With my esteemed colleagues Dr. Harald Sack, Jörg Waitelonis and Joscha Jäger, I recently wrote a paper on our project semex—a semantic search engine that supports exploratory video retrieval.

Read the paper as PDF, 1 MB.

semex combines entities and content-based suggestions to support semantic search. The semex interface provides facet filters, entity recommendations, a pagination and browsable search results; all of these elements are interconnected by instant “linking and brushing”. Hence semex enables instantaneous visual feedback on how a selected search facet will affect the displayed result set. This unique feature facilitates a quicker and clearer search process compared to other systems that need to perform new search queries to achieve a similar result. By making the subsequent results available at fingertips, the semex interface allows users to pursue related exploratory search strategies that lead to a genuinely responsive and quick browsing experience.

 

Disambiguation on user input (1), the “Context Explorer” widens the search result (2),
facets derived from the result set (3) and the results themselves (4).
Brushing (5) over a facet provides visual feedback on how the result set will be changed (6)

 
With the introduction of Google Instant, popular web information retrieval has become quick. Immediately after entering a keyword into the search field, suggestions are shown in a drop down box and the result set is constantly updated during text input. Thus, Google provides instantaneous feedback on keyword search and resolves what once have been successively received web pages into a continuous flow of user input and system feedback. As e.g., the video search of Bing plays videos already in thumbnail preview. In this way it transfers the users’ decision making process from the sites actually containing the video content to the page of the video result set itself.

While most keyword-based search systems are optimized to narrow down a huge data space to the most suitable results and present them in “ten blue links”, exploratory search aims at finding results, which are not considered to be related at first glance. Similar to the concept of the flaneur, an urban wanderer of the late 19^th century, who leisurely walks through the more and more modernized urban landscape and draws inspiration from it, exploratory search assists the user in navigating the growing information spaces and lets her choose between alternatives, move along paths, and move back to discover sidetracks and to choose alternative ways. The growing amount of structured data on the web promises to enhance exploratory search by taking into account the actual meaning of the information and its semantics.

Even though speed in terms of system feedback and an upfront but deep gaze into video result items have become available in popular web information retrieval, in the case of exploratory semantic search, instantness and an early preview into represented items on a semantic level, is highly required but only slowly taking shape.

Exploratory semantic search is based on facets and content-based recommendations, enabling the user to better refine and broaden search queries. Extracting entities from vast data collections and to find meaningful representations on the interface is understood to be one of the most important challenges in search today. User interaction overall needs to become more intuitive and lightweight. The success of exploratory semantic search heavily depends on accessible and user-friendly interfaces.

Taking these aspects into consideration, our paper presents the semantic search engine semex, that facilitates its users to perform state-of-the-art exploratory video retrieval. The objective of the interface design was to support its users with a quick feedback on selected facets that encourages exploratory search.

 
We would like to thank Prof. Mario Doulis, Jörg Frohnmayer and Stephan Schröter from Merz Akademie Stuttgart for their valuable feedback and contribution to the project.

semex was developed at Hasso Plattner Institute for IT Systems Engineering in Potsdam, Germany in cooperation with Merz Akademie Stuttgart during the Mediaglobe project. Mediaglobe is part of the THESEUS research program, supported by the Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology on the basis of a decision by the German Bundestag.

The Uncanny Valley is a hypothesis concerning the emotional response of humans to non-human entities (Wikipedia) that applies for example to humanoid robots and faces in computer graphics. One might presume that, the more realistic a human face is mimicked by a robot or CGI character and resembles human behavior and gestures, the more we might be attracted. That is not the case, for example many viewers find almost-but-not-quite-human CGI characters to be disturbing or creepy. Started in 2007 by Bill Higgins and in 2010 fueled by Apple’s iOS Human Interface Guidelines that encouraged designers to create realistic surfaces and to use real-life analogies for the programs on the device, the Uncanny Valley also starting to be discussed in the fields of User Interface Design.

In the seminar at Merz Akademie in Stuttgart we found ourselves between the once reduced styles of Susan Kare and the currently opulent Apple icons, between the by-nature minimalistic Kindle Interface and the shiny iBookstore and since WWDC2011 took place on Tuesday, the whole seminar was overshadowed by iCloud and the imagery that came with Steve Jobs keynote.

iAmp
Artur Musalimov rebuilt a virtual Garage Band amplifier from cardboard and foam material in the exact proportions to place it on top of his Macbook and amplify the sounds from its squeaky speakers. It also was connected to an 8-bit converter that played music contrasting the hi-res and hyper-real imagery. Check the images at Flickr! (soon)

Real Gloss Effect
Constanze Link and Charlotte Hofstetter got tired by the many gloss effects they encountered on their UIs while researching on the seminar’s subject. Eventually the artists made two sculptures from Windows and Apple logos and dashed them with the one and only real gloss effect. Yay!

The Other Side of Browser Icons
Now that most icons are pseudo 3D, Denis Hoffmann decided to catch a glimpse at the other side of those icons. How—for example current browser icons—would look from the other side. The backside of Chrome unmasked the software to be no browser but a huge Google search field. Firefox is open, of course. And not surprisingly, Denis discovered IE to get rusty on the other side.

Real Photo Booth Icon
Lisa Hofmann, Sascha Mickeleit, Shirin Sparr and Kristina Spurgat made a precise real-life model of the Photo Booth icon from iOS. They underwent deep research to find the right equivalents to Photoshop textures and gradients, eventually found an old stool on Kristina attic and surprisingly the cheapest red blanket IKEA hat on stock was remarkably similar to the red curtain of Apple’s Photo Booth. Built on wheels, they took their Photo Booth to the city and tried to squeeze passers-by inside, noticing that the icon’s proportions do not make the model a well-suited apparatus to make images. The stool of the icon and its perfectly rebuilt model was just too tall.

Real iWeb and Versions
Laura Lasinger had a look at the iWeb icon and rebuilt it with gigantic pins to fit the proportions. Even though, Lion is not yet published, she presumed Apple to tell another John Appleseed story on the papers of the Versions card box.

iBookstore
Oliver Ruebener found Apple had already gone so far with real-life analogies in the iBookstore user experience, so that a huge shopping cart would be the next logical step. Check out the great interaction concept on YouTube! (Update soon)

myCloud
After watching Steve Job’s keynote on WWDC2011, Susanne Müller was confused by Jobs’ proposal to upload all her stuff to the cloud. She already had all her important stuff with her. Nevertheless Susanne also wanted to keep up with the times and made “myCloud”, the iCloud alternative in the shape of a handbag. This bag even has a small pocket for her iPhone. All your stuff and data stays in reach and accessible—no need to synchronize.

Uncanny User Icons
Thomas Noschka is a real master with graphic tablets and strives for realism in his illustrations and opulence in design. He was shocked after he saw the demo of Windows 8 and the minimalistic approach that is used for its typography and icons and tiled layout. Comparing that to previous Windows versions (Bob, XP, Vista, 7), this new minimalism just did not fit. So he proposed a even more realistic (and still not photorealistic) version of icons to bring Microsoft again on the right track. Uncanny!

Thanks to all the participating students for their great works.
A documentation of the seminar can be found on our Uncanny Tumblr Blog, more images on my Flickr.

The Semantic Multimedia Explorer research project was initiated by Hasso-Plattner-Institute in Potsdam to develop technologies that reply to the growing amount of multimedia content on the World Wide Web. The Semantic Media Explorer, or semex as we call it, combines state-of-the-art media analysis techniques, such as structural segmentation, intelligent character recognition, the ability to detect genres and faces in videos and semantic technologies. In this project I am responsible for the interface design of semex.

The amount of multimedia content on the World Wide Web is growing rapidly. To manage and organize this content new technologies are required. One example of such technologies is the semantic multimedia search. Semantic multimedia search offers an efficient way to access this growing amount of data. Automated processes for semantic analysis of audiovisual content provide the solution to the current problem.

The Semantic Media Explorer combines state-of-theart media analysis procedures, such as automatic scene segmentation, intelligent character recognition, and the ability to detect genres and faces in videos. As a result, the Semantic Media Explorer provides optimal access to video content. This new kind of multimedia search offers users enhanced support with semantically enhanced metadata and intuitive user interfaces. The information extracted via the media analysis is correlated using semantic information so that users can identify new links and rummage around in the multimedia content.

Read more about semex in the official PDF from Hasso Plattner Institute.

Since its launch, the App Store is lacking a clear set of rules about what content is and is not allowed inside the successful platform. This is not so much a problem for the transfer of established publishing to the new medium. But, as could be be seen with several examples, it is for projects that are satirical or play with the limitations of the platform itself.

My students asked themselves times and again if the app they had to make during my recent seminar at Berliner Technische Kunsthochschule, actually would be approved by Apple or not.

Eventually we tried to make a virtue out of necessity and explicitly made concepts for artistic apps, that had a satirical and political part and as such were unlikely to be approved by Apple. We came to understand that art, satire and politics are underrepresented in the App Store and that this will be difficult to change.

So we opened Another App Store, one that was capable of containing our contributions to App Culture.

As Brien Chen from Wired puts it: “We in the press don’t know to what extent we can retain our editorial freedom in the App Store. Working with Apple’s current opaque policy, we’re left to trust that Apple will do the right thing. And time and time again, Apple’s App Store reviewers have been proven fallible, as recently shown by the rejection of Mark Fiore’s Pulitzer-winning cartoon. Apple rejected the toon because it “ridicules public figures,” and after coming under fire in the press, the company approved the app. But in reversing its decision, Apple still did not make its content policy clear. Instead, the Fiore episode raised more questions. Does it mean we can now publish satire? Or does it mean we have to win a Pulitzer in order to publish satire? Or does it mean we have to stir up negative press in order to publish satire?”

 
Projects from the Another App Store
(links lead to students’ final presentation slides, some in German):

Christian Rösike—The App Store App
Even though Apple introduced In-App-Purchase, it is highly unlikely that Apple will approve an app that exactly mimics the business model of the App Store inside the App Store. Nevertheless the App Store App is in now way inferior to its bigger brother when it come to functionality and look and feel. During his presentation Christian only showed unmodified screenshots from the App Store :)

Rut Sigurðardóttir—iConfess
The purpose of the app is to give people the opportunity to free themselves from sins they have committed. Sinners can buy an absolution and start again with a clean conscience towards god. Absolution for smaller sins start from 99 Cents to more serious ones like murder for up to 999 Euros. I do not know if In-App-Purchase range that high. Have a look at the final presentation and at the exact prices. Another funny thing about this app was that a quite similar app published by the Catholic Church got approved.

Simon Siefert and Christoph Rauscher—CrackApp
On launch, CrackApp pretends not to be launched and again shows the user’s home screen. When the user again taps on the Crack App icon, the front window appears to be bursting. The more the user tabs on the screen, the more intense the shattering of the display. After the display, chips inside the device and its backside are shattered, it is possile to “look through” the device with the built-in camera. Have a look at CrackApp in detail.

Jessika Klemm—Windows Media Player App
The infamous music player from Microsoft comes to the iPhone. Unsurprisingly the Windows Media Player App lets you upgrade from iOS to Windows Mobile very easily. And unfortunately it does not play AAC files. Have a look at the Windows-like iPhone design.

Stephan Winkler—Doom 2011
Great augmented reality ego shooter piece that lets you creep into Apple Stores late at night and “play” in a doom-like manner with the hardware situated there. Play along!

Claudia Matthias—Forbidden Fruits
Inspired by the infamous Wobble App, Claudia’s app presents examples of famous painted nudes. It is a matter of course, that on the masterpieces can be shaken and that they do not only wobble but go the full monty. Presentation slides.

Oliver Schaal—iRacist, iPassengerCheck, iCustomer
An app that let users do what all of us do all the the time—classifying people according to their outer appearance. A practical application of the app with higher chances to be accepted by Apple facilitates risk classification of flight passengers by similar means. Another modification is called iBusinessContact and lets users classify scanned people according to the suitability as customers or business contacts.

Lisa Erkinger—iKo
This tamagochi-like app ist too hot for the App Store: “Hello, my name is iKo. May I be your friend? I like your smile. Let me make you happy.“

Thomas Bretzke—iWindows 95

A great remix of two interfaces that are meant to be from so different ages of interface design. iWindows 95 is not only an emulator that lets you run an entire office suite on your mobile phone, but it is also the proof that rounded corners and gloss effects are nothing more that interchangeable styling on top the same interface principles. I am exaggerating, of course.

Oleg Hein—Leaks Everywhere
An app that is made to brings together the interface commodities of an app and features of Wikileaks. But can there be any secrecy in a closed platform like the App Store? Check out the presentation slides of Leaks Everywhere.

Thanks to my esteemed colleague Prof. Thomas Noller.

I came to the understanding that I had been searching string based needles for too long now. Not only me, web search as such is moving towards entity based search. On my journey I did not only visit the village Needles, I also got to know Jimmy Needles, an American basketball coach and saw the blockbuster horror movie Needle directed by John V. Soto. Needles to say that these distinctions also shoud be made in an elegant way information retrieval.

CONTENTUS—A Semantic Multimodal Search User Interface

View more of my presentations at Slideshare.

The search interface of CONTENTUS combines different media and entity types within one result page. The types comprise books, newspaper-articles, videos, images, audio, locations, and persons. Thereby, locations and persons are entities and not documents. All types can be visually distinguished by an individual layout and icon set. For example, search results for locations reveal a geo-map, and an image preview is presented in video image results. The relevance ranking of the search result is supported by different sizes of the single result items. The more relevant an item is, the more space is provided to show related information.

I, Johannes P Osterhoff, shall do a one year performance piece.

The piece is called Google and documents all searches I perform with the search engine of the same name.

The performance shall start on January 1, 2011 and shall end on December 31, 2011.

I shall not use undocumented ways to use the search engine Google during this time.

Each of my search queries shall create a webpage that is indexed by this search engine and thus creates an unique feedback loop.

Search queries can be bought and shall cost 99 cents each.

For search, I shall use only these computers during this year:
Laptop — Apple MacBook Pro, OS X, Windows 7, each with Firefox
Netbook — Samsung N130, Ubuntu, Firefox
Work — Dell Desktop, Windows 7, Firefox
Mobile — Apple iPhone 3G, iOS, Mobile Safari

You can follow the searches by RSS and a selection by Twitter.

 

Google has been exhibited together with the Submit Button and Freedom from Porn during Hyperkult XX in summer 2011.

Nice words on Google can be found on the homepage of Joachim Stein
and funny comments on Nerdcore.

The Firewall Ball Cup took place during Wahlwoche from December 6 till 10, 2010 at Merz Akademie in Stuttgart. The documentation video was directed, shot and cut by Marc Bretzler.

The Ö?üt Foul will enter the history books of Firewall Ball.

From icon to trophy—the Firewall Ball Cup.

More images can be found on Flickr and some social network.

Participants of the seminar and players were Saskia Aldinger, Vlatko Babic, Esra Bayrak, Brandi Bryant, Hannes Buchwald, Darja Daut, Marina Gröpel, Jens Kefer, Steve Krapitz, Daniel Kurfess, Cando?an Ö?üt, Jan Wenger. With a special guest appearance by Prof. Mario Doulis and Merz Allstars Isabel Aller, Robert Kaiser and Irmela Nothdurft.

The Firewal Ball Masters logo was created by Jan Wenger,
the Firewall Ball Song by Steve Krappitz.

Thanks to all participants! Get well…

We stressed the “browsing” capabilites of its user interface and its multi-modal presentation of search results.
The paper present the semantic search engine CONTENTUS and its user interface, a multimedia retrieval system developed in the context of the German research project THESEUS. This interface uses content-based suggestions and a multi-modal presentation of search results to support semantic search. In addition, the system deploys a combination of a facetted browsing and breadcrumb-based navigation; a time-line enables time based filtering of the search results and the system suggests related search results according to the user’s preferences. Finally, CONTENTUS has become more than the sum of its parts. Its unique feature combination facilitates search to become a more efficient and overall more pleasant user experience.

When showing various media types on one result page, special care has to be devoted to the feedback that lets the user know why exactly the listed items have been presented. To find an appropriate balance between the demand for details on the one hand and ease of use on the other hand is subject to further research on CONTENTEUS.

The paper was accepted at the workshop VISSW 2011 Visual Interfaces to the Social and Semantic Web held in conjunction with the International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI 2011) in Palo Alto.

Founded in 1923, Young & Rubicam Advertising is one of the world’s largest consumer advertising agencies, offering strategic and creative development, consumer research and marketing. Young & Rubicam Advertising ranks as the world’s 10th largest advertising agency, with revenues of approximately $907 million.

Together with my friends from Deuxième Degré Berlin I created an state-of-the-art 2.0 website for Young & Rubucam Germany. We made the complex requirements fit into a sleak and easy to use WordPress theme. As Art Director of the project, I created a minimalistic typographic style bringing together the brand’s history and progressive orientation.

The labs originate in yovisto, the academic video serach engine to upload, share, search, tag, and discuss scientific videos. In addition to the function of a video search engine, yovisto enables the search within lecture videos. yovisto provides an automated mechanism to generate a full-text index of the videos.

With yovisto it is possible to describe video content collaboratively, additionally users can place keywords or labels (tagging) at any position within a video (collaborative tagging) and they can start or carry on discussions belonging to any position within the video. Moreover, users can write or edit wiki-pages to enrich the video content with further information, such as images, hyperlinks, and text. The content based search functionality of yovisto is the most important additional benefit for the user and allows an efficient search through yovisto’s repository.

Read more about yovisto at Wikipedia, for example.

Is that why Apple users live in bourgeois allotment gardens houses? Freed from the Uncanny Valley of interface design, “Home, Sweet Home” was shown in real public space on the streets of Berlin, at Ars Electronica St. Oberholz in Berlin and during Hyperkult XX on Lüneburg.

 

Every house building starts with a plan.

Painting the shutters for the single window.

The OS X house has a very solid door.

After long reserach I found a wallpaper to properly fake the fake plaster.

Last summer I took “Home, Sweet Home” to various places. This is why I made a two straps on its back. They are useful to take it rucksack-like from exhibition to exhibition. When I am carry it around I usually get to know a lot of people :)

Facades

At German supermarket Aldi

Different homes

The single window painted in blue, with shutters and white curtains

The front door

“Home, Sweet Home” in a corner of Ars Electronica 2010 with an Austrian inhabitant.

“Home, Sweet Home” at Sankt Oberholz, Berlin…

…and together with my first Interface Artwork during Hyperkult XX in Lüneburg.

After quite some time I decided to return to my roots as an Interface Artist and do an image with Aqua’s interface elements again. No scrollbars this time, but all possible bubbles from the top left of our windows. Actually from both themes (Blue and Graphite) in all click states available.

I used the image from Wikipedia as a starting point.
Acaben’s portrait of Steve Jobs from WWDC 2007 was of great help.
Thanks.

Top left detail view

Top right detail view

Close up view of Steve Job’s eye

Plus and minus, maximize and minimize

Detail of the green turtleneck, Steve Jobs is famous for.

Feel free to download the larger version of “Window Control” as PNG file (2.4 MB)

Update: Actually made for the Dutch Bright Magazine,
here you can see it printed by German “m” in February 2011.

For quite some time now I was thinking what exactly to do with the many depictions of firewalls on the web and the firewall icon of Windows in particular. With Windows XP the feature of a firewall was introduced to the GUI and this new feature came with a depiction of a brick wall in front of a globe representing the World Wide Web. For Aram Bartholl’s great TELE INTERNET at the latest Ars Electronica I decided to make a serious sport out of it.

The first players of Firewall Ball said they started to play simply because the wall was there. Others started to play for political reasons and some said it was an update of Volleyball that they had been long awaiting. Indeed, Firewall Ball resembles this game of the last century. And yet it is strikingly different: instead of a common net there is standing a (really) big Firewall in the middle of the playing field—and instead of a common volleyball Firewall Ball is played with a big world ball. And the rules are different, too.

Firewall Ball Rules, ver 0.2

Firewall Ball is a sport for two teams. Each team consists of at least four players.

Players start to throw the ball from the mark in the middle of the field. Their main goal is to play the ball to other team members on the other side. A teams scores a point when a player succesfully plays the ball to another team member on the other side of the wall. The ball must not be dropped and must be played back withing 1 sec otherwise the other team is allowed to start (and score). In general, scoring of one team is interrupted, if fouls are committed or the ball drops back to the field of the active player.

The firewall we used at Ars was 1.80 m tall and 2.61 m wide. It was made of 14 stylized red brick stones. These stones rest loosely on each other. The game is played until no bricks rest on one other.

First official Firewall Ball playing field.

Yay! Firewall Ball shirts!

Players in action.

This earth ball is glowing more than your icon ever could.

First official Firewall Ball interview ;)

More on Firewall Ball

Firewall Ball’s page at the Defence Project
Interview for great Hyperexhibition
ORF Futurezone on TELE INTERNET and Firewall Ball
Video doku of TELE INTERNET
More images of Firewall Ball on Flickr

The topic of William Tell is timeless. As with its premiere in 1804, the piece is now more than ever a parable for individual protest against despotic oppression.

And yet many contemporary interpretaions failed. Recently for example Bad Hersfeld Festival tried to give Schiller’s piece a long awaited update. According to the adaptation and the reception of Frankfurter Allgemeine, Tell has become a “cool guy in a leaher jacket”. But a real revival of Wilhelm Tell is not done with dressing the protagonist in different clothes—or let him drive a VW bully through a dusty setting.

Today—when everything is 2.0 and products turn to whole widgets—our rulers have become technology and software manufacturers, but still of importance is everybody’s freedom. Perfectly designed user experience and multi-touch make us forget that the easy-to-use interfaces are designed not only for our benefit. The more beautiful those interfaces are and the more compelling the experience from purchase to consumption, the quicker the Gruen transfer. With the AppStore, Apple has not only created a platform for programs. The back then hardware manufacturer now controls all small programs, books and magazines on its devices, music and videos to a great extent.

How free are authors in the realm of an emerging überpublisher, for example when publisher and topic inevitably collapse? We wanna find out it and try with William Tell 2.0 an indeed political update of the old play.

Wilhelm Tell 2.0 is a simple game for at least two players. Each player wears an iPhone (or an iPod touch or something else with Apple insignia on its back) on his or her head. With balls players try to hit each other’s device. The player (or team) who hits (all) the other player’s (or team’s) iPhone(s) win.

Here you can see the very first actual game of Wilhelm Tell 2.0 with a prototype. Currently we prepare variations with crossbow and paintball ;)

 

The first play of Wilhelm Tell 2.0 took place on August 12, 2010 near Bornholmer Brücke.

The prototype of Wil-Helm. A solid construction keeps your iPhone in place and makes clear if the hit was valid or just a grace shot.

No revival without consulting the classics.

 

Improvised setup during the many Firewall Ball matches at Ars Electronica 2010.

Black and white versions of Wil-Helm at Ars.

 

Frieder Nake playing Tell 2.0 during Hyperkult XX.

Other shootouts during Hyperkult XX.

See more images of early Tell 2.0 on Flickr!

And the question remains: why the iBookstore looks like Billy?

Select some books and put them into Billy (beech veneer).

The first try.

The Billy corner at Ikea Tempelhof, Berlin.

Billy fits perfectly into our iPad made of cardboard—with a little help of Photoshop…

Spontaneous reading to a small and surprised audience.

One of the key factors of search engine optimization that is clouded in secrecy is the mysteries Google Juice. It is ment to be an ethereal substance which flowts between web pages via their hyperlinks. The amount of Google Juice flowting around a page thus reflects how well connected it is.

After a long quest I was able to catch the myth-enshrouded liquid and to precess it for mass consumption. Currently you can buy Google Juice only at the German discounter Netto, but I am negotiating with other distributors as well. Buy Google Juice today and get well connected and refreshed from this tonic potion.

Update: The real Google Juice actually came from Rene :)

Another Update: DO NOT drink Google Juice. It is highly addictive!

 

The first bottle of Google Juice.

Google offers really everything :)

Online result layout offline. Read carefully.

Google Juice and others at a Berlin based supermarket.

As one can see in the relaxed posture Apple imagines for its future users, the iPad is about to offer an entirely new porn experience. The user experience of the device and its dimensions will make it a perfect hand for porn viewers. If not—it will be due to the platform only.

A reply to the revealing discussion Gawker blogger Ryan Tate had with Steve Jobs:

Freedom from Porn is was located at the subway at Rosenthaler Platz.

Update: Regarding media attention, Freedom from Porn was a quite successful piece.
On the weekend the iPad was launched, it was featured on many blogs and press and it eventually inspired the work of even rigorous adbusters who spread the message to WWDC 2010.
Congrats guys, and thanks for your nice words:

Freedom from Porn featured in De:Bug magazine’s 2010 annual review.

This is the first part of a series of overall seven projects dealing with Windows 7 and the system’s piety and numerology. The seven windows of the installation were made of two-layered acrylic glass and were hung side by side.

The icon I used comes from the deep abyss of system files where a huge amount of data from another age of computer experience seems to carve out a miserable existence. In the DLL and EXE files of the hidden system folders of Windows 7 one can find icons from age-old versions of the operating system and images that appear to have not been touched for centuries.

One of them is the icon of the process “Winlogon” which is responsible for authentication and handling user profiles; depending on the version of Windows, it also sets up the desktop environment and checks if a legal copy of Windows is used. This crucial process and its associated icon is located at C:\Windows\System32\winlogon.exe

7 Windows gives insight into the ancestry of Windows 7 and is the first of overall seven projects dealing with the current spiritual condition of the famous operating system.

7 Windows was shown together with Defence at Platoon Kunsthalle in Seoul from March 22 till April 26, 2010.

But so far I couldn’t.

Anyway I have the impression, people find me in Facebook too easily and many start to use Facebook instead of e-mail. As I do not like this at all and as I do not want to enter the gated community of Facebook everyday, I decided to make the process a bit more difficult.

My approach is to do something against this process from the outside, so I concentrated on Google. Old acquaintance seem to query my name in Google, find the entry of Facebook and contact me there without checking my website or using the contact possibilities of good ol’ e-mail. So I created a very simple web-page which also shows up in Google search results and looks very similar to the result of Facebook there. I called it Fakebook.

This is the result you get when you query Google for “johannes p osterhoff, facebook”:

And this is my simple web page as it shows up in Google many, many pages later:

As you can see, Facebook has become very influential and unfortunately shows up very early in Google’s result list. You can help m Fakebook to overtake Facebook (or at least come closer to it) by linking to my Facebook-like page.

Thank you very much! If you do, please let me know with a short e-mail to
contact at johanes-p-osterhoff dot com
Or send me a message… via Facebook.

Update May 17: In the meantime Fakebook shows up in the search results. At least.

Here you can see icons for “order projects”, “time observation sheet” (yawn), “assign to consultant”, “filled forms”, “monitoring” and “integration”.

 

For Vodafone

 

For Nokia

 

For Sonim

The Defence Project is about the many promises of absolute security. Currently these symbols, icons illustrations and terms are spreading rapidly. Especially on current interfaces the defensive imagery leads to many striking examples that should not go unnoticed. With the Defence Project Plog I try to condense both projects and texts on this subject.

In my first post I used the ad of Deutsche Telekom from late 2009 to link what I was up to:

With what was called a bird’s eye view in earlier times but nowadays immediately calls connotations to CCTV and surveillance, the makers of this ad knowingly open up a neatly composed Mise-en-scène. We are supposed to watch from far and not to participate. From above we see a concrete floor, a basketball field. Children are playing, they trundle hoops and throw balls. A celebration. We see a slide, a wheel of fortune. And a gigantic inflatable castle.

A text in the upper left corner reminds us that this perfect idyll was not achieved by the children’s parents, but by T-Home, the branch of Deutsche Telekom being responsible for landline communication. The parents, the ones this ad actually is made for, are surprisingly not present at all (or hidden behind a Gaussian blur making the ad’s text more readable). In this eeriness, the most important carrier of meaning is the colorful castle in the front.

This certainly was sponsored by T-Home to the organizers of the street celebration. And they have their reasons: an inflatable castle is a great symbol for safety and lightness at the same time. A castle of stone does not imply the intended connotation. The positive meaning of security would change to a negative one, one of imprisonment. A bouncing castle does now.

This blog deals with the strategies used to achieve a feeling of safety by visual means. Especially on the internet and in the graphical user interface, depictions of (fire-) walls, small castles and cute vaults automatically add this lightness to the depiction of safety and both accompany each other in a mostly unintentionally comic interplay.

This interplay is the topic of both Defence Project and its documentation.

At Berliner Technische Kunsthochschule in the semester of 2009 I had the chance to start a lecture series that brings together artists, theorists and designers in the digital drop shadow. The series continues this semester.

The digital drop shadow is the most popular effect in computer graphics today. Easily applied, it made its way to modern graphic design and advertising. It raises typography and objects from a flattened background into three-dimensionality—and thus significance.

With the current generation of operating systems the drop shadow effect entered the graphical user interface to a new extent. In this context it raises not only windows from background wallpapers; it also stands for a visually enriched interface that strives towards three-dimensionality. Loaded with rich imagery, photorealistic icons and pseudo three-dimensional configurations the graphical user interface yet remains tied to its flat medium.

Bewildered by this paradox, the graphical user interface leaves the office it was made for and becomes a pop culture phenomenon.

The Drop Shadow Talks reply to current developments on the visually enriched layer for machine interaction. In the shades of evening lectures the Drop Shadow Talks regularly present art and projects influenced and inspired by the baroque graphical user interface.

Speakers list:
Prof. Owen Mundy, artist from Florida State University
JODI, artists from the Netherlands and Belgium
Prof. Hans Dieter Hellige, Universität Bremen
Prof. Marc Hassenzahl, Folkwang University of Arts, Essen
Gordan Savicic, artist from Berlin
Constant Dullaart, artist from Berlin
Prof. Jay David Bolter, Georgia Institute of Technology
Jan Robert Leegte, artist from Amsterdam
Prof. Olia Lialina and Dragan Espenschied, artists from Merz Akademie Stuttgart
Michelle Teran, artist from Berlin
Aram Bartholl, artist from Berlin
Lars Harmsen, designer from Karlsruhe

The Drop Shadow Talks take place at Berliner Technische Kunsthochschule.

Vimeo channel and website of the Drop Shadow Talks.