Christian Zöllner

This has been some busy weeks for me and the vr/urban collective. After a breathtaking redesign process of the SMSlingshot (now more, smaller, lighter, easy to recharge via usb, all 3D scanned branches, all one-shot-cnc-milled and lasered…) we hit the road to play some festivals all over europe.

First we went to INCUBATE festival in Tilburg/Holland, that is organized and set up by nearly the same guys doing strp festival in Eindhoven. So we´ve been happy to see wout, tineke and cees again, plus all the other SMSlingshot enthusiasts in Holland. The festival was a blast, though we didn´t get our setup running the first night. But, hey shit happens, and the following nights were purely positive and we also managed the third night completely drowning in rain. Thanks to the crowd for sticking to us. Beside this, we saw an enormous amount of incredible music acts, such as Untold, Boddika, and my secret dubstep superhero since day one: DJ MADD. We missed the even more interesting acts like celeste, austra, ketzer, girl unit, due to our tight schedule of setting up, hosting and dismantling the smslingshot performance.

Next to this we created a little outdoor/backyard workshop ourselves and assembled our new smslingshot prototypes. One very special thanks goes out to Marco and his incredible wife Anastasia for their never ending hospitality, their beautiful garden, and the heavy welcome drinking at the first morning…wheew.

YES. It´s true, even though I couldn´t believe it until i saw it with my very own eyes. The SMSlingshot is part of the Talk to Me exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The show is curated by Paola Antonelli and lasts until the 7th of November. To be seen next to our world tour video and one SMSlingshot behind glas are works by Even Roth, Aram Bartholl, Herzog & De Meuron, Hans Hemmert, Sissel Tolaas…

It´s been a long while no posting here. This has a few reasons, mainly one is that i had so much to do with the SMSlingshot project, a record cover and the whole appearance of a fashion label so that I didn´t found the time to update my website. Ahh yes, and there is a little family i love and try to find time to share with them, and my students I will help learning the rocket science of industrial design. Forgot something… yes, hanging out with the guys and doing simply nothing comes to schedule aswell.
So to keep the flow I just follow up where I ended last time: the Fusion workshop. As some people know, I created cardboard Dubplates to let the Fusion people scratch their own beats and drones. This worked quite good (and sometimes not), but the overall effect is suprisingly good.

Back from this rough week, first Grenoble, then Kiel, after that suicide commando towards spare time utopia fusionfestival I find some time to put up some impressions of the DIY VJ workshop. We had the luck to catch at least some hours of no rain to set up our van as a makeshift canvas and the overheads and slideshow projectors. A lot of people stopped by to try their luck in creating rotated and shifted interferences. Some also started to experiment heavily with the stuff we brought, such as waterbowls, oils, liquids and different foils, grids, and of course our two hour super mock up of a transparent turntable to rotate slides. In the end everything was a total mess, we had a very good time and are still very happy to had this chance of tryingout this idea!

Just a few quick impressions of our SMSlingshot performance in Grenoble. PLAY-IN is such a recommendable small, familiar, beautiful and stress-less digital public media festival: UNBELIEVABLE. Such a warm and professional athmosphere. We´ve been showcasing the SMSlingshot alongside projects by Cran (so poetic) and WECOMEINPEACE, who had set up a perfect pubic kinect hack. All our massive thanks go out to Mathias Perrette who was keeping all strings in hand, Toma, Claire, Raf, Pauline, Chloe, Yannis, Amèl… the whole Narkolepsy crew! See you soon!

^click to enlarge

Thanks to everyone who came to attend my space to space lecture at the Muthesius Art College in Kiel. It was a pleasure to be there, to get a little insight to the industrial design department and the beers and schnaps over the night did their best to keep this evening in good memory. Special Thanks to Kerstin Abraham, Frank Jacob, Linda Schütte and for sheltering me: Birgit and Philipp!

In one week I will hit the road to fusion festival. Together with SHOC, T&E, OPENDESIGNCITY and SONICE we will set up three to four workshops. Our main focus will be on hardware hacking, circuit bending, analog visuals and analog noiseplate cutting. We will be around the workshop hangar and opened from late afternoon to 9pm.

There will be also a double set of lectures i will give together with Miss Pantel at the bunny school in the casino hangar. This stage is organised by the ingeniuos Sigmund Lachs Institute and features loads of interesting talks and lectures. The topic of our lectures is still top secret, even the date, best would be to stop by at the workshop tent and ask there for updates!

I am invited to give a talk about the space to space paradigm at the Muthesius Art College in Kiel Germany. This talk will feature plenty projects that link between spatial input and spatial output. Few of these projects are well known, some are surprisngly new and one or two are by myself. The lecture will take around an hour and starts next tuesday 6pm at the faculty of interaction design. If you are around: drop in!