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!

“Students at the MIT Media Lab have developed a wearable computing system that turns any surface into an interactive display screen. The wearer can summon virtual gadgets and internet data at will, then dispel them like smoke when they’re done” [via Wired]

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 >>

I just got a very pleasant call from Burda Marcom. They invited me to blog from the Digital, Life, Design Conference 09 (short dld09) in Munich, starting this sunday jan 25th until tuesday jan 27. I am very excited, its an event I would have liked to attend since I got to know about its existence about two years ago.

I will cover the conference together with Nicole Simon, Oliver Gassner and Andrea Vascellari – I am proud to be working with them.

Gestern hatte ich die Ehre, auf dem Virtual Worlds Camp einen Vortrag über “Gesellschaftliche Gründe für die Flucht in virtuelle Welten” zu halten. Nach einigen Anfangsschwierigkeiten stürzte ich mich voll in die Soziologie der Regeln und Sanktionen, der sozialen Anerkennung und Identifikation und hatte am Ende eine zwar nicht perfekte, aber immerhin so anregende Präsentation beisammen, dass sich eine äußerst lebhafte Diskussion entwickeln konnte. Danke an alle Teilnehmer, hier finden sich die Folien via Slideshare.

Tomorrow I’ll be talking about virtual worlds and social reasons for escaping into them at the Virtual worlds camp. The camp will take place at Frogster IP, in Hardenbergstraße 9a, Berlin, from 11.00h to 16:00h. I’m talking at 14:15, you can watch the whole conference on Hobnox.

Beside me, there will be other experts, like Computec Media AG CEO Johannes Sevket Gözalan, Sunny Park from Frogster Korea or Mirko Caspar from Metaversum, talking about virtual worlds, gaming in general, promotion and business models within that area.

There will be a party at night, too, where I’ll be djing at a secret place you will have to find out by asking the sausage seller at Choriner Str, corner to Schönhauser Alle. You can register for the event at amiando.

So, this blog is about Music, Lifestyle and science, right? Then this video here is perfect to illustrate the idea: It’s great entertainment, it’s music, it’s very illustrative, it’s about what a hadron collider does in the form of a rap.

The people of CERN (European Nuclear Research Center) who run the big 17mile long atom smasher called Large Hadron Collider in between France and Switzerland made a very cool video about what they are doing and kind of questions their research adresses:

Totgesagte leben länger, und was kratzt es überhaupt die Eiche. Nur weil ein paar Internetheinis nur noch sporadisch zappen, aber natürlich trotzdem die EM-Spiele schauen und natürlich trotzdem wissen, was GNTM bedeutet, ist das TV noch lange nicht tot. Wir reden hier über eine Industrie, die Milliarden umsetzt, die wird sich nicht einfach wegmarginalisieren lassen. Fragen wir lieber, was aus dem Fernsehen wird. Oder fragen wir noch lieber, was das Wort “Fernsehen” in ein paar Jahren bedeuten wird.

Weiter geht mein Artikel als Gastbeitrag bei den Blogpiloten

Die Next08 liegt nun etwas mehr als eine Woche zurück und über die Konferenz ist viel geschrieben und gemeint worden: “Gute Organisation”, “zu viel Business, zu wenig Vision”, “gutes Essen”, “schwaches Wlan”, “zu laut”, “beeindruckende Ansammlung von Brancheninsidern”, “Schlipsträger, die keinen Schlips tragen”, etc.

Einge Fragen bleiben aber immer offen und die Macher stricken, nach einer wohlverdienten Pause, sicher schon an Konzepten für das kommende Jahr. Eine Frage jedoch, die meines Wissens verblüffenderweise selten öffentlich gestellt wurde, ist die nach einem Live-Stream aus den Panels oder von der Konferenz allgemein. Denn eine Veranstaltung, die sich “Get Realtime” auf die Fahnen schreibt, muss sich diese Frage sicherlich gefallen lassen. Continue >>

Atome fangen – halb Planung, halb Fingerspitze: Nanotube by Slakinov. Nothing special but a cool waste of time.

Indiegames says: “Use the left or right cursor keys to match colors. Forty-two levels are included, though most players might not find the gameplay enticing enough to hold their interest for that long.”

Blogrolls oder was? Unter anderem dafür interessiert sich folgendes Projekt:
Netzwerke im Internet.
Außerdem noch über alle möglichen anderen spannenden Sachen: Semantiken, verteilte Konversationen, Diskursanalyse.
Schön.

Gute Kampagne, finde ich, checkt das Jahr der Mathematik.

Ich persönlich bin z.B. ein großer Fan von Fermats letztem Satz und war geschockt als ich erfuhr, dass ich, als der Preis für seine Lösung vergeben wurde, wohl nur weniger Meter oberhalb der ehrwürdigen Göttinger Aula unwissend Bier trinkend auf dem Fensterbrett saß. Hier das Buch zu der Geschichte.

Also eigentlich wollte ich nur sagen, dass mir das Motiv gut gefiel, vorhin am S-Bhf Schönhauser Allee. Aber der Trailer ist auch ganz schick:

Link: sevenload.com

Schrödingers Cat, installation by Reinhard WannerThese three have something in common: It’s the promise for something big that’s hiding behind it. When I heard Radioheads “OK Computer” for the first time or Notwists “Shrink”, I knew it were great pieces of music I am just not able to understand yet. I listened to them again and again and slowly they unfolded their magic just like I expected.

With system theory it happened to me in a similar way. The first time I heard about the idea of seeing society as a communicative system that consists of communication and nothing else I was fascinated yet unable to grasp only ten percent of what it really means as a consequence. Now, I even read books understanding that their authors criticize system theory without having understood them.

As for quantum theory I am still struggling – what about these strange states and probabilities little quantums are in? Being waves and particles at the same time? And what about Schrödinger’s cat who is dead AND alive at the same time? I know there is something big waiting for me, I just need to be patient to understand.

In the meantime I listen to Stars new album “In Our Bedroom After The War” (order on itunes) because it’s really great and look forward to Chikinki’s new album “Brace Brace” which will be out on Weekender records in November. Singer Rupert’S voice still sounds pretty whiny but very charismatic and the whole Chikinki-experience has become much bigger and broader. Check out “Oh my God” from the new album:

Friday and Saturday I attended the Jahrestagung (annual summit) of the German scientist community for organizational communication. It was not only nice to meet Thomas Pleil and Ansgar Zerfaß again and to listen some very interesting insights about the professional world of organizational communication like Vodafone, EADS or Scholz & Friends but also good to realize that I could follow most of the speeches pretty much – after all, we had the most advanced scientists on that subject gathered here. And I was delighted to see, that the vibe amongst all these scientists and professionals was very relaxed and folksy. In the end we (I comprise myself here) do not only like to talk much, but also: to listen.

The museum of natural history in Berlin has recently been renovated and now features an impressive amount of interactive use of multimedia stations: 3D-movies that take the environment into account, moving screens, touch sensitive information. It’s full of kids and they seem to have a lot of fun learning.
Here you’ll see an interactive projection about animal families.

That sex porn was one of the main drivers of the internet (and now its mobile derivatives) is a statement that surely can be discussed but still pops up here and then again and again.

And taking this story on BoingBoing about remote-controlled fruit flies into account, adding the fact that one of the scientist behind the fruit flies experiments is Dr Gero Miesenböck and funded by the us military brings us to one sad conclusion: Despite being humans, complexly developed creatures, sex and violence are still the main drivers of our progress.

Das Buch “A virtuos cirlce” von Pippa Norris ist ein Schlüsselwerk für alle, die sich mit politischen Kampagnen und ihrem Wandel in den letzten Jahrzehnten beschäftigen. Vor allem der Einfluss des Internets auf politische Arbeit wird von ihr detailliert dargestellt und ein schöner Vergleich zwischen verschiedenen Ländern gezogen. Dieses Werk ist nun auf der Homepage von Mrs Norris, die derzeit Direktorin für Democratic Governance beim UNDP ist, herunterladbar und sei hiermit dem interessierten Publikum wärmstens empfohlen:

Pippa Norris: A virtuos cirlce: Key literature for all interested in the change of political campaigns especially taking into account digital technologies and its influence on politics, including a comparison of different nations and their resprective approach to digital democracy.

[via Falk Lueke]

Remember, when I wrote about Gapminder and TED Talks here? Obviously, Google must be reading here and took the article as a solid fundament to purchase the visually statistics analyzing software firm.

Picture by Christian Iten & Daniel LüthiAnd here is another interactive multitouch display from the Hochschule für Gestaltung und Kunst, Zürich.

If you like this you might also find the following interesting:
Multitouch interaction research at NYU
and the interactive multitouch instrument Reactable

I got this hint via an sms, somebody believed having seen a blogpost about the Reactable here and wanted to inform me that this fascinating digital music-interface is in Berlin for Transmediale at M12. Actually, I did not know about this project by the Audiovisual Institute at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona but it is similar to the Multi touch interface I posted some weeks ago. Watch this demonstration and be amazed by the blend of the visual effects and the music controlling capacities.

“The reactable, is a state-of-the-art multi-user electro-acoustic music instrument with a tabletop tangible user interface. Several simultaneous performers share complete control over the instrument by moving physical artefacts on the table surface and constructing different audio topologies in a kind of tangible modular synthesizer or graspable flow-controlled programming language.”

Spending my days in the library and reeling in between insight and confusion, I’d just like to use this as a little sketch of what organization identity might be, in science and in practice.

Science

Ever since the ground-breaking article by Albert & Whetten, defining organizational identity as what is central, distinctive and enduring about an organization, a wide range of scholars have emerged, trying to theoretically describe and analyze this field. In their views, organizational identity serves as a cognitive frame for understanding reality, as shared assumptions about the world that lead to collective actions (just like in organizational culture), as a discourse about sense and reality (therefore there can be multiple identities to organizations), as collective claims about the contents of the organization and room for personal identification (e.g. “I am with Boston Consulting now, boy, I’m proud, we are so going to do a good job on this project!” social identity theory).

Continue >>

I just filled out a survey about the students’ expectations for a new portal and social network for all students of the Freie Universität Berlin. I have to admit, I was quite surprised about the quality of the questions, the whole approach seems very promising to me. Let alone the fact to actually ask the users and recruit them for beta testing through a survey before starting to develop a social network platform is a plus. It seems ironic because this should be the case for all user driven online platforms but sadly enough is seldom the case.

If you are a FU student, take part in the survey until january 15th! Continue >>

Hans Rosling on TEDtalks“TED was born in 1984 out of the observation by Richard Saul Wurman of a powerful convergence between Technology, Entertainment and Design. The first TED included the public unveiling of the Macintosh computer and the Sony compact disc, while mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot demonstrated how to map coastlines with his newly discovered fractals and AI guru Marvin Minsky outlined his powerful new model of the mind.”

Now TED Talks features many, many highly interesting speeches online that are really worth watching. I especially enjoyed Hans Rosling’s speech about Gapminder and data visualization (sounds boring but he is entertaining, educating AND funny) and Barry Schwartz, author of “The paradox of choice” who explains why more choice does NOT mean more freedom, on the contrary. A point, I am pretty sure, all of you have discussed with friends considering what you want to be in this world and how the many possibilities we have these days are more a burden than alleviation.

Rember “Minority Report”? The best thing in this movie were the fascinating interfaces the policemen used to gather information. Big touchscreens that react to the movements of several fingers or even several hands on interactive walls or table tops. Well, there is something like this in reality and of course, I liked the idea of the digital touchscreen turntable (as seen in the picture).

Jeff Hahn and his colleagues at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University are working on that and there’s an impressive movie clip to visualize their efforts. Mindblowing, music by Peter Kruder.

[via sounds.imnetz]

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