For my current projects at the college please turn to the RCA-category at Plugimi and have a look at the department website.
This workshop aims to copy objects from Second Life's walled economy of simulated things. We export those into the real world by transforming them into life-size papercraft models. Export to World was created with Linda Kostowski for Ars Electronica 2007.
Website and product design for Linda Kostowski's realfakewatches, laser-cut props, made from genuine leather, each displaying a unique time and featuring a Thinglink on the back.
Between Blinks & Buttons is a twofold thesis project about the camera as a networked object. Through making their photos public on the internet, individuals create traces of themselves. In addition to their value as a memory, each image contains a multitude of information about the context of its creation. Through this metainformation, every image is linked to the precise moment in time when it was taken, making it possible to see what happened simultaneously in the world at that instant. This work tries to focus the user's imagination on that other, to create narratives that run between one's own memory and a stranger's moment which happened to coincide in time.
The installation Blinks is a prism which refracts the ray of time running through a photo into all the moments that were captured simultaneously in different places. Buttons is a camera that actually shoots other's photos, taking the notion of the networked camera to the extreme.
There's also an extra newsfeed for this project.
I went to Boston in August 2006 to present this scientific paper about Eavesdripping that I had authored at ACM SIGGRAPH:
(you might need the free Acrobat-reader):
four-page paper (4.5mb PDF)
one-page "sketch" (1mb PDF)
An Interview with John Maeda about the Simplicity project, politics, big leaps that we are waiting for and why everything has been only a rehersal so far. An abridged version appeared in De:Bug magazine 01/06.
This is a scenario about the impact of RFID-enabled fashion items. Originally developed with Johanna Dechau during a workshop at Mediamatic Amsterdam.
I've recently become the second contributing blogger for the fabulous We-Make-Money-Not-Art. I will mainly be covering German projects (and occassionally doing some covert operations) so bitte tell me of anything that you think would be blogworthy.
Yay, there will be an RSS-Feed for this page from here on.
A sixty-second clip produced for the Videominuto festival in Prato near Florence, Italy. The clip consists of roughly 1000 high-res still images taken during the course of one day. It was first shown in September 2005 at the Luigi Pecci center for contemporary art as part of a very nice open-air screening.
video (10mb MPEG4, QT required)
this is a series of three projects created together with jakob schillinger in the digital media class for investigating what constitutes the self as found in photosharing services like flickr. It questions the relationship between self-perception and active construction of identity. It tries to identify the methods, motivations and paradigms underlying both concepts, yet clearly focusing on the narration of identity. the projects consist of egoshootr, an installation about selectively showing off, fixr, that started as a statement in form of a website and resulted in hundreds of poetic stories submitted and mirrr, which serves as the confrontation of person and persona.
flickr projects documentation and pictures (please use firefox or safari)
a poster promoting a demographic research project and "sophia", a font which tries to visually reflect on turkish immigrants' way of using the german language and the hybridity of the turkish-german as well as the turkish culture as such. two projects from the typography course at udk this summer.
documentation and pictures
can the surface of water be used as a display? eavesdripping is a physical-computing project that was created for the assignment "sensitive skin - intelligent surfaces" at the digital media class. the prototype features 4 x 4 drops of artificial rain that hit a specially prepared basin and create glowing dots on the ground which function like pixels. the resolution is scaleable and has also been already tried with simple live video. in its first application, the installation was used to render wireless communication in the same space experienceable and visible as text on the water for people to read. Eavesdripping was shortlisted for the radiator festival 2005 in nottingham and will be exhibited at re/act 2005.
eavesdripping documentation and pictures
video (23mb MPEG4, QT required)
hallelujah! my blog now has got a decent domain for you to point your rss-guns at: www.plugimi.com. in the meantime, i've also revamped the stylesheet a bit and on the left you're always gonna find my three most recent postings on flickr. more crazy flickring to come soon, so look out.
isabelle schmidt edited a gorgeous film from the hours of material that i originally had collected for trajets. the 30-minute piece was first screened during hauschka's set at karaoke kalk labelnight, maria berlin on feburary 18th.
watch some excerpts of it (mpeg4, quicktime required):
Orange (17.6mb, 4.06min)
Golden (19.1mb, 4.26min)
Wait (9.4mb, 2.11min)
all music by hauschka, (c) karaoke kalk records 2004-05.
just discovered flickr. i used to have an account for ages but i never realized its elegance until now. so from now on, you might find me posting my daily findings there. go get an account and post yours too!
in january 2005, the city authority of berlin had a strangely hard time in picking up all the christmas trees that berliners were dumping on the streets like never before. my collection of trees is now featured in cornelia durka's beautiful collection of minor urban disasters.
please have a look at the discarded christmas trees of berlin.
tequila sunset is the result of a pressure project about bar counters at udk. in this design, glasses and objects in general are tracked from above and a virtual shadow is projected from underneath. within the shadow, there are two layers of information: the outside time is displayed by its rotation and the time that the glass has been on the counter by its length. micro- and macroinformation visualized in a natural yet artificial phenomenon.
please visit our new website for a more detailled description of tequila sunset.
might i suggest a visit to slowlab, a new york-based nonprofit design organization in the making that i kind of joined recently. founded by carolyn f. strauss, slowlab tries to develop ideas for sustainable and procedural designs in every kind of way and media.
memory of the city at slowlab
beside all the new works added, i'm glad to announce that this page is now done in nice and clean XHTML and CSS. no more cranky dreamweaver-workarounds here. furthermore and maybe even more important, all the works here are now released under a creative-commons-license. you are permitted to legally republish them. however, you are not allowed to charge for publishing, alter the works in any way and they have to be published under the same license.
this project was commissioned by funkstörung for their upcoming dvd-release "isolation remixes" which will be published by die gestalten verlag in fall 2004. together with isabelle schmidt, i did a video for the track "captured in tones" with vocals by sara jay, best known for her work with massive attack.
this work was awarded the backup clipaward 2004 at bauhaus weimar, has been a finalist in the Cologne Artfilm-biennal at Museum Ludwig and has been featured in the DOTMOV 2004-festival and catalogue.
our approach to visualisation of the music was to keep it as pure as possible, matching the beautiful simplicity of the track. all you see is basically a young woman's face in changing illumination that moves from complete darkness to bright light then back to darkness again. the woman rotates only once in almost surreal slow motion over the duration of the song. we chose to film her in this pure way in order to be able to reflect on what can be found in a human face. you could take the images as an experiment in perception.
watch captured in tones (23mb, mpeg4, quicktime 6 req.)
music by funkstörung, (c) !K7 records 2004.
based on the techniques i developed for the memory of the city-project, lisa rave created a series of wild animals that together we set free in the city of berlin. this was done as a part of stefan sagmeister's assignment to "touch one's heart with design" at udk-berlin. the aim of this guerilla-style action are city dwellers who are not used to encountering animals, left alone bears and leopards in the urban environment.
the pictures use reflective beads that only appear when directly illuminated, thus making the animals invisible during daytime and visible in the night, especially when driving by in a car.
the documentation for this project and many others can be found at www.designberuehrtherz.de. there is also another great and funny project called zettel für sascha by cornelia durka that is related to my person.
Safari has been awarded a honorable mention in the I.D.-Magazine's Student Design Review and was critiqued by John Maeda in the September-issue 2005.
herman was the short time assignment at the beginning of the semester. the task was to enhance a standard ikea-chair in an electronic way. my design is called "herman the liar" and works as a very simple trap. there are water basins filled with flowers mounted to each side of the chair. herman looks very peaceful and inviting but if someone sits down to rest, he or she triggers a switch that enables a pump spraying a jet of water over the person, effectively trapping her.
please visit my weblog saschaklasse for the detailed documentation of hermans development.
watch a video of herman in full effect (11mb mpeg4, qt required) -->
trajets is a video installation that i did as my final project at ENSAD in paris. it was inspired by condensation trails of airplanes that are very present in the paris sky. since they always evoked a special feeling in me, i decided to create an installation around them.
the installation space consists of five walls that are covered with video projections, so only the floor is left blank. what you see is brilliant blue sky and a single plane gently flying, leaving behind a trail. when the plane crosses from one screen to the other, the trail is continued in the correct place and angle while it slowly fades away on the screens it already passed. the sound you hear is a loop generated from filtered long-wave radio interferences that i recorded in my appartment.
since you only see one plane circling endlessly around you, the work creates a strong feeling of detachment and refers to many things related to loneliness, communication and space not to mention the graphic simplicity of the lines in the sky.
watch three excerpts of the visualisation:
trajets1 (4.3mb, mpeg4, quicktime 6 req.)
trajets2 (4.9mb, mpeg4, quicktime 6 req.)
trajets3 (5mb, mpeg4, quicktime 6 req.)
see the presentation of trajets (1,2mb, pdf)
i have started to work as a freelance editor for the german monthly newspaper de:bug. my first article is an interview with the paris-based videoartists pleix in de:bug 81, page 5.
arrière-plan is a project that was designed with liddy scheffknecht for an assignment by sophie calle. while her exhibition "m'as tu vue" was on display at centre georges pompidou, she was interested in the reactions of the visitors. students of ENSAD and ENSBA were asked by madame calle to concieve projects to watch people or actually observe them.
since we believed that there is much to be found in the expressions of a face, we proposed to install cameras that would capture the visitors reading the gruesome stories found in the work "douleur exquise". the images would then be instantly projected on the bench behind the visitors for the others to see, thus rendering the most intimate moment of perception public.
watch three excerpts of the visualisation:
arriere1 (4.3mb, mpeg4, quicktime 6 req.)
arriere2 (4.9mb, mpeg4, quicktime 6 req.)
arriere3 (5mb, mpeg4, quicktime 6 req.)
see the presentation of arrière-plan (1,2mb, pdf)
alices is a short film that was realised as a collaborative project in the class of brice dellsperger. the film makes use of the split-screen technique to tell the story of a man who literally is caught in between two women, real or imaginary. as the story unfolds, the relation between both people and screens gets more and more sophisticated.
watch alices (18mb, french with english subs, mpeg4, quicktime 6 req.)
je ne sais rien d'elle is a very short experimental film and was my first project at ENSAD, paris. it shows blurred images of the city, people passing by, water. the sound is both taken from the original takes and a classic movie about paris to which the title relates. the work is supposed to be a try in approaching a foreign city and reflects my feelings towards paris in the beginning.
watch je ne sais rien d'elle (18mb, french, mpeg4, quicktime 6 req.)
there is another blog of mine called saschaklasse. it's meant to be the documentation of our projects at udk's digital class. there you can follow the progress of my current project very closely.
my own blog objets trouvés is now online! i will try to keep posting my digital findings in paris on a regular basics. please feel free to comment and also check JD3. (update: after 70 pictures posted and my return to berlin, i discontinued objets trouvés. of course you can still access its archive.)
i am studying at ENSAD in paris for the winter. paris projects will start to appear soon! until then check out the collaborative blog JD3.
strangely illuminated zoo enclosures create surreal settings of simulated wilderness.
fotoseries
WAVES is a cooperative project with jakob schillinger that takes an experimental approach towards the documentation of political activism. the work was commisioned by rebecca gomperts of women on waves, which is one of the most interesting actions to date. it consists of a mobile abortion clinic loaded onto a ship that sails towards countries in which abortion is highly restricted or forbidden. the ship offers the possibility to have the liberal dutch abortion-laws apply when only 12 miles away from the foreign country's shore. the footage for WAVES was shot in june 2003 at wladyslawowo, poland where the most recent action took place.
WAVES was realised with the korsakow system and works as an interactive documentary. decisions have to be made after each clip or interview and depending on the watcher's opinion, the next clip is selected. while the overall structure is relatively fixed to reflect upon the course of events in poland, we believe that this form is very elegant for making people think again by facing them with the consequences of their decisions and opinions. the project was exhibited at mediamatic, amsterdam in 2003 and was selected for the new media competition at stuttgarter filmpreis in january 2004.
watch three clips of WAVES in use:
waves1 (6.3mb, mpeg4, quicktime 6 req.)
waves2 (5.9mb, mpeg4, quicktime 6 req.)
waves3 (5mb, mpeg4, quicktime 6 req.)
blumenwiese neben autobahn: being stuck in a trafic jam at A2 there was the rare opportunity to step out, walk along the track and see what people are looking at.
fotoseries
transitory spaces: imagine going from a to b by train. then being unknowingly loaded onto a ferry and eventually ending up in a floating shopping mall. impressions from a non-place at sea.
fotoseries
time-lapse footage that i shot from by bedroom window has been used in florian thalhofer's and mahmoud hamdy's brilliant love story project, which was first shown in cairo last december.
the 02/03 semester projects at udk class-digital are all about berlin:
in the second part of the project, an approach for digital media had to be developed. this design called 'panorama' turns toward information design and tries to create a 3dimensional map of the city that solely consists of contextual information about the street names in berlin.
concept panorama (1.6mb flash mx)
the aim of this project is to remind of places, people and events that took place in history but are almost lost in history. for this purpose a kind of memorial was to be designed, here also conventional ideas had to be reevaluated. the topic i eventually chose is the constant change of street names in berlin, where some places have been renamed every time a new government came into charge. here's a guerilla-approach to remind people of things past:
concept echo (2.6mb flash mx)
we were asked to design an alternate version of the well known berlin flag (the bear, you know) and purposely leave the conventions and restrictions of flag design.
concept berliner flagge 2.0 (700kb flash mx)
following the meandering project, i did a video based on meandering with kerstin j. walgenbach. the footage recorded from the software underwent a process of selection and re-selection before it was edited in the last step. this process is meant to reflect the also fragmentary character of the audio track by funkstörung. meander was featured in the vscape-program of the tel aviv video biennal in 2002.
meander (15mb mpeg4, quicktime 6 req.)
meandering is a software project that was done as my intermediate diploma at university of the arts in berlin. it explores the possibilities of extending the idea of duration in cubism to video by the use of 3d technology. meandering is able to create video-objects in space that visualize time flowing through the structure of a film. meandering was presented at file 2002 in são paulo and at transmediale.03 in berlin. it is also featured in the catalogue of ZKM's future cinema-exhibition, curated by jeffrey shaw and peter weibel.
read the documentation
try four films: (shockwave req.)
eye (3.8mb)
drop of water (1.2mb)
tunnel (5.8mb)
woman on staircase (4.1mb)
some small projects from the introductory semester at class digital at udk. each one was a two-week task that dealt with different aspects of screen-based media.
form (deconstruction of a given shape)
space (exploration of a non-existing room)
sound (correlations between sound, shape and speed)
1024x768 browser window + shockwave req. for each example
two digital flyers for the club "suite 212" in collaboration with platoon berlin
flyer 0901 (250kb flash 5)
flyer 0102 (290kb flash 5)
this video installation was originally designed to cover the topics "time" and "communication". it became a play on walther ruthmanns sinfonie der großstadt and his abstract films. it consists of two screens which each show real video and abstract elements. as the loop unfolds, the video gets in and out of sync and the black dots start to communicate. this work won a kurz&schön-award at khm in 2001.
lo komm otion - one-screen version (6mb, mpeg4, quicktime 6 req.)
please visit my old homepage to have a look at less recent projects, such as digital miniatures in flash, a foto documentary about the restaurant moskau in east berlin and a concept design for experimental furniture surfaces. go there now! (and please don't have "block pop-ups" enabled)
