Looking back at Reboot11

Danish is a funny language. Let alone pronouncing the Reboot11‘s venue “Kedelhallen” correctly is a command of its own. It’s something like “cahilhäln” but we never got it right. Said it, looked into puzzled faces, wrote it down and were told “oh, you mean cahilhäln!” Finally got there, were amazed.

An old industrial building with several rooms, the walls covered with handwritten paper and plans and rooms and talks, with small wooden chairs outside and a 3d printer which can repair its 3d printer brother and a supercreative crowd who didn’t care about business cards and seemed to be really interested in answers (not the kind of people that ask “so, what do you do?” and then look the other way).

And: Whenever talks mentioned the word “crisis”, they never meant the financial crisis but were talking about the climate crisis ahead and how to adress it with smart technology and will. Most of the sessions I found interesting, but I was surprisingly dissapointed by two internet legends who seemed not to care so much about inspiring people: Dave Winer who just let the audience talk and produced a lot of unstructred noise (nothing against open mic but without some outlines there will be nothing of substance) and Stowe Boyd who told us to use our rights on the net. Yeah, thanks.

But some stuff was truly amazing, there was a hellride through all sorts of geo location examples and tools by Andrew Turner, a very dark yet humorous speech by Bruce Sterling (“get the best bed you can get!”) and again, the Placebo of tech festivals, David Weinberger about Cyberutopianism. Not to mention Tor Nørretranders who showed us how literally sharing your shit makes things better.

Look for more posts about reboot11
, thank you again Peter for suggesting me to go!

Körpervermischungs-Installation

Samstag wird Tine Papendick ein Testsetup einer Körpervermischungs-Installation im Spielraumschaufenster aufbauen. Ihr könnt euch mit anderen Leute verdrehen, vermischen, überlagern oder auch einfach nur ein Bier mit uns trinken. Keine Party sondern das TO-DO bevor es in die Nacht geht. Das ganze findet statt im Spielraum (Tataaa!).

SAMSTAG, 16.05.2009
ab 21 Uhr
Reichenberger Straße 28
Berlin Kreuzberg

Moneyprinting, party of friends, Politcamp

It’s going to be a pretty active weekend, I am not talking about riots. But there is lots of cool stuff going on in Berlin this weekend: Tonight, thursday, there is the money printing contest which will take place at Mariannenplatz 21 in Kreuzberg 36. (“Who hasn’t thought about it? The perfect solution in this time of global meltdown and financial disaster! We need to make our own money!”) Great, arty and subversive idea by Czentrifuga.

Tomorrow night, I will be playing at CRACKERS, Heidestrasse 5, a friend is organizing a party for friends, come if you’re a friend! (see the flyer to the left).

Then, saturday and sunday, I will be attending Politcamp09, a barcamp about politics. I’ll try to post an English summary here.

Notic Nastic’s blogmesite

It’s all in a little, tiny, universe! Yes, Berlin based art-music-club-community Notic Nastic put it all in a widget: their outer space of secrets, fans, music, videos and other crazy hidden stuff. And every month, there will be something else, people can become part of the collective and submit stuff which will then be featured on the little widgetothingy. So this time there is actually a reason to embed this piece of code to your whatever blog or profile. Do and love or don’t and recieve nothing back either, bitches.

My DLD09 summary

First, you can get an overview of all articles published on the DLD live blog here.

After three days of intense blogging, live blogging(!), there should be a little resumée. Must be a personal one, naturally, although I aim to grasp some of that spirit hopefully many people sensed in these days of Digital, Life, Design 09.
Continue reading

“Captured” – documenting Clayton Patterson’s work

On saturday I had the chance to see the European premier of “Captured” at Babylon Berlin, as part of the American independent film fest “Unknown Pleasures“.

“Captured” is a film about the New York artist Clayton Patterson and a film about the change in the Lower East side, Manhattan, during the last 20 years. Patterson has tons of foto and video material from the time when the Lower East side was a dirty, cheap, chaotic, independent, arty, druggy, anarchic area. Not only with Giuliani this changed into yet another hip and expensive place to live in New York nowadays. “Captured” shows this change and the protagonists around Patterson, e.g. the art scene, the hardcore scene (with Bad Brains e.g.), the queer scene, the squatters.

Filmmakers Den Levin, Ben Solomon and Jenner Furst managed to boil down Pattersons’ hours of film into a consistent, exciting and interesting 90min movie, which literally makes you feel sad you hadn’t been there when it was still rough.

Captured Homepage
Captured MySpace

What you can do with Arduino

ArduinoArduino is an open-source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software. It’s intended for artists, designers, hobbyists, and anyone interested in creating interactive objects or environments.”

Hm, so what does that mean? Basically what you can with the little Arduino board is easily bring lots of input in and turn it into certain outputs. Sounds easy and maybe trivial but really is not. Because Arduino can process many different signals and trigger many different outputs. Kiss a door and it opens. Step close to a mirror and a video starts playing with the mirror talking to you. Turn TV picture into LED-signals. Connect it to the Wii and In general one might say it’s very nerdy and looks a little unready still. But it’s definetly the start into a development of selfbuilt robots and machines.

Below are some video examples. I particularly like the TV to LED part because it’s kind of what a friend and I did for a party once. We put 16 toilet paper rolls covered with translucent paper in fornt a tv and thus reduced the pictures to a 16×16 pixel screen. We taped it to video and had a nice party light installation. The posted below is slightly more elegant but, really, less charming.
Continue reading

Streetart in Lofoten, Norway

streetart_lofotenThere are not many streets there. Still, in the very north of Norway, on the archipelago Lofoten two of the most known Norwegian street artists, Dolk and Pøbel have painted some house walls. Poppy, stencil-like paintings in black and white with few colour highlights and some surreal motives like superman with Dialyse, at old wooden houses in the middle of nowhere. Certainly one more reason to travel to Lofoten despite the breath taking nature. [via Elsbe]
Watch more pictures at Nrk.no or watch a slideshow with Lofoten pictures from Flickr
Continue reading

Berliner Straße exhibition

The most exciting moment of Berlin Art Forum is already over? Probably. Because the furious and multicreative festival that international artists put up yesterday at the opening of Berliner Straße at .BHC has been a firework of wonderful moments. Rooms, so many impossible to count, each one especially designed by a an artist or a group with painted walls, installations, videos, bands, performances.. It was a blast: A man playing drums in big yellow box, faces out of rotten potatoes, concerts with looped beatbox and casio guitars and many photographies, grafitti like street art pieces and last but not least a big and arty looking crowd hanging out in a party atmosphere with drinks, talks, dance. Enjoy a little slide show of impressions.