Andre Hoffmann

I just read that the Breakpoint festival, the largest demoscene festival in the world, will be hosted for the last time this year – at least by the old orga team. The organizers would love to be a visitor of such a festival again. And their growing old – no new blood in sight. The …

Kristian Gohlke and Michael Haltky from the University of Applied Sciences Bremen presented a set of slick controllers for quick and easy multipoint interaction with any audio software at TEI Conference 2010 at the MIT Media Lab, Cambridge, MA. Seems like the good old mouse is not quite dead yet. Read more here. Full paper …

eBay auction item which attempts to sell itself via eBay. If you buy it you can put it in your room, connect it to your internet connection and wait until it tries to sell itself again. Interesting postironic concept.

mybiennialisbetterthanyours.com covers some of the NetArt activities which have happened happened in 2009.

The 00s will end in a few days. I take this opportunity to link to the top lists for this decade. Webby's Top Web Moments of the decade cnet's top downloads of the decade Top 10 gadgets of the decade The Top Selling Games of the 2000s Top 15 Most Influential Games of the 2000s …

It sure is Duke Nukem Forever , announced in 1997, then awarded with the Intergalactic Vaporware Lifetime Achievement Award (I just invented this one, but I am sure, that there is some price invented especially for DNF's case), responsible for a whole bunch of wasted youths (wasted hope, wasted time, wasted money, wasted everything), proof …

I take this opportunity to write down what the 00s were technologically all about. Most points here I wrote down by heart, with some I did some extra research. Enjoy the soon-to-be-retro-feelings! the internet sow it's wild oats in the dot com bubble, then its coming-of-agewith the web 2.0, 2005 the world faces one billion …

There had been some hard work done to make Processing run on Android. Read some details here or here: android.processing.org

In October 1969, a student typed 'LO' on a computer - and the internet was born Unless you are 15 years old or younger, you have lived through the dotcom bubble and bust, the birth of Friends Reunited and Craigslist and eBay and Facebook and Twitter, blogging, the browser wars, Google Earth, filesharing controversies, the …

It turns out that Charles Bukowski, novelist and poet, famous for reflecting on and out of the american working class, was open to new technologies at least in his later years, if not eager to delve into them. In general Bukowski kept abreast of new innovations that would further his writing. In a letter to …

A lot of work has been done lately in terms of facade projection. This is the next big thing. by playmodes @ Ingravid Festival, Spain Telenoika Audiovisual Mapping @ Ingravid Festival, Figueres 9/2009 [FULL] from Telenoika on Vimeo . via cdm

What will the web do to content, in terms of... high cost, expensive, time consuming content. Now we can see where that comes from.

Smooth Zarathustra of Design Stefan Sagmeister held a brilliant note at TED recently. It's about his sabbaticals and funny and informative. This is the second fantastic video I saw today (actually the third, but the third one does not belong here).

This analysis analog additive re-synthesis project absolutely blew my mind. Imagine approximating every sound with the sublime timbre of a piano. I wonder what that would sound like on an electric organ with multiple keyboards or the likes.

This technology, aka PatchMatch will be made available in CS5 .

Check out this recent rhizome interview with Processing founders Ben Fry and Casey Reas. They talk about the roots, the development since 2001 so far and they let us have a little glimpse for the future. I don't remember if I started with Basic or Logo, but I learned a little with both. I hit …

If you are a EU resident please consider signing this petition against any form of freedom-regulation. All bills to introduce a formal net neutrality which is guaranteed by law were declined to this day and the discussion is still vivid.

(1977) The computer graphics for the first Star Wars film was created by Larry Cuba in the 1970s at the Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) (at the time known as the Circle Graphics Habitat) at the University of Illinois at Chicago. This heavily reminds me of Ivan Sutherland's Sketchpad demo , as shown in "Doing with …

Gordon Brown issued an unequivocal apology last night on behalf of the government to Alan Turing, the second world war codebreaker who took his own life 55 years ago after being sentenced to chemical castration for being gay. Describing Turing's treatment as "horrifying" and "utterly unfair", Brown said the country owed the brilliant mathematician a …

Procrastination is so easy these days. There's a lot we can do when sitting in front of the computer. Checking Emails. Only one more video on YouTube, checking my subscribed Feeds, the weather, the stocks. Takes only a second. Seriously, it gets even worse when we try to do all the things at the same …

Fifty years ago, Miles Davis legendary Kind of Blue was released. Kind of Bloop is a hommage to the Album in 8-Bit Sound. Before I heard it I was fearing the worst since chiptune remakes tend to add an infantile and unsophisticated timbre (is it just me?), a quality highly arguably in Jazz. I would …

Art & Copy is a cinematic documentary about advertisement. I would say - according to the trailer - it is one typical self-criticizing and at the same time self-adulating fast paced movie with the motivation of mystifying things more than they probably deserve to be. Maybe it's all of that not because it's just the …

I feel that people started to listen to Radiohead just because their usage of distribution is not only just innovative but because the whole thing, how they play with media became a social experiment. People wanted to be a part in this experiment. But Radiohead are not necessarily the ones, who are playing, or are …

A few years ago I saw an interface for blind people which consisted out of a camera which was recording the contours of what was in front of it and translated that to an array of little actuators inside a device which the blind person would attach between his eyes. Unfortunately, I forgot about the …

Our goal is to create a powerful free and open cinema camera that we as filmmakers love to use. The idea of using an Elphel camera for this particular purpose was born in 2006, found many followers over the years and ultimately resulted in this community driven project entitled "Apertus" and this website. Check out …

Japanese "ARTIST, DESIGNER, PROGRAMMER, DJ, VJ, COMPOSER" Daito Manabe took over the sound generation part in this amazing interface concept.

"How it would be, if a house was dreaming" The guys from urbanscreen in Bremen did a fantastic job with this projection on the Galerie der Gegenwart in Hamburg. The tromp-l'oeil effect is convincing – I wonder if that would work at daylight. This is definitely the most sophisticated facade projection I came across yet.

I read in the news recently that most Internet users are chinese now. Still, only 19% of them use the Internet regularly. Biggest per capita rate is in Japan, followed by the US. Click on the graphic below to see the numbers of some of the biggest Internet countries in 2008. [caption id="attachment_453" align="aligncenter" width="300" …

The landing on the moon is one of the events in mankind I really would have liked to attend to. Well, no problem! The whole transmissions are played back in realtime, only 40 years after. Check it out here .

Reading one of my favourite magazines, Vice , I stumbled across an interesting interview with contemporary British philosopher Simon Critchley. The interviewer is not very good, probably he had no idea of what he should ask, but nevertheless, Critchley pointed out some interesting thoughts. We are not even consumerist; we are a society of distraction, …

Two eccentric game designers talk about - what else? - game design. English with German subtitles @ arte+7 , available only a few days!

Movie props rebuild within a 3D game engine.

More interesting than those here , 9 0 0 0 s flickr set shows some beautiful and interesting Atari VCS cartridge artworks .

A new and stunning approach in anti-shake algorithms. In research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison , shown at SIGGRAPH 2009. (However, they do not mention that – like with every other algorithms of this kind – a lot of the picture borders go down the drain, but it is stunning, nevertheless.)

Dialogues between two chatterbots: J: How do you define life? A: Life is the opposite of death. J: So death is the absence of life? A: Take it easy. I try not to think about such things. J: Why not? A: Ambiguous. J: Yes! Wanna try it for yourself? Alice Jabberwacky Good ol' nerdy sunday …

In a lucid moment, dear dumb sparrow, maybe you might ask yourself: "Do I twitter or does twitter me?" sk8monkey

In case you haven't seen it yet.

Okay, consider this as a comment on the contribution of non digital-natives. Consider this right here as a appraisal of what they all are talking about: Us Now from Banyak Films on Vimeo .

Ceci Moss from rhizome collected a couple of YouTube videos which document the transition from analog to digital in the USA on June 12, 2009. NTSC is history, ATSC is the new guy in town.

Maybe some readers will remember Big Dog from Boston Dynamics, which freaked me out and fascinated me at the same time. Well, although we all saw it coming , for me this TED Talk by PW Singer fires up the transition from the fantastic and horrible visions, like so many other forms of technical "improvements" …

The International Symposium on Electronic Arts (ISEA) has been taking place in prestigious institutions across the globe since 1988. It is organised under the auspices of the Inter-Society for Electronic Arts (ISEA Foundation), an international non-profit organisation that promotes the relationship between arts, science and digital technologies. Projects and papers for presentation at the ISEA2010 …

You can go to Iran if you want. But i think you better stay here, and organize the community here, to collect money. the revolution will cost money. for pamphlets, machines, defense operations, unlocked iphones. Organise on internet the collection and buying or getting from apple of unlocked iphones for Iran Green. Did he just …

There certainly was too much pointless blabla about the Web in the past few years. After watching this cut by Andre Fillippone Jr . made with source material he took from Charlie Rose' shows, I feel much better.

[caption id="attachment_368" align="aligncenter" width="268" caption="Art and Electronic Media"] [/caption] After last year's Mark Amerika workshop, there will be another compart workshop – this year with art historian Edward Shanken . It will happen from the 13th until the 17th of July at the OAS @ Linzer Straße in Bremen. Shanken recently published a comprehensive book …

Shamus Young's impressive journey for an automatically generated cityscape by night. Watch it here or read the details here .

E15:oGFx is a Python API to generate and explore 3D forms originating from 2D animations. (Runs in Leopard only!) It derived from MIT Media Lab's E15 Project .

Hi from Multitouch Barcelona on Vimeo .

Online Exhibition of artistic Famicon (japanese NES) game cartridges.

Enjoy a TV feature about Grace Murray Hopper from 1982. EDIT: Btw. Today is Ada Lovelace Day !

[caption id="attachment_290" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="Leopard Wallpaper Aurora"] [/caption] [caption id="attachment_291" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="Scene from 2001: A Space Odyssey"] [/caption] What you see here is the well-known Apple Wallpaper Aurora, the standard background in Mac OS X Leopard. Yeah, it's the first one, not the second. The second is a movie still from 2001: A Space …

An early experiment for digital news distribution.

April 18th, 2009 @ Caligari Theater in Wiesbaden We will explore new approaches that are being developed to confront the flood of information and transform it into useful knowledge Speakers will be Aaron Koblin (made that Radiohead music video), Sebastian Oschatz from MESO and others. Tickets for students are 40€. Drop me a line if …

Big Dog is freaking me out, with it's surrealistic natural movements (check out the trousers it has – looks like two small people are desperately stuck inside of it. Point is, that you know there are only those two legs and no corpse. I am shivering.) At the same time one can also give lots …

[caption id="attachment_248" align="aligncenter" width="400"] [/caption] January 28th – February 1st 2009 (Wed–Sun) at the House of World Cultures Berlin Looking beyond the evolving alarmist scenarios of environmental catastrophe prevalent in the global warming debate, transmediale.09 shifts the focus of this challenge to the broader cultural, societal and philosophical consequences that the collapse of the northern …

Oblong Inds. presents a spatial interaction to good to be true. Now, if I could afford a MS Surface table and get this here... I would degrade it to a... well, a table. g-speak overview 1828121108 from john underkoffler on Vimeo .

And we could do so by participating on a survey . They try to find out similarities and dissimilarities between pairs of sounds.

Maybe some of you remember the Yes Men movie we saw at the Amerika Workshop a few months ago. In a very elaborate prank the Yes Men now published a fake New York Times titling "Iraq War Ends" and a lot of other wishful news in the 1.2 Million print fake issue . They also …

That president is so sympathetic that it almost scares me. But it's also the confirmation and fulfilment of the strategies he pursued during his campaign: running a campaign 2.0.

Firefox Plugin that simulates the censored chinese Internet routing behaviour.

The Ringvorlesung at the Haus der Wissenschaft will go on with Andreas Breiter's contribution on 19th November at 5pm: Educational Information Systems “Bringing Order into Chaos?” The next lectures will be announced here as well.

Press Update: Here's their Google Tech Talk:

Yesterday a bunch of fresh bachelor students were introduced at the HfK. Only four Master students for the HfK already arrived at that time. How were things going at the other schools? And if by any chance a new study got lost and found this page: welcome again!

Held by Nicolas Born. 7th of October 2008. 5.30pm in the HfK room 3 09.100.

Sound gets processed into video and back, ranging from sonic bursts to melodic melancholy, using joysticks and selfmade controllers to keep it all in line (most of the time). Every SKIF++ performance is improvised, but based on structures that give each set its distinct character.

Held by Sebastian Hübschmann and Christian Schwarz. Under supervision of Nüri Övüc and Roland Kerstein. Monday, 29th of September, 14:00. Room 3.09.100

An interesting info-animation, maybe some readers can relate. ;-)

I recently visited eyebeam in New York. eyebeam became known to this blog before . Unfortunately there was no exhibition at the time I have been there. But be sure to check out their schedule .

Here you'll find an interesting TV Interview with Video Art Pioneer Nam June Paik . vvork is exclusively blogging a series of interviews with different artists recently.

Kansas State Dr. Michael Wesch gives a wonderful retrospect on the YouTube phenomenon. "55 Minutes, 33 Seconds Well Spent". via Data Mining

[caption id="attachment_106" align="aligncenter" width="300"] [/caption] There are a bunch of tools for creating Typefaces, but fontstruct is one of the easy to use ones. After registering you may easily create fonts out of a palette of predefined shapes, allowing a huge variety of results.

Maybe some of you remember the lecture " Achieving Your Childhood Dreams " from last year by Randy Pausch. It was his very last lecture and he knew it. He was diagnosed with cancer and his doctors said that he only would have had a couple of months with good health left. Randy Pausch died …

[caption id="attachment_93" align="aligncenter" width="300"] [/caption] A few years ago, when I dreamed of being a famous designer, one of the first great and inspiring websites I stumpled upon was neave's , an interaction designer from the UK. He had this funny Flash-frame which bended upon touching it with the mouse and wobbled back into its …

Let me channel your attention on a project Mark showed some of us last week. Google Will Eat Itself We generate money by serving Google text advertisments on a network of hidden Websites. With this money we automatically buy Google shares. We buy Google via their own advertisment! Google eats itself - but in the …

When: Tue 8 July, 11 a.m. - 12:30 p.m. Where: ZIMT (Flughafenallee 10), room 122 With respect to still images, the literature is full of wonderful papers concerning the use of Non-Photorealistic Rendering (NPR) techniques to produce painterly effects. But with respect to applying these same concepts to 3D animations, there is much less. Still …

Photo by (stacker) Did you know that Space Invaders drove the Japanese so crazy, that the coins which were used to get a credit to play the arcade ran into a shortage? That it was programmed, designed and engineered by only one guy? Find more interesting facts here . I would say, together with Pac …

Just another video clip about the everyday life of a "web guy"? Maybe, but it's been done great. And of course it's funny. Check out this short film here .

Stories in Digital Media is 3 months old now and I would thank all contributers for their work, inspiration, critique and encouragement. There are some plans for the future, including a reworked Layout, a new Logo, some additional functionality (to be discussed) and editorial refinements (cannot be too precise yet). If you are a reader …

More than a blog – an institution – we make money not art writes about contemporary art for several years now. Their in-depth research and coverage does not only cover digital but also media art in general from places all over the world (right now they cover China). Be sure to check the blog regularly …

The last few years there was pretty much going on in Digital Street Art (compare Graffiti Research Lab). Wii Spray is another contribution to this art form. Martin Lihs, student of the Bauhaus Universität Weimar, has chosen to design a digital Spraycan for his Diploma thesis. The picture clearly says it all.

Today the final version of Firefox 3.0 has been released. The Mozilla guys want to break a world record in most downloaded application within 24 hours. So today is the Download Day (actually, it starts at Tuesday, 7pm and ends at Wednesday, 7pm). Help them break the record by downloading an application most of you …

I think that I now saw everyone of our age group at the Master Presentations on Friday. Finally! I somehow feel much more connected to the other groups since I know now, what all fellow students are doing. Here are the four projects in overview: Intelligent Room gesture/sensor based interactive room (Uni) T³H – The …

...for the German and political interested readers a short announcement:

Well, those guys basically had the same idea.... but they actually implemented it. Alliance (Win, Mac, Linux) allows you and your friends and colleagues to build up an own private Peer 2 Peer Network. Guess what: I have something 2 share with you. If you are interested: my nick is effzehn. EDIT: Well it seems …

Digital Media Bremen and Interface Design Potsdam graduate Christian Behrens recently finished his Master thesis at the University of applied sciences in Potsdam. He designed a compendium of dozens of information design patterns, such as treemaps, pie charts, thread arcs, etc. There is an online version available as well as a printed book (which is …

The first lecture of this series was Frieder's talk The Machinic & the Semiotic . The next ones all take place in the Haus der Wissenschaft, Sandstraße, at 5pm. 14 May Rainer Malaka, University of Bremen: "Intelligent Interaction" 4 June Roland Kerstein, HfK Bremen: "A lot of AV" 18 June Jörn Loviscach, Hochschule Bremen: "Graphical …

Automatically generated psychedelic animations (called sheep), rendered with quicktime afterwards and distributed through a network of electric sheep users over the net; named after Philip K. Dick's novel "Do Androids dream of electronic sheep" which later became the movie Blade Runner, btw. Screensaver for Mac, Linux, Windows. Paper: The electric sheep screen-saver: a case study …

vvvv is a toolkit for realtime video synthesis (Windows only).

What? you might ask yourself while thinking of the notion esoteric in combination with programming languages . How can that two fit together? Well, life is full of contradictions which very well might end up in a dialectic conclusion, as you will see in this example. In the normal case, programming languages claim to be …

Information aesthetics is a fabulous website for information design and visualization. Whenever you need inspiration for visualizing sets of data or complex coherences, static or dynamic, you are very likely to find it here.

Two Principles of digital media. Talk by Frieder Nake on April 30, 5pm at the Haus der Wissenschaft, Sandstraße, Bremen.

If you are sitting in the Marum, Room 2070, it is the 25th April of 2008 and the time is something between 9:30 and 15:30, you don't need to know that the Master Project Presentations of 07/08 will take place. If Marion does not forget it and she really will throw this on the wall …

Bremen based artist Zach with Plotter Drawings. 22 April to 15 June 2008 at the Kunsthalle Bremen.

A great sampler of 70s/80s TV intro's. This might give logo and motion designers some retrospective inspiration:

Identitycamp Bremen will be the first Barcamp in Germany that focuses on identity 2.0, single-sign-on, reputation management, relationship management, privacy 2.0 and related issues. Please add further ideas below. Barcamps are bottom-up conferences, where the themes and sessions are set by the participants themselves. Everybody can participate and thereby take part in shaping the camp. …

Lyrics & Audio-reactive movie based on Goldfrapp's "Lovely Head". Made with Processing. Flight404

Do you guys know vvork ? It's a great Blog about contemporary art. Many, many gems in there! (It recently celebrated its 2nd Birthday.)

"Say What Again" in high quality If you think this is cool, but you can do better: Henning Rogge Coming soon... Demnächst in diesem Theater EDIT: Ups, this was last semester, but there is a similar course this semester... General motion design stuff @ motionographer .

...you'll find some/all (??) here .

Dear fellows & friends, Welcome to Stories in Digital Media . SiDM is a fresh new blog for all you Digital Media students in Bremen and Bremerhaven. It is a blog for you , made by you. This blog should be about Digital Media in General (meaning: theory, design, art and technology) and the programme …