Christian Zöllner

One week to go. Cromafest Mexico City. SMSlingshot in the streets. Still unbelievable.

Next week will be big. There will be two presentations of the courses I held at the University of the Arts Berlin. The design-basics course will give its presentation on monday morning starting around 11am. The topic of this term was to create tools for uncommon matters with the focus on mating and related behaviour. Very strange task, I know, but the results are promising and I look forward to the performances. A lot of rapid prototyping and soldering in the game. Straight after the basics, we hop on the chartered bus to make an extended trip throughout the city and make some serious window shopping. 18 students designed 18 shop windows all over Berlin. And we visit all of them, so the students can present in front of their work and we can get some feedback from the shop owners. So if you´re interested, drop by at the University at 1pm to catch a seat in the bus. Meanwhile in the bat cave: some work in progess moods.

Some late update on my workshop at the Muthesius Art College in Kiel. I was invited to hold a one week workshop during the Forum, an interdisciplinary working week. For the workshop I was able to recruit students from free art, industrial design and spatial strategies. The task was to question the form follows function principle and developing it towards a “form inspires function” paradigma. Basicly it´s time to rethink this, anyway. The aim of the workshop was to create a digital ready made out of 3d scanned all day objects. For the scanning we used 123D-Catch. These objects had to be reworked and merged within the 3D-coat modelling software.

The first day I gave  brief overview to 123d-Catch and sent the students out in the urban and domestic wilderness to catch some promising objects that are worth to rework digitally. We´ve been facing some problems with the first tries but over the time all students succeeded in capturing real world to data meshes. Very recommendable tool for quick three dimensional impressions.

After this intense phase of scanning everyone began retouching, morphing and transforming their objects into completely new artefacts. From fennel to heart to bike-birthing machines and from battery gun to battery biface… all was possible and preferred option. Over the next three days the objects went through the scraping, chiseling, flattening and resampling of 3D-coat. The approach of not constructing a function out of a need, and instead playing with shapes and impressions led to a new kind of objects: less rational readable and more inspiring.

To round up the process, though it´s a very quick one for beginners, we uploaded the design to shapeways and brought the objects back to real life. By this the students can judge their designs inreal scale and in combination with other “real” objects. For now I only have the photos of the objects in the studio, but i look forward to see the spatial prints in combination and orchestration.

Coming originally from a scanned battery gun and desperatly trying to construct something similiar with 3D- coat Markus decided to leave his solid works path for heading back to stone age. Ladies and Gentleman: a battery driven biface.

Laura comes from a free art and ceramics backround, mostly dealign with bio-mechanics and weird machines. After assosciating her scanned fennel as a heart she moved further to a double heart shaped bike birth machine. Weird? Indeed! But the object is overall beautiful and by holding it against the light one can see the scanned bycicle inside.

This one is very impressing. Hans scanned a flatting iron. After two days of not knowing what to do, he started to mirror and rotating the object and discovered this wonderful modul system. If you look twice, the iron ist still visible.

For any further impressions of the single projects, please see this presentation poster. Click to enlarge!

My talk at the Unversity of the Arts Forschungsforum / research forum felt quite good and was fitting well to the other speakers. I was ping-ponging the talk with Axel Kufus and talked mainly about the trans-verse design process of the SMSlingshot and the results of the Forum Workshop I held at the Muthesius Art College last december. Thanks to Masen Khattab and Susanne Hauser for preparing the forum and the other speakers for the inspiring talks. As usual everything comes different than thought and so I had to improvise a few parts and fit the talk to the ping pong principle. In the end, I have a spare “ready-to-hold” lecture in the backhand. Feels good too. Above you see the mapping for the talk. I like this way of preparing talks, because it allows more associatiiva and inspiring workflows. Click to enlarge.

Last march, yes last years march, I held a one day workshop with pupils from the Berggruen Highschool in Berlin. I got support from the students Katharina Bredies, Amelie Hinrichsen and Fynn Freyschmidt to host two 12th grade classes in one big room at the university of the arts Berlin. The kids were invited by their arts teacher to design a radio that only plays one station, the designers favorite station. In the end the radios had to display the characteristics of the owner and his or her favorite station through their material, colour and shape. Tricky task for the youths, but they mastered it all quite well. Two days ago we visited the presentation at their school and were amazed about the quality of the final models.

After two years of not participating at the Research Forum of the University of the Arts Berlin I will hold a lecture together with Prof. Axel Kufus. Our topic will be the value of prototyping in experimental design processes and feature work samples of our students, ourselves and best practices. The focus is more on poetic and semantic realm and less on a pragmatic level. The whole show starts 9.30 am and lasts until 7.00 pm. We enter the stage around 2.30 pm. It all takes place at Hardenbergstraße 33 in Berlin. See you there!

There is a new DJ-mix up online. It´s the forth part of the Dronestep series and features tracks from Zhou, Distance, Rhythm and Sound, Shackleton, Isis, No Ufos and Roly Porter. As usually the sound is quite dark, ambient and soaked in bass. Go for it!

I know my meme, and it´s the memefest. For everyone not being familiar with memefest: it´s a worldwide, “more than g8 international” community of artists, critics, media theorists and wild folks making wild stuff. I feel very home with the people, because they work so hard to push non-commercial artwork and critical positions in public space. This year, SMSlingshot got massive feedback throughout the memefest friendly competition and was exhibited in Nijmegens Oddstream festival and here in Berlin, just right around the corner in an empty fabric floor. Thanks Dejan, Alain, Rola and the rest of the crew for giving such warm and constructive feedback. Now the books arrived, beautiful as assumed. Here some pictures.