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.

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.

Among the devices built in the Circuit Bending and Arduino workshop given by Gijs Gieskes in May 2008 were some really curious ones. For example the modest chip with tiny LEDs on the picture below allows you to write in the air.

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.

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.

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.

Summer semester projects’08 for the students of the 3rd-7th semester are:

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!