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.