Christian Zöllner

Over the last three month I was working on the artwork for the new record of Dresden based poostpunk band Goldner Anker. The project includes LP sleeve, CD digipack, posters and shirt designs. I tried to create a fine but still raw and basic atmosphere within the motives. Less metaphors, no symbols, all very plain and open to interpretation. I used portrait photographies of the three band members, cut them to slices and rearranged it into a new face. All analogue with scalpel, ruler and gluesticks. The final reprography was shot by Jens Beyer and Armin Bronco. The font is hand painted and simply scanned. A bit +m let it look more rough. The rest of the artwork is set in super grotesk. No playing around, just plain text. I signed it all with my new bowing out alter ego Bill Wankhead,

The design process included also some trails and errors. Here you see some versions and early steps of the fonts and cut ups. In the end we kept going with the stripped version, but we also were going for a more topographic version of the face mash up.

Because nothing is complete without some hands on merchandise, here you see the poster and the shirts based on one more symbolic artwork. Again all analogue cut up.

It feels so well. After a long time of sitting behind keyboard and display, I have my own workshop with tools, materials, and loads of space to store all the weird stuff I found an find through the time. Hello messy life, I´m coming!

A lot of books featuring some work of mine have been released since the last updates. I just briefly flip through them to give a short overview.

I start with the latest release by gestalten called “Precursor, the creativity watchlist” featuring a colourful range of interactive, graphic and severall off topic projects from art and design. One of the editors is Jan Middendorp who was joining our office for quite a year. The SMSlingshot is listed in the field of code.

Early this year, gestalten editors published the book “touch of code” which features a wide range of projects an friends from the field of interactive installations. Siren, Daniel, the Facadeprinter boys, trikoton, all are in! Feels very home!

As a very late addition I have to post the article we wrote for weave magazine last year. It´s about our manifesto “act on hybrid estates“and describes the design process of the SMSlignshot.

And last but not least the catalogue of the current MoMA exhibition talk to me. No words just the cover!

Together with Nadia Pantel, i headed to Riga/Latvia to give a workshop on urban interventions using light. Fion Dobbin put together a crew of young emerging artists containing beside Nadia and me, Christina Kral, Kasper König, Voldemars Dudums and Gatis Mūrniek. First day we´ve had a top secret jury meeting for projects concerning Riga as cultural capital in 2014. After that we went out for a drift through Riga, researching and documenting spots that are suitable for light interventions. We ended up at the nightmarket cafeteria, a place i felt in love with the first time I saw it back in 2009. The next days workshopwas introduced by small lectures of the artists and started with a warm up round in which my little group was asked to create tools for advanced mating. The video will follow up next week, Kunti the girl who was filming and documenting so tireless will send it to me asap. Aswell the documentation of our little light workshop is missing yet. To tease you on the fun we had please chek the flickr stream of Christian Kral

Just briefly. While spreading the word in Brussels the rest of the VR/urban crew went to Marsatac festival in Marseille. There is less to say from my side, but one thing the guys said, that it was the biggest show we ever had. It felt like thousand people were grasping for the SMSlingshots and all night was full traffic.

No, not again Netherlands, but nearby: Brussels. The Todays Art festival in Brussels, sister to the one in the Netherlands. Again early out, bus, airport, train, taxi, hotel, bar, backstage, projector guys, setting up, managing the sitespecific errors, having everything run and starting to dring more beer. Please believe me, this is the best that can happen: creating something interactive that brings you around the world to meet people, see different cities and habits and drink all variations of alcoholic beverage. This time i went with Armin Riedel, filmmaker, photographer stunt-cyclist to support me during the night shows. It was again a blast, to meet all the other artists and make friends with the locals. Thanks Pierre and Nico for bringing us to The Hague, Andreas for the good time company and Schwausch for two days massive hang over! Will stay in mind, for sure!

Not even one week after coming back from Tilburgs Incubate festival, we headed again to the Netherlands to play Todays Art festival in The Hague. Thanks to Adrian, Remco and Stacie for all the support during and beside the show. Somehow everytime I went to the Netherlands I can´t really remember what happened exactly but there are a few photographic documents that clear up the sky a bit. First to mention: we got a very prominent facade, the townhall of The Hague, which got known by the (now quite old) projection mapping by Pablo Valbuena. This piece was one initial work make us found the VR/urban collective. For two nights we gave the people of the festival the chance to tell their thoughts on politics visually loud. We were very suprised, because friends of us dropped by to hang out with us! Perfect gang to hit the clubs afterwards to see Daedelus, Jazzsteppa and deBruit.