial interaction and 3d modeling. The outcome of their project was a immersive Car viewer.

Bernadette Neuroth and Stephan Schröter have rebuild the feeling of beeing inside the Matrix and have implemented a interaction technique where no buttons are required.

Here are Isabel’s tips for the students getting ready for their internship.

- Präsentiert sich die Agentur schon online eher konventionell und
“spiessig”, wirds im Büro bestimmt auch nich bombenlustig, innovativ und
experimentell zugehen .

- Zeigt in eurer Bewerbung nur Arbeiten, die ihr spitze findet und die
euch spass gemacht haben.

- Erwähnt nur DIE Programme, mit denen ihr gerne arbeitet! Niemals eure
kenntnisse in Microsoft Office oder ähnlichen Horrorprogrammen anpreisen!
Word & Excel sind sonst eure Dauerfreunde im Praktikum. Würde ich nach
jeweiligen Kenntnissen im Bewerbungsgespräch gefragt werden, würde ich das
Gespräch beenden und den Raum verlassen.

- Beschreibt in eurer Bewerbung UND im Gespräch genau, was ihr lernen
wollt, was euch wirklich interessiert. Auf die Reaktion des Gegenüber
achten!

- Wichtigste Frage im Bewerbungsgespräch: “Was werden meine Projekte die
nächsten 6 Monate sein?”

- Fählt ihr euch während und nach dem Bewerbungsgespräch wohl und sind
euch die Vorgesetzten sympathisch (eigentlich das wichtigste), ist das ein
gutes Zeichen!

- (ich finde) es ist kein gutes Zeichen, wenn Agenturen kein
Praktikumsgehalt zahlen wollen.