Christian Zöllner

Friends. Time to pause for a while. Time to think about what all happened throughout the year. Remembering the new made friends, the new places here and beyond the oceans. Time to leave the focus on the future. Calming down, reflecting on the WHY and HOW. You see, somehow I like the last days of the year. Especially for saying thank you. There have been !again! so many people helping me with my projects, my ideas and weird plans concerning … whatever! Thank you, you know who you are. For all you guys I put some of my favourite songs of this year in the blender ranging from dub to step to skwee to experimental beats. The Mix is online here for listening and free download!I hope you enjoy it!

This was a week. I accompanied the SMSlingshot through europe, starting in Palma de Mallorcas Contemporary Art Museum, where we showcased our work and held a talk about our “Act on hybrid Estates”. The talk was extended with a short summary of the design process of the SMSlingshot. Pau Waelder held the introduction showing some very interesting, and some well known projects of digital art in public space. His resulting article can be seen here. The performance in the museum yard was a total success - no bugs, no breaks, no hassles. The people gave and explained the SMSlingshots each other during the evening.

After these two sunny days we left Palma and headed to Eindhovens STRP festival, to let the people explore our concept “reclaim the screens” there. This annual festival is absolutely stunning. We never been exhibited in so high class neighbourhood. WORM collective was there, Fur Art, Chris Cunningham, onedotzero and Lawrence Malstaff. Wow. We showcased for three nights in the entrance area and let the people give their comments on the Geert Wilders racist a**hole. This worked well and the idea of bringing the discussion back to the people worked really well. And, not without, we held a talk on the Pubic Art Panel, mainly speaking about the making and the background of the SMSlingshot.

After more than one year it´s done: the documentation of the Schwarmlabor / Swarmlab project from summer term 2009 is available.  The book features all the projects and workshops that took place during the whole term, including the processing and arduino workshop. It also contains an exclusive imprint of the talk given by Prof. Niels Werber about transnational swarms and essays by Prof. Axel Kufus, Prof. Gesche Joost and Prof. Dr. Ingo Rechenberg. The whole editorial and design work was done by me during the last year. Below you can flip through the pdf and if you like you can order the book here

Last week the VR/urban team was invited by Amnesty International to show the SMSlingshot at the Museumsquartier in Vienna. The occasion (Day of death penalty) was less delectable than the fact that a lot of people haved used their voice against capital punishment and death by right. We used background illustrations for the first time to better trigger a discourse in front of the facade and by this on the facade. There are also videos available: here and here.

I just briefly post this video, send to me by the °FACT Liverpool team. It covers partly the performance during the joint broadcasting performace while the mediafacades festival opening. Enjoy!

We are back from a short but very intense and inspiring trip from Madrid. We had the opportunityto show the SMSlingshot during the white nights festival at the MediaLab Prado. It was the first time we used the new graphic engine and a LED facade as hardware. What to say?! It worked out very smoothly, no problems and the people enjoyed the performance very much. By far the best message that have been shot during the whole project. Thanks madrid, espacially carles, daniel, monica and nerea for making it possible!

WOW. I´m back from brazil since three weeks but thats the first day I really get into reflecting and posting about FILE festival and the SMSlingshot project in Brazil.

First: it was an amazing trip. We met so many new friends and saw even more interesting projects from all over the world that it´s hard to list everyone. FILE festival especially the awarded projects and the exhibited pieces at FIESP/SESI theatre are worth talking about. You can get the full report at the InterfaceBlog by Form+Zweck. It´s so much, that it might take while to cover all the projects.

FILE festival was divided into a few parts: We´ve been part of Paulista Interactiva, a curated bunch of projects that deal with interactive art in public space and were shown along Paulista avenue, one of the big main streets in Sao Paulo. During three nights we took our equipment consisting of three SMSlingshots, a massive 15.000 AL projector, and our laptop with the little camera and modem and stuffed it into a little combi van. Then we built everything up in the street and the people reclaimed their surrounding facades. Thanks to Daniel for his support and help! We won´t forget! The people, and the festival curators aswell, loved the SMSlingshot and so got the third prize in the interactive art category at the FILE PRIX LUX awards. Thanks for that one! We are also featured in the festival reader which is a brick of a book containig also a dvd with our demo-video.

Because FILE is more then just showing cool projects, we got the opportunity to give a talk during the symposium. The first time we declared the “act on hybrid estates”, our manifest for free access to public images. It was well appreciated and will be translated in portugues soon and published in shortened german version in the next weave magazine.

Finally I want to thank Gabrielle for the support, Daniel for the portugues training and the technical assistance, The whole FILE festival crew for making it possible to come over

Flights go on wednesday, nothing is packed, everything is dismantled and a slight feeling of stress is coming up.  But as always everything will work fine and we´ll be standing at Tegel with three realtime working SMSlingshots ready to be shown at the museum of modern art Sao Paulo, a perfectly worked out keynote lecture for the FILE symposium and enough sound, books and happy vibes to stand the long flight to brazil.

As you might now allready know, we are invited to show our SMSlingshot project during the FILE electronic art fesitval in Sao Paulo Brazil. We will show it at three different venues, one at MASP,  SESI theatre and in the streets. On the 27th of July we also give a talk at the related symposium to declare the “Act on Hybrid Estates” - our manifest on digital augmented urban space. And not to forget meet an incredible bunch of nice and interesting people. And Mojito showers every morning!

I will try to post the best projects we will see at the festival at the TUI^Blog by Form+Zweck design magazine. So drop by there from time to time and get the news!