This summer semesters Pathwayweek conceptualized and realized games that take place inside the imaginary Grid known from the TRON movies. Jörg Frohnmayer supervised the project that have been already presented at the Trickfilfestivals GameZone in Mai 2019.
is a pathwayweek by Jörg Frohnmayer with the focus on creating interresting virtual worlds and think about a creative way to travel through this world. Students developed storyboards for virtual worlds thinking about the possibilities that come if we are not bound to physical behaviour, designed spatial navigations and implemented them as a working prototype in Unity3d with the virtual reality headset HTC Vive.
The project is dealing with the idea of accessing your own personal data from a point of view u never experienced before. Jörg Frohnmayer suggested to students to bring their own private dataset and make an artistic or profession virtual reality (VR) storyboard in a one week workshop. The out come was a VR experience that reflected the difference one can get from a spatial representation of data and was represented in a stereoscopic setup like HTC-Vive.
As part of an university exchange program between the design akademie berlin (B. A. Photography) Prof. Sebastian Denz and Merz Akademie Stuttgart Jörg Frohnmayer (Pathway New Media) students work together on a VR-project for HM-Displays. The aim is to explore and create new spatial strategies for exhibitions incl. stereoscopic content. The project was presented at the prelude of the 30th aniversary of the transmediale in Berlin.
24 doors from One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age archive are waiting to be opened at Old Web Advent Calendar
Mario Doulis preparing his career as professional sculptor for minecraft - using New Media student Vlad Sycev's "VR-Stonemason".
Lecture series at Merz Akademie, Stuttgart
curated and moderated by Prof. Olia Lialina
For the second time, Akademie Schloss Solitude has awarded Schlosspost web residencies. The call on the topic »Re-entering the Ultimate Display« for virtual reality projects of all kinds was curated by professor of new media Mario Doulis , who was also in charge of selecting the web residents.
The Pathway week was all about enter new fields of digital experience. Jörg Frohnmayer supervised the development of individual projects and gave a short introduction about virtual reality, the gameengine unity3d and the Oculus Rift.
The workshop given by Jörg Frohnmayer is dealing with the topic of rebuilding reality in games. Students build games u can only experience in the virtual world and created very unique worlds. They were twisting the standard gaming goals around and build their own from the scratch within one week.
In April 2015 Prof. Sebastian Denz was giving another pathway week lecture at Merz Akademie: students explored the field of spatial media and learned how to compose stereoscopic photographs & renderings, spherical panoramas, 3D web applications and more. Take a 360-180° VR roundtrip: http://www.merz.denz.cc/Brechung-des-Realen/
Simon Ruber's generic grip won Best Concept.
Germany - Heimsheim/Stuttgart/Frankfurt - the purmundus challenge 2014 presented its exciting final exhibition at EuroMold from 25th till 28th of november. The competition for 3D printing was operated in cooperation with the Demat GmbH and invited designers and engineers. This year the topic was: "Print up your life! – How does 3D printing change our world?“
In winter 2014 New Media students developed experiences special to the virtual world. Jörg Frohnmayer gave a short introduction to the Game Software Unity 3D and discussed the possibilities of the Head Mounted Display Oculus Rift. With this setup the students developed intense virtual experiences.
Gijs Gieskes gave a workshop about physical computing to our students.
In the Selfie Seminar our second Semester and Johannes Osterhoff made selfies on selfies. After a thorough scientific research of matters like composition, democratization of artistic practice, and – of course – after reading Susan Sontag’s famous essay, participants made selfies in GTA5, with life-threatening animals, a One-day Selfie Performance, or they surrendered entirely to their followers and asked them how and where to shoot themselves next. A full documentation of all project can be seen here.
The workshop addressed the topic of failure in game development. Jörg Frohnmayer gave a short introduction into the game development software unity 3D and supported the students with their own game prototypes. This post will be updated with web versions of some games so stay tuned!
In November 2012 German artist Sebastian Denz was giving another 3D workshop at Merz Akademie. 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.
In November 2013 Sebastian Denz was giving another 3D workshop at Merz Akademie. Students explored the field of spatial media and learned how to compose high quality stereoscopic photographs and renderings, Phantograms, 3D web applications and more. Back to the roots – for the presentation they exhibited their 3D experiments in a space installation. http://www.merz.denz.cc/Bild-Raumbild-Raum/
On Saturday our second semester visited the famous group bitnik at Stadtbücherei Stuttgart. At the workshop Carmen Weisskopf told us about bitniks motivations and strategies.
Interactive Light Bar is a project created by Constanze Link during her 6-month internship at Limbic Media.
20 years ago, on the 22nd of April 1993, NCSA Mosaic browser version 1.0 was released. We celebrate!
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.
In our New Media virtual reality (VR) introduction we realized some interesting spatial interactions. The goal was to learn how to work with tracked immersive environments. Students developed and implemented different interaction techniques that are realizable within their first VR course.
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.
With FoodU students of the Merz-Akademie can check out the daily menu of Merz-Cafeteria and DaCapo Restaurant in one simple Android-Application.
Don’t Hassel the WWW is a new project by three brave students of last semester’s project “Timeline”, guided by Olia Lialina. Darja Daut, Susanne Müller and Lisa Hofmann staged the history of David Hasselhoff’s personal webpage.
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”
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.
The Project deals with the remediation of archives, collections and exhibitions. It is a collaboration with the civic Archive „Les Archives“ in Bruxelles.
Denis Hofmann and Thomas Notschka put together detailed tutorial to help you make proper 3D plots with the Makterbot.
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.
In February 2012 Joscha Jäger presented his Bachelor’s Project "Open Hypervideo as Archive Interface”. 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).
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.
Endless is a new experimental online narrative by Shirin Sparr. In her work she questions the core principle of the Facebook Timeline — to give its users only one life. Endless considers previous and future lives of its users.
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.
2012 Julia Böger and Mona Mohr finished their fandom studies with an impressive project – ZOMBASE. It is a mixed-media open-source game concept for Nintendo DS.
Jörg Frohnmayer presented the Virtual City Scapes at Hannover Messe. It is an information visualization demonstrator made for the Fraunhofer IAO. The Magazine C’t showed some pictures of the work in an article.
If you are into music, adventure and file sharing, you should definitely try http://www.audiochopsuey.com by Oliver Rübener, a new platform to exchange audio files.
Cyberfeminism is back! Saskia Aldinger — professional internet amateur — presented her new project, the photo series Daughter of all Demos.
The New Media Pathway invites to reception of summer semester 2012. Our students will present their works on 18.04.12 from 17:00 – 19:00 in and around the Virtual Reality Lab 2.6.
Daraja Daut’s work in last semester’s Magic Paper group was centered around scrollbars: their invention and acceptance, their metamorphoses through time and operating systems and their gradual disappearance from interfaces in the last couple of years.
I Can Has History, Helene Dam’s final project that mapped the world of lolcats, got online in July 2008. Since then no other page on the Merz Akademie’s servers got more hits than this one. The cat memes’ family tree also comes as a poster with the book Digital Folklore.
Stefan Krappitz, author of Flyer Generator, Save my Job and other useful applications, finished his studies with the essay Troll Culture, A comprehensive Guide.
Next 15 weeks New Media students will be busy with the following three projects
Gamification with Sabiha Ghellal
WWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW with Dragan Espenschied
Timeline with prof. Olia Lialina
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.
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.
Back to the Web! is a final project of Christopher Heller. A killer app that should kill the apps by attracting attention of the users to beauty and openness of the WWW. You can get it for free at the market.android.com
The frameset HTML tag was introduced in 1996 with version 2.0 of Netscape browser. This tag made it possible to divide a browser window into parts and show several HTML documents at once.
Aram Bartholl worked with the Merz Akademie students this semester. Beside several speed projects and the Speedshow, he infected the students with one of the greatest illnesses of our time — the deaddrop feather. As a result, there is a Deaddrop in Stuttgart now! Hidden at a perfect place, namely at 48.77420 N 9.17993 E
The best way to exhibit net art is to do it in an Internet Cafe (CallShop, CyberCafe). This is what we did on the 8th of June 2011 at Ch@troom, very friendly and open space next to the Stuttgart Stategallery (Staatsgalerie).
Some wise and spectacular typography projects made during “Typography in Interactive and Dynamic Environments” course by Lutz Eberle last year.
Finally some photos of the Guitarhero even! Stefan promises that soon there will be more on the official site of the contest. And that it is not long to wait till Real bands and Wii bands will share the stage of Merz Akademie again.
Thank you Nocean, Learning from Larry, and Apetown!
In Mai 2011 Hans Peter Wyss Swiss artist was giving a processing workshop at the Merz Akademie.
In Mai 2011 German artist Sebastian Denz ( www.denz.cc/ ) was giving a workshop at Merz Akademie. 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.
The processes of transfering money and virtual goods over the Internet was the main focus of the winter 2010/2011 semester’s project. Using Paypal, Flattr and more obscure mechanisms, students had to actually make money. Whoever would earn the most would be awarded with a T-Shirt from our idol Money Boy http://moneyboy.at/
Obtaining and using software is a story by itself; commerce and its circumvention through piracy is an engaging experience. 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 www.lostdoor.com: An browser version, shareware, and instructions how to crack the binary.
I HERD U LIKE HAMSTERS
I HERD U LIKE HAMSTERS
I HERD U LIKE HAMSTERS
I HERD U LIKE HAMSTERS
I HERD U LIKE HAMSTERS
Attention is serious business on the Internet.
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!
Bernadette Neuroth finished her studies with a paper about WWW standards — Wild Wild Web: 15 years of browser wars, software competition and other conflicts; 17 years of W3C’s effort to regulate the development of languages and protocols.
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.
When Google released Street View in Germany the world was shocked. Because it looked like Germans wash outside. Wherever you look there would be a huge shower cabin in the street. 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.
In the theoretical part of ‘Raumnutzung2020′ several ideas concerning the way people may interact with computers in their homes in the near future, are developed and discussed. Within the discussion Thilo Schulz refers to both new developments like Microsofts Kinect and abstract ideas like Weisers Ubiquitous Computing.
On tuesday 7.12 from 17:00-19:30 everyone is invited to the interface design reception at our Virtual Reality Studio ( room 2.6). You can see and try out our recent projects, talk to the the students and teachers, play Minecraft and have drinks.
The Merz Akademie present their results of remediate research project from the 19 to the 21 november at Württembergischer Kunstverein in Stuttgart.
On the 13th of October 2010, the Beautiful Zeros and Ugly Ones invited Users “to surf the classic way” for the third time
In June 2010 Spanish designer and CSS artist Roman Cortes (3d Meninas, Coke Can, Tribute to the Beatles, etc) was giving a workshop at Merz Akademie.
Shadows of the User Strike Back:D is a photo series by Brandi Bryant developed during the Drop Shadow workshop.
Dragan Espenschied, author of the the most bitter article of our times — “Put yer fonts in a Pipe and Smoke em !!” (The Digital Folklore Reader,) talks at TypoBerlin today.
Media artist Yunchul Kim held a workshop about physical computing. Students made experiments based on the Arduino and Max/Msp software. Some results of the workshop are documented here.
Students of the Interface Design Pathway presented their work at the celebration of Max Bense 100 anniversary in Stuttgart.
The latest project of former NM student Sebastian Schmieg — Last Midi Background (http://www.kingcosmonaut.de/lmb/) got a the 1st prize for Online works at the 23rd Stuttgarter Filmwinter Festival. No wonder. LMB is a beautiful and very alive archive of MIDI music. Like Animated GIFs formed the WWW’s look, MIDI files gave to the WWW its special sound.
This semesters’ physical computing workshop was held by Yunchul Kim. The students produced an sound installation called “Unisphere” that can generate sound and light events, out of the weight changes of objects placed on the Unisphere platform. The whole project was technically realized with Arduino and Max/Msp.
This semesters’ creating virtual worlds workshop “Raumgenerator” was held by Tracy Krüger and Gabriele Bingula. The architects working in the field of digital content creation and virtual reality adressed two main topics: space as programmable mode and filters as structural elements of space. Some results of “Raumgenerator” can be found here: http://www.newmediaproject.de/facade/
If you are n Berlin don’t miss The Drop Shadow Talks at Berliner Technische Kunsthochschule.
The event is organized by Johannes p Osterhoff. He writes:
10 yers ago Merz Akademie students Dragan Espenschied and Alvar Freude created the Assoziations-Blaster.
Isabel Pettinato, the designer of the site you are looking at, got an IF Communication Design Award 2009 for Gebührenrechner. Congratulations!
“Hi everyone! I’m SUPER EXCITED to announce the opening event of my little solo show in Berlin. Sa. 31.10., 20:00h
Isabel Pettinato got an IF Communication Design Award 2009 for Gebührenrechner. Congratulations!
Students of the Interface Design Pathway presented their work about Elektrolyrik at the Lyriknacht’09 in Stuttgart. The exhibition took place in the Wilhelmspalais’s lounge.
Usually Aram Bartholl shows to his students how to make real objects out of digital artifacts. During his workshop at Merz Akademie he addressed this topic on meta level. Under the motto “How to DIY” workshop participants were following online tutorials, very famous and completely obscure ones, and are now offering their own Howtos to the global community:
Human attention equates to a form of inter-instance, through which contents become perceivable. Yet attention itself usually stays invisible. According to this, mediareception can be both, the immersion in contents and the attentivness on the materiality of medial surfaces. The installation intends to create a permanent shift between media transparency and media consciousness, respectively to cause a possible scrutinizing of habits of perception and reception. Just as well it is one goal of the diploma project to point out the individual potential of everyone to intentionally influence ...
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 -> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Natal
On the 5th of May 2009 at 19:30 Happy Front End lecture series (Ringvorlesung), organised by New Media/Interface Design pathway will start. This time it will be about successful practices in the field of interface design, web design, game design, media art and computer history research. Note the dates and read the abstract in German below.
Once upon a time people had to spend from 10 to 22 seconds to design flyers for their parties. They had to take a skyline, a siluet of a dancing girl, crazy fonts and paint splashes, and put it all together.
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.
On the 1st of July 2009 students of the Security by Obscurity project guided by Olia Lialina, presented their work.
After the great success of Wiimote Masters 2008, On & Off group of Merz Academy invites you to play again on the 24th of January, 18:00, at Ex-Ikea in Stuttgart. 4 projections, 32 teams. Online registration will be opened on the 20th of January. Dress properly, the best outfit will be awarded as well.
The social networks specialist Ethan Zuckerman noted: “Web 1.0 was invented to allow physicists to share research papers. Web 2.0 was created to allow people to share pictures of cute cats.” NM student Helena Dams made an extensive research on this phenomena. Her text “I Think You Got Cats on Your Internet” will be printed in the Digital Folklore reader we are going to publish in 2009.
On December 7th, 2008, Marc Grimm’s Happy Real got TWO (!) prizes at the DIY festival in Zurich. Both awards are in the category of DIY Ingeneering. Happy Real was Marc’s final project: a self-built and self-programmed arcade that questions ego shooter behavior and ethics.
Tobias Leingrueber is a master of Firefox Add-ons. His recent one — China Channel — he developed together with the great media artists Aram Bartholl and Evan Roth.
Emolator by Florian Kroener and Benjamin Walter went online in July 2008 and got a lot of attention through the summer. Not everybody wants to be an Emo, but everyone wants to know “How would I look if I’d be one”. Templates are constantly updated.
StudiVZ is Germany’s most popular social network for students. Michael Ruß created a service that builds 1990s-style amateur home pages from StudiVZ profile pages and weaves them together in a new old web that is a joy to surf through.
After two and a half days in Johannes p Osterhoff’s seminar “The Final Frontier“, second semester students came up with the most radical presentation ever seen in the walls of Merz Akademie. Six minutes video of outer space wallpapers and screensavers: starring mondaufgang.jpg, cosmos07.jpg, cosmos04.jpg and many others, known from different times and systems.
New Media teacher Dragan Espenschied collects some of his design insights in his blog To all the ravers in the internet. It is written in German language and read by students.
The Virtual Reality Workshop during the pathway week 2008 at the Merz Akademie was lectured by Roland Blach, Matthias Bues and Jörg Frohnmayer from the CCVE at Fraunhofer IAO. After a swift introduction students have build realtime applications within the field of game design and interaction design.
Isabel Pettinato, NM student who made the theme for the old nm blog, came back from her internship at Feedback Media. She was designing and programming websites for Universal Music. Her projects for Schiller and Neue Töne are a success.
Among the online projects made last semester is a nameless but precious googlemaps-photo-service by David Ikuye, Christoph Brandin and Paul Steinhilber.
Alexander Schlegel, author of the 2007 hit Pixel Art released his new entertainment for the online community and game fans — Street Fighters: Relations between Characters Diagram.
Former NM student Dennis Knopf now works at Rhizome, the foundation dedicated to the creation, presentation, preservation and critique of emerging artistic practices that engage technology.
Time and again Florian Dusch had to find out how to set up another model of alarm clock, until once he got the idea of Universal Remote. It is supposed to simplify our relations with the everyday electronic house equipment: TV sets, microwaves, vacuum cleaners and of course alarm clocks. A mock up of the Remote — Florian presented it as a practical part of his final project research — fits well into the hand and the pocket of a bathrobe.
If the interfaces of everyday equipment would be unified and moved to the remote, all buttons and switches would vanish.
Alice with Diamonds is one of the generative graphics projects made last semester in the processing course given by Mona Mahall and Asli Serbest. Helene Dams and Stefanie Rückert combined processing techniques with the greatest glitter graphics of all times. Looks weird. To start the show you have to press glitter buttons on the modified glitter keyboard!
In December 2007 Swiss artists Monica Studer and Christoph van den Berg hosted the workshop Digital Garden for Merz Akademie students. Authors of Vue des Alpes, the most elegant virtual experience ever, taught students to model, film and assemble real and imaginary environments. Together these mixed media panoramas formed a smooth, seamless virtual world.
Dragan Espenschied — NM teacher, web designer, information architect, net artist and rock star, — announced today the 12 inch vinyl release of Bodenständig 2000′s long awaited UBER ALBUM with 8 eurostyle conscious home computer tracks and awesome cover design by otro in Atari Desktop Green.
For details go to the long Bodenstandig 2000 page.
Please note that the computer fanzine Junk Jet is available now. New Media guest teachers Asli Serbest and Mona Mahall created a great laser printer publication that questions the mainstream usage of digital media to produce a standardized aesthetic.
Jana Frank, known online as Miu Mau, is an illustrator, graphic designer and author of the book Diary of a Maniac Designer. Last week she taught NM students different illustration techniques, like drawing and collaging.
Warius Watz, the prominent Norwegian artist working with generative systems, spent last week in Stuttgart, teaching New Media students the principles of generative systems. He was showing how they can be used both as pragmatic tools and a conceptual frameworks for creative work. For 5 days students were programming in Processing and managed to achieve results that made themselves and their teacher happy. He even promised to come back!
There are several news about our former student and current visiting teacher johannes p osterhof. Recently Merz&Solitude published Osterhoff’s final thesis IMG_SRC. It is in German and can be ordered online from the publisher.
Till the 6th of January 2008, Marc Grimm’s ego shooter research arcade can be tried out at the ZKM (Karlsruhe) as a part of the ‘World of Games: reloaded” exhibition. Happy Real is a central part of Marc’s final project that aims to answer the question:
The ExhibitSpace project has investigated new ways of spatial representation and interaction concepts for art exhibitions. Therefore Virtual Reality was split in it’s main technical components and experimentally re-arranged in kind of interactive exhibition spaces. As case studies the students chose artworks of the New State Gallery Stuttgart and conceptually extended the real exhibiting space with media installations.
“The Complex” is a Virtual Reality application about the topic “labyrinth and maze metaphors for information structures” from Jörg Frohnmayer who finished his studies in summer 2006. He developed navigation techniques especially designed for a six sided projection system like the CAVE at Fraunhofer IAO. Additionally he came up with displays that support the user in way finding while he is travelling through random generated maze structures.
Former NM student Johannes Osterhoff comes back every semester to make students think about history and ideology of Graphic User Interface. Last semester his group came up with an outstanding realistic interface.
The 1st semester in New Media (2nd semester of studies) is the time when students come up with their first web project. After HTML, CSS, PHP training with Dragan Espenschied, Action Script classes given by Alexander Götz and an Interface seminar by Johannes Osterhoff, students are free to develop their own ideas. Then they make it happen with help of designer, programmer and musician Dragan Espenschied.
In July two students finished their studies with works on web 2.0. It is quite understandable that both chose it as a topic in the end of 2006, there was hardly any other subject left for those interested in the Internet at that time. Nevertheless both were quite embarrassed by the fact that their topics are so terribly close to each other and preferred to keep a distance to each other, not to discuss or show things to each other.
Students of the summer semester project Standarts and Revolutions had to came up with the projects that would show that they understand and respect the laws of webdesign. Tobias Leingruber went further and made a work that is full of love to WWW and its pioneers.
Leo Merz finished his studies this semester with an impressive Virtual Reality application. Klang Klötzchen Kiste presents a new, smooth, continuous interface to the step-sequencer approach of composing music.