Typresso trailer

quickie for the presentation tomorrow.



now off to watch 'PI' with fellow classmatians

Classmates random motion + my soundbite

Emil Rydberg featured a snippet i've made in some totally random motion he done for his portfolio.



it seems to fit for a strange reason

Logo's, Tunes & Graphics

School: Logo for typresso, a revolutionized way of chatting! (?)




And between tomorrows, new tune! with a nice image:





CLICK HERE FOR MP3

Digtial Media 07 KarlsKrona's Daily Bread

STRP!

We finally returned from our inspiring trip from the STRP festival. It was really nice to be back in Holland for a few days to meet my friends, family and go to RAVE! as the swedes adress it. It was a bit of a hassle to ship 12 swedes back and forth to Holland to my parents place and try to keep an eye on them. But it worked out really well.

The night of arrival we went out in my hometown Uden, no bigger than Karlskrona but apparently more fun. Probably because the alcohols are half the price they used to. Many happy hours!

The swedes weren't easy to exhaust and to get home. But finally we managed to go home and sleep. We needed the rest for the full nighter at STRP. We all woke up later than suggested and everyone was still a bit tired and hungover. But they did it to themselves. After ending the endless showercue we finally could go down to STRP.

STRP was long and there was too much to review indvidually, so I will only review the things that are still sticking in my head.

ATOM

Atom was a really inspiring music and spatial visual piece done by monolake. They created 64 balloons on a grid which were replacable by height and therefor they could create abstract sculptures with these balloons. Each of these balloons could light up whenever they wanted to. Accompanied with some really good abstract music they managed to create a beautiful and inspiring piece of work.



TFT Tennis

Plain simple, but good, pong in 3D, I loved it.



Bejing Accelerator

An agile tool to view nice panoramas from Bejing



Motor Karaoke

Haha probably the one with the highest entertainment value. A racing game based upon on ruke: The harder you scream, the faster you go. You could hear people screaming from the other side of the building. Some swedes lost their voice here.



Otolab: Circo Ipnotico

Some really heavy visual ride existing plainly on abstract circles and circular rotations. Together with the sounds it was hypnotizing. This exhibition endured like 45 minutes. After ten minutes we went away before getting brainwashed. Video later today.



Soundspots

Really nice dolby surround soundscape. With basically some sound cones, which were like sound showers to extend the experience of the position of the sound.



And there is more to be reviewed, but these were my main beloved experiences. To add, the sitting bags were really nice and there was some good music too! I would say encore to Trentemoller, Monolake, Various Productions and U-Dub (instead of loefah)!

The golden soundbites folder

After many requests I revived the /audio folder upon stijlfigurant.nl. This folder has been gone for a couple of months due to clumsy server moving. Luckily after a few days of downtime they managed to put most of my stuff back online, but not my beloved audio folder, which I used for uploading new soundbites, finished tracks, mixes and so-on. Reason: they did not backup folders bigger than 2 gigabytes.

Oh really, that is just what a good service should be about!? Very well then, make up your own rules, but then please presuade consitency.. For instance, my /motion folder was bigger than 2g's as well, but that one got backed up? Oh hell they have learnt me a good lesson. Don't go for small(er) and cheap hosting again. I will never use the webhosting: yourname after this again due this brilliant fact.

Anyhow back to the point. Some nice recent stuff to be found here, to bad no time in Karlskrona to finish a single bit, anyway, enjoy:

/Audio

Some layouting buisness

Good, things are rolling again, loads of workshops and some hands on work.

Results for the few:

A few hrs of typography

A few hrs of layouting


Note: All the content as the images aren't belong to me and far from absolute truth.

Useful tool when facing a difficult descision

My submission for hyper's cooperative christmas calendar

My first release!

Hurray, released on UMR 002, experimental belgian label.

look for dead pigeon entertainment

more tracks:

Myspaz

Touching the sand in the sandbox

So many things, so little time. So I will try to keep it edible. Last week has been very stressfull the birth of reclaimmagenta and the death of a buisnessplan. Not really the death, we successfully managed to finish the plan with a lot of utopian woordpooping from my side. But the investers didn't buy it. Or to be said better, they liked it but they suggested we should try to look for investments somewhere else.

ReclaimMagenta was a great succes, over 10.000 visters in one week from day one. We are almost up to a 1000 petitions by now. Meanwhile I really havent had the time to keep it evolving, and therefore freemagenta.nl smelled cash came in and stole our pride. No need to be having war on who has the best initiative, it's all for the sake of magenta. Only the part of money making over this annoys me. This remembers me of a quote I stumbled upon a couple of days ago. "I am the modern day robin hood, stealing from the rich, giving to the poor and keeping a little for myself". Im the brokest motherfucker in town, but still, I keep my values.

For the rest things are going pretty well, doing lots of freelance stuff and adding some value to Hyper here and there (which is another blogpost worthy writing about). But somedays I feel a bit displaced when I hear stuff going down in my old natural habitat from my friends. The best I heard this week as Bram msnd me: "I met Guus and Stephan the other day, they told me: 'are you coming to the party at Coen and Kasper's home next week in Breda' and I(bram) said : but they dont live there anymore? they answerd:'No but were still invited'". I am happy to hear my housemates keep the Weerijssingel 15 legend going :). Way too bad I can't be there..

A new module started, and it started of with a bang. I really enjoyed Greg's lecture today. He learned us how to start playing again. I have to get myself a new sandbox. But he lost me when it got tedious in the end. My focus wanderd off and I started to enter a half sleeping half awake state of mind. Therefore his words entered my mind but created other words than he actually was saying.

I here some echos down in the hall saying: "Goodnight, see you tomorrow, you are the only one left now!".

So thats a good reminder that I really need to go home, grab a beer and get some sleep. It will be early tomorrow and it will be early the whole week. And loads of extra work has to be done, so maybe this is the first and the last update this week, you better enjoy it.

RECLAIM MAGENTA

soon to be found on reclaimmagenta.net

Rapid Pink Movements

Many things to running around my head to write about this week. Too sad there is such a minimal amout of time. But there is one thing that pisses me off right now: T-Mobile (a mobile phone company) claimed the rights of the color maganeta. So they sue every other company that uses that color... Makes my blood boil. Up untill now I only found reports in dutch. But I will try to keep you updated.

I will put up a petition site, to reclaim the pink! (some hrs later today).

To keep it pink, there is a lot going on around the topic of free online music distrubution as Oink got busted sometime last week. There is something revolutionairy music distribution wise going on this moment. But more on that later (today I hope).

Finally! someone has reinvented the paperclip

and made it even better



to bad i can't read the website

Buisness Managment Website

Me and Andreas Widman are going to work on the buisness management website based upon the hel-looks website. We both made some sketches.

These were mine:

BOINK

The Pirate Bay To Bring Back OiNK

"In this sense, Oink was not only an absolute paradise for music fans, but it was unquestionably the most complete and most efficient music distribution model the world has ever known. I say that safely without exaggeration. It was like the world's largest music store, whose vastly superior selection and distribution was entirely stocked, supplied, organized, and expanded upon by its own consumers. If the music industry had found a way to capitalize on the power, devotion, and innovation of its own fans the way Oink did, it would be thriving right now instead of withering. If intellectual property laws didn't make Oink illegal, the site's creator would be the new Steve Jobs right now. He would have revolutionized music distribution. Instead, he's a criminal, simply for finding the best way to fill rising consumer demand. I would have gladly paid a large monthly fee for a legal service as good as Oink - but none existed, because the music industry could never set aside their own greed and corporate bullshit to make it happen."

When Pigs Fly: The Death of Oink, the Birth of Dissent, and a Brief History of Record Industry Suicide.

Funny-o-meter

http://www.drewheffron.com/

The winter is yet to come

Autumn hasn't finished yet, but you could notice the shadow of the winter extending every day. Days getting shorter, docks getting empty and common mures preparing their bellies for on hell of an overnighter. More and more people changing their shoes for cars, while everything is a 10 minutes walk around this by god forgotten near to comatose town. It almost seems that there are more people leaving South than birds. Even my parents, born and raised in even smaller towns in Holland, which came to visit last weekend, described this place as excitngly dull

So this is what Sweden is all about and I slowly come to understanding their alcohol problem. It's either get drunk or get lost.

The last channel on our TV is slowly fading, we experience recurring power outages and so Duckburg is slowly taken down with the whole town. I spend more and more time in my prisoncell. The only daylight I see is in the morning when I walk to school. The prison is one of the most cosiest place to be in these times. More and more hours I spend behind my one and only lightsource, my computer. And I feel like I'm going to the monastry of digital media development, when I come out after this winter I will be able to create code with my mind.

Still there are some small threads of light going out of this place thanks to the internet and I'm happy I could participate with WordWide. The photo I've taken symbolizes the comatose situation of this town and that the winter is yet to come.

I'm also eager to get back to Holland in the end of Novemberto visit STRP FSTVL and I believe that more classmates want to get the hell out of here as there are 11 Hypernauts coming along.

Time for some serious crunching!

a beautiful Win 386 promo video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QGO2hVA3P58

thanks to my friend Pieter

(still i believe its afaik (mission impossible theme?))

Building flexible bridges for bughunting safaris with Tore

Me and Tore went to Expo C today, a tech conference at Marin Museum. They offered Hyper Island a couple free tickets and me Tore took the chance. Basically most of the stuff was far beyond our hat. It was adressed to software developers in general, which we aren't. For the first time since ages I felt n00b again. We are just media developers who know a little bit of Actionscript, Java, Processing, XML, Html, PHP. But nothing such as C++ and projects of 10k+ LOC (which means 10.000 lines of code (yes i've learned a new short today)).

Anyhow there was some intersting stuff on DuckTyping, for flexible XML webservices and some interesting views on Agile software development, which seems to be a new trend or a Buzzword. This Agile stuff felt really UGL and probably should improve the atmosphere and the effectiveness of work on the workfloor.

No time to go in depth right now, so to summarize it: some mad german professors, some debugging and most of all, free food, candy and some new contacts! And maybe some more freelance stuff as well. We will see.

New Burial Album Mix
by Kode9

this is what a post apocalyptic film noir should sound like.

Fire up the brainstorm generators!

New week, new module. Concept & Development. If I had to believe my feed reader, everybody seems quited filled with joy by having this module. Which in theory should be the most dull one. No hands on work now, but plain brainstorming, developing a buisness plan for a certain product and then pitching it upon investers. Still, a lot of people seem to be stressed by the amount of work. I feel less as there is no hands on work, no several nights in a row of scripting or keyframing. I think this module is going to be quite relaxing, at least for my standards.

The should be comedian Teo@interesting.org confronted us why the young & creative people on one of the most creative school in one of the most creative countries in the world weren't that creative. To quote "Noo, that is not being creative! that's just being stupid!" Meaning, we suck (we are crossing some UGL borders here). Luckily he showed us some martial mind arts how to be creative instead of being stupid. Some of the attacks I actually knew from previous education or inspiration, but its good to refresh if you want to become a black belt.

Our Mission was handed out today by Micke Ahlstrom, another black belt in developing Concepts & Buisness Plans. He also gave us some good tips. The "Masculine Tech Group", as we like to refer our group to, adapted and developed one of his tips straight into Brainstormr . A web 2.5 random brainstorm generator. Which was actually one of the best of the over 20 ideas we generated today. We are actually thinking of developing this a bit further with some neat flickr plugins for some nice visualisations.

So things are going well. The current group is filled with manly ninjas; Tore, Erik, Zirath and Filip, we probably manage to get rich this module. In the meanwhile: the fireplace at Duckburg is burning like hell, and I fixed myself a freelance job for the next couple of months. Comfort & Money: the cornerstones for every succesfull life.

Research on the link between WiFi and health problems

"Over the past few years, the spread of wireless network connectivity has done wonders for both laptop sales and the ability of the public to access the Internet without being shackled to a desk by an Ethernet cable. Along with this connectivity, though, come fears that surrounding ourselves with low-powered clouds of electromagnetic radiation might be bad for our health."

more here

Wii Confuse

Finally, 4hrs after the deadline, I managed to get our 21st century confession booth to work. It was the outcome of the experience technology module, where every group received a technique and had the mission to do something inventive with it.

Our assigned technology was the Wii and our group quite quickly came upon the idea to map elementary messages into sound. We would only use the Wii for interface useage. So we started off with the idea of WiiCommunicate, which quikly developed into WiiConfess. (for more info on the progress it would to redirect you here).

The WiiConfess works basically like this: You have a 3d interface which represents a 'word cloud'. Every node, or in our case, sphere represents a word, when selected 5 new associative words pop-up. And in this way the user would manage to create a message such as: "hate+school+friends", which ofcourse means i hate my school friends. When a message is put togheter the user sends the confession to the confession wall.

The messages are posted on the confession wall as anonymous circles which bounce around in space. These circles contains the messages translated into a sound scenario. In this case, the listener, what normally would be a priest that works as the ear of God, would now be the exhibition visitor which works as the ear of the collective association.

I grabbed the oppertunity to use the "High Quality Video" function on my phone to make some footage of this project.







It ended up to be a bit more WiiConfuse than WiiConfess, as we had no room for usability testing as we already went 4hrs over the deadline. And I might sound strange on this videoclips, but thats because I have been awake for over 54 hrs. And so I've learned to not to be the Tech-guy and the Project Manager at the same time within a group, who always would say "yeah, we can do that". Two and a half week are way to short to learn: ActionScript 3.0 / The just over a month old new 3D library for Flash Sandy 3.0 / and to build this project. But still we managed! and I would like to thank my hardworking supportive groupmates for this achievement. Although they couldn't keep up with my ActionScript 3.0 ninja skills, they made sure that everything else was in tip top state.

I also would like to thank Tore & Rikard for helping me out at school and kirikou at flashsandy for superquick reaction debugging on the spot. See topic:
http://www.flashsandy.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=113

Finally some time to do some blogging again

To start of with this brilliant image

Sandy & Berra saved our days!

Cheat on the need to sleep

"Polyphasic sleep is a term used to describe several alternative sleep patterns intended to reduce sleep time to 2–6 hours daily in order to achieve a better quality of sleep."

Very useful information for our hyperislanders! Especially within this project

An endless resource of beautiful swatches

"What do you get when Dr. Woohoo mashes up Adobe Illustrator CS3, Flickr and In The Mod: Color Analytics? A free swf Panel that runs inside AI CS3 that allows you to search Flickr & In The Mod, view the colors from each image or painting you select and then save them directly to the Swatches Panel in AI. "




From inthemod & computerlove

Most usefull resource!

DIY Multitouch screen

Jeroen Braspenning, a good old classmate hit me with this on the MSN's. He's busy building a multi-touch screen for his graduation project. I only can say, neato!

http://www.muhneer.nl/blog/

"On a windy day you can take a newspaper and have fun for hours"
- Max Olander

Wii communicate

Finally this week we started off with the Experience Technology main assignment. This is to make an interactive experience out of, in our case, a Wiimote.Very interesting. I took the role as project manager as I got a lot of experience doing certain interactive projects. We will see where the ship will crash, as we got somewhat around two weeks to make this happen. All I can say for now is that we had an brilliant brainstorm today.

Your 21th century fireplace replacement

Last week our group received three items to work with and develop a product. We started of with car, mouse & keyboard and heat. We ended up with a fish controlled atmosphere generator. And it sort of looks like this:


(design by vedran, modelling by me)

Basically the upper 'harp' part is an aquarium, where a few black fish reside in. When a fish interrupts a laserbeam, the algorhythm (that is used to calculate the ambient sound that is put out) will transform. So you have an everlasting self refreshing atmosphere. Next the user is able to control the type of atmosphere. The user can set the color to the mood the user would enjoy.

So here you have it: your 21th century fireplace replacement.

My first Wii artwork

made with a wiimote connected to a computer, more fun stuff pretty soon!

FAS: Foreign Accent Syndrome

Looking for a dime in a haystack

Who said Digital Media would get you rich? It would at least not be me. For those who are interested in my finacial status, here is an update:

My second payment for Hyper Island is almost due, and I haven't paid the first one as well. So there goes another 45000 swedish crowns, or 5000 euros. So from this point I got 25000 crowns, or 3000 euros left. This is every single penny I posess. I can live with this untill somewhere around Febuary if I spend a maximum 500 crowns, 56 euros a week (I calculated the monthly rent seperatly within this model). This is not much for Swedish standards, but managable if I cut down on booze, meat and other luxuries.

Still Hyper Island needs me to pay another 85000 Swedish crowns in the near future. So I am already 60000 short and so to speak, officially rendered broke.

Before I came here I figured that the Dutch 'IB Groep' would be able to lend me money for this cause. The time between admission and the offcial start of Digital Media course was shorter than the time the 'IB groep' could process my request. So with some uncertainty I took the risk. Spokepersons from the 'IB groep' were saying, "don't worry about it, Sweden is a sober country, they know what they are doing" and the website of Nuffic was saying that Sweden has the highest valuated schools within Europe.

From all the professionals around the world who came to give us a lecture, said the Hyper Island is seen as the most or one of the most highly respected and valuated school from within the Digital Media market. But for some uncertain reason, Hyper Island did not get acknowledged at the Dutch govermental instances and I ended up without a loan. I am still not really sure why.

I tried to look for other money shooters such as CSN. They can't lend me money because I need to live in Sweden for two years. Guest scholarships in Sweden need me not to be within a KY system. And for almost every scholarship, they need me to apply many months before I knew I got admitted. The swedish goverment can't pay for me because I'm following an english spoken international course. It starts to feel like I am two steps ahead of globalisation.

Now my parents are willing to help me out, but I don't want to strip them from all their money. Second they also need it to be repaid within 2 or 3 years because I am not the only child they have.

I figured that I should be old and experienced enough to stand on my own two legs. And so I am trying. I've looked desperately for some freelance work the last couple of weeks, but somehow nothing has really worked out untill now.

Maybe I should start working in a restaurant as a dishwasher, or picking mushrooms somewhere (I got at least five years working experience picking mushrooms). But that's not how I expected to end up with a Bachelor degree Communication & Multmedia Design.

But then again, David Lynch took a job as a newspaper delivery boy to get his funding for Ereaserhead around.

Podcasting, mooncasting, mixtapes from the moon, what's next?

I have been pondering why no one is interested into going to the moon anymore? Maybe everybody feels that organisations like NASA will take care of that. But now Google opened a contest, it sounds almost like a DIY trip to the moon. I love it. If I had some money to build me a rocket I would be in!

As quoted from a Computerlove blogpost:

"COMPETITION GUIDELINES: To win the Google Lunar X PRIZE, a team must successfully land a privately funded craft on the lunar surface and survive long enough to complete the mission goals of roaming about the lunar surface for at least 500 meters and sending a defined data package, called a “Mooncast”, back to Earth.
PRIZES: The total purse of the Google Lunar X PRIZE is $30 million (USD) etc.see Picasa"

Noisia Vision Studiomix

Would fit nice as a soundtrack for transformers the movie

Doing some hardcore infographic buisness

For the CAR project within our Experience Technology module

Allright, I quit my job.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2josUqMTUmE

Playfullness

And the three other items (artistic, technology and usefullness) Bjorn and Jonas talked about the last two days, put into one simple ball.

Zygote

(Its really inspiring!)

Breach

Yesterday, our lecturer Bjorn Renner showed us a very nice visual piece done by the Swede Ralph Lundsten in 1966, the piece was called ‘EM nr 1’. It was a psychedelic collage of some unidentifiable shots transformed by a couple of filters accompanied with ambient soundscape collage consisting of only electronic manufactured sounds.
In the beginning it felt quite uncomfortable and strange. And my mind made me once again realize the aversion I have for meaningless overused filters. But wait. This was made 40 years ago, when Resolume and AfterEffects didn’t exist yet, and when clubs weren’t packed with VJs using the same filters over and over again.
At this point I started to enjoy this voyage into the void of meaningless audiovisual experimentations and let the experience come down to me. With this mind set I got easily drawn into this audiovisual experience (as I wouldn’t like to refer to it as being a movie/film or animation) and I was quite disappointed when Bjorn stopped it halfway the run.

Bjorn commented this as being a good example on what could happen if you break your barriers and try to do something outside your comfort zone. And I could totally agree. Within the 60’s this probably would be some mindblowing piece of visual extravaganza. But it probably ended up to be just that and it would be very hard for people to look at, understand and enjoy (except for the hippies). He probably didn’t get rich or popular with this as well.. But what you should not forget is that these pieces of uncomfortable experimental behaviour should be held responsible for the (over)used audiovisual techniques nowadays. And thus this is why VJs end up with ugly additive effects.

My thoughts as inspired by our lecturers: don’t be afraid to experiment, step out your comfort zones, but be careful with the things you invent. Because your children either will; get sick off it, or benefit from it.

And here's a nice picture of ralph to end with:

Eb Hu's Lalaland

Plain beauty: Link

Experience Insanity

My RSS reader, and especially the folder HyperBlogs, went completely bonkers (thank you Sam & Max) yesterday because of an overload of experience technology experiences. I rather not go down that same path as everybody goes, because for now it had been only dm07kna students that read these blogs. And why read 51 times about the same stuff you've already experienced happening a couple of hours earlier that day.. You know how it feels to get lost in a house of mirros filled with dozens of refelections.

Still for a undefinable certain reason I feel obliged to write at least something down and I will do it this day in the form of a review on Ralph Lundsten and our hit product CAR. But first I need to do some more research on Ralph Lundsten.

PS. today is 'Talk Like A Pirate Day'. So i am gonna fetch me a nice bottle o' rum and get shipwreck'd.

Russian iBBQ: Link

Generator.x on flickr

The Norse site about coded graphics Generator.x has put up a nice flickr album with computer generated graphics.



I am a sucker for this stuff and I feel like trying to make something alike someday this week. I already managed to do some coding in the form of neat random line stuff with processing as you can see in the background of my blog (now that's some hardcore Einstein shit 'innit? (actually no. because Einstein was more a physicist instead of a mathematician as we all are supposed to know)).

BASS !

For Sale: Belgium, a kingdom in three parts: Link

And so I have been featured

Yesterday I received an invite from Simone to join Behance, a network for creatives. I Joined, uploaded some projects. And just a couple of minutes ago my iPinball project has been featured.

Check it out!



For all Hyper Islanders: I created an hyper island circle on behance, so please join us, we can rock this place ;)

What happens if you give an elephant LSD?

To All Lurkers,

I've updated my rss feed to feedburner so I'm able to check some hot stats stuff. Those few souls that subscribed to my feed, I would like to ask you to 're-subscribe'.

Feed me weird things

Allright, I will confess, I have been hiding under a rock for a while. Max has learned me some revolutionary stuff. How to use and read RSS feeds. It was necessary step, I didn't want to go all RSI on checking up 51 hyperblogs a day.

I was aware the existance of this all along. And I actually had some lessons about RSS and XML on my previous education a time ago. But back then the brilliance of RSS somehow didn't seem struck me. Maybe because RSS wasn't so exstensive implemented as it is nowadays. Today 95% of the sites I follow use RSS.

For those who don't know how this thing works, I shall give a small explanation. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. But actually the name makes it more confusing, although the use is really simple. Very big amount of newssites/trendsites/websites/blogs and whatsoever have RSS implemented nowadays. And I quite expect that almost every regulary updated site in the near future is going to do this as well.

At this point it starts to get interesting. You see, all these newssites, blogs and whatsoever are using the same protocol to encode the updates. What if you can manage all these equal encoded updates into one programme that checks for updates for every single one of them on a regular basis, let's say once an hour and pops up in your tray bar when there happens to be an update on some site. OMFG! (excuse my h4x0r). Here you have it, the new definition of newspaper, and it's about the things you are interested in.

It sounds radical but this is about to save me 10 to 15 hours checking favourite websites, a week. No more do I have to go round clicking every single bookmark every single moment I feel like this ( and this happend to me multiple times a day). I just open my RSS reader hit Shift + F5 and Im updated again.

lolcats taking over

Dinner at duckburg

spot the duck!

Professionalism, hyper meals and meatshaped vegtables

I'm happy that Asa was the first person to point it out this morning, so I don't need to mock any more about this. I took the opportunity to put my camera on my phone into good use to capture this contradiction in termino. For those who still don't get it I would like to refer you to here and here.

To make my thoughts about the branding issue more clear for people as Carl (who seemed confused and distressed when talking to him). I will write something down in the way of a beautiful metaphor that had been awakened inside my skull when Kim D dropped the word Big Mac. To make this all a bit more confusing, I owe rights of the word HyperMeal to Kim J. And yeah, this is all about professionalism.

Like I was saying to Carl, I have absolutely no problem to ditch the name 'Crew 13' and using the structure as Hyper suggested us. But using dm07kna as a way to identify ourselves is a bit too much for me (although I enjoy abstract names, especially in the way as Autechre name their tracks).

This is because a couple of certain reasons. First as the people of Kong explained to us. People don't like to go down to (and to exaggerate a bit) http://www.hyperisland.se/kna/dm/07. It's because A) harder to find for people and B) hard to market us as a class. This is because I presume everyone within our class wants to dm07kna to be the best year of Hyper to be remembered forever (otherwise we wouldn't have had all these endless discussions about the brand). And I feel the best way to motivate people in doing this is to make them believe in their 'own' brand and let them fight for it to make it known in the ways we want to be known within our fields of work.

Now here comes the hard part, I ask you to imagine Hyper Island as being MacDondald's. I will give you a minute to visualise this idea for your selves... Allright... we carry on. Now, you don't want to go down to the MacDonalds and order FPCIPSWS (Fried Potatoes Cut In Pieces Sprinkeld With Salt) and a POCAPBB (Piece Of Cows Ass Put Between Buns) with a glass of H2O (yes, we're being healthy!). No they sell food with stronger brand names, such as Big Macs, French Fries and a great variety of other ever changing buns. And those names never affected MacDonald’s as a brand, no instead they even helped it to take over the world! How would you market a FPCIPSWS and POCAPBB with H2O?

The problem with the ‘crewname’ was that it was a bit too unspecific and undistinct (is that good English?). As you don’t go down the MacDonald’s and order just ‘food.’. You can’t make a clear distinction which food you want to order. Thus with the crewname, you can’t make a clear distinction which class you’re dealing with.

This is why I suggest that every class within Hyper Island is free to develop it's own ‘brand’ name that is only specific for that year of Digital Media within Karlskrona (or some other construction). So it's able to distinct themselves within the market. But it should always refer in someway to our working area and not let it interfere with other classes such as Business Management or Interactive Art Direction. In this way Hyper Island can still be referred as the organisation which sells all these different buns.

As a lot of buns from MacDonalds changes every couple months or year or so. So does the Digital Media market and the market on which Hyper should focus on: the ever changing, evolving technology and design market. So maybe our brand name could turn out to be a one day fly, but at the moment we market it we should put our full love and ambition into it to make it worth to get the attention we want and need. Because within these field of work you just can’t sit and wait.

The time to act is now! Who cares if over five years nobody remembers the alter ego of dm07kna. Around that time your experience and reputation that you gained when you marketed yourself as a great class within these short amounts of time would probably put you in a very nice working place. And why do you want to rely on the name that your class or school should have. You are here on Hyper Island because you are talented in some way, so use that talent and market yourself! And still you are always able to refer you’ve been one of the variety of ambitious special buns which the greatly respected brand Hyper Island (at that time) has put out during the years. Instead of saying yeah, I was in crew 15628 (and a being a copy of a copy of a copy is being less and less respected nowadays).

Disclaimer:

I’m not speaking the truth, as I believe there is no such being as absolute truth. But I try to convey a message. Which sometimes can be hard when not written in your mother language and words can be seen as vehicles. And I still need to work it out a bit, but Max (and i got his permission from him to accuse him) was nagging about when I was done. Now when I've got this written down, some other ideas constructing this even better start to develop. As I have the next three days off. I probably write some more down during the days.

PS:
What's wrong with vegaterians eating meat shaped and meat named vegtable stuff. I as a omnivore don't eat vegtable shaped meat, do I?

I'm glad I sent my link section to oblivion

The whole of Duckburg here is going frenzy having an fight who has linked the 51 Hyper students first.

I'm glad I don't understand certain Swedish.

Feed me content

So we received this exercise to give all the groupmembers feedback on their blogs. I figured, the best way to do this is to write it as a short review on my blog. In this way I finally manage to link these people on mine, because I have my link section discarded somewhere into a place which people would like to refer as oblivion.

To start off with my roommate

Johannes Mathison

Very well written and a bit cynical on the things we have done so far. Quite interesting texts. Layouts are there for to be pimped.

Alva Nachenius

Running low on content, but it fits the design being as minimal. I like the greens and the motion.

Rebecca Berg

I could say the same as I did for Johannes. And I rather don't put to much work into saying something different. Good content, design a bit too unedited. Making something look attractive gets you half of the audience.

Frederik Twede

It's quite a good resemblance on how you react in real life, as so far I could experience. It's still a bit low on content and design, but yeah..

Thus the reviews are as well low on content and design. But hey.. feedbacking people who have their blog running for about two days which almost hadn't had the time for sleep isn't actually a realistic idea. So I'll get back to you when everybody had the time to wise up.

And for the presentations today... It's was a hell of a drag. Some beautifull dynamic stuff had been shown. I haven't heard much real engaging stories. However some groups had done a thorough research, most people seemed to be quite low on interesting content. . Except for Kim's Russian part which I really enjoyed!

I'm glad this day is over. Sofie said we should celebrate. But how are we going to be able to celebrate if we have to be present in school at eight tomorrow morning? Maybe there exists some weird Swedish associations on the verb 'celebrating' which do not include beers and the usual hangover.

KK: "I'm taking the shortcut."
...
JM: "Now what did you gain?"
KK: "Like 30 centimeters"
JM: "And wet feet..."
KK: "Yes, but that's another experience you gain"
JM: "And the possiblity stepping into dogturd"
KK: "Those are the risks you take, and in the end, it makes life more engaging"
JM: "Yeah and the risk of the experience for the whole class smelling dogturd"
KK: "I like to share my experiences"

My brains feels like this

If I want to make pictures, I will buy a camera instead.

After using my indestructable Siemens A50 for about 6 years now, I finally bought a new phone. It's a neat Sony Ericsson W200i, looks decent. It has good design written all over it, even within where the accu is located. And for the most important part not too much fancy stuff. The fellow in the shop told me that this one dont have as many megapixels as the Samsung phones have. I was like, yeah if I want to make pictures, I will buy a camera instead. And another thing, about those samsung flip-open ninja phones. I really don't like the design and I will probably break them right away, get stuck between elevator doors or something more improbable.

So yeah it looks real neat and feels decent. I can probably hang on to it for like 4 years. I got prepaid because I am the foreigner around here (discrimination I would say!), it's a Comviq prepaid thingy, so those swedes who have Comviq, I can call you for free!

And now comes the most brilliant part of it, my phonenumber:
07 04 082 082 that would be in dutch +46 7 04 082 082

I love it!

"All rights reserved ­ all wrongs reversed"

I actually don't know if I am legally allowed post this. But I was busy mailing Elin Renck today. He is a art director at tonium and I saw this brilliant text in his signature. I felt it was worth al log.

So long career!

I got an invitation today to play at the John Peel Day in Amsterdam, but the guy on the phone was quite supprised that he was calling to Sweden.

I have been active as a DJ for several years by now. It is a hard struggle to get your ass respected and known. I took my time, playing several kinds of music, organising loads of parties and events. Starting underneath the ladder as a drive in DJ with cds. Now finally people call me for several events in Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Utrecht, Breda whatsoever. What do I do? I move to Sweden.. To start all over... Again!

The Avatar Machine

Ever wanted to enjoy a third person view of you first life?

VIDEO

“The virtual communities created by online games have provided us with a new medium for social interaction and communication. Avatar Machine is a system which replicates the aesthetics and visuals of third person gaming, allowing the user to view themselves as a virtual character in real space via a head mounted interface. The system potentially allows for a diminished sense of social responsibility, and could lead the user to demonstrate behaviors normally reserved for the gaming environment.”

thanks to pixelsumo

A couple of favourite motions I would like to share.

The tale of how: By the black heart gang
Potapych, The bear who loved wodka: By Darren Price
The Tower Of Grantville: By Buck

[1967] Shopping in 1999: Link

Argh It's tooo early...

15 seconds of fame

My bit for the 15 secs personal animation, eventually I didn't came far enough to use any programmed graphics.

VVVV to da bone!

Joa! my first well executed experiment in VVVV. I got VVVV wandering around my computer for a couple of months right now, but did not dare to use it yet. Today was a tutorial massacre.



I'm trying to make a 'coded' animation for the personal 15 seconds animation exercise. It's all about pushing boundaries.

"Writing exactly the phrase hello world is crucial to the positive completion of this tutorial. You owe this to programming history, so don't be childish."

From the VVVV website

Motion Week

For every classmate their second, but for me my first week. And were getting off where I'm best at. Motions! We had two lectures on Monday and Tuesday. And I took the oppertunity as well to give a microworkshop on Motion Tracking. Then they gave us two exercises, one group motion and another personal motion. The group motion had to be done today, and had to last 60 secs.

So actually we got two days and a tuesday afternoon to realise this group motion, and in the meantime we were supposed to work on the overlapping Information Soceity project as well (in short: calling agencies in Asia at 6 in the morning..). We managed. As I was the most experienced in doing Motion Graphics in my group I took the role as Art Director and guided the groupmembers along the process and After Effects. Also I tried to function as a Helpdesk for the unknowing classmates, but yesterday I took the service out of order after a crash and not saving for like 4hrs...

A lot off classmates took the oppertunity not to sleep and stay at the Häktet (the prison; our building) working all night. I actually got myself some good nights of rest and I managed a small hangover when I had a couple of beers with Aina, Kristoffer and Andreas (the Widman, not the Dagman) the other night.

The catch: interesting groupworks and tired faces.

Here is ours (on which I would like to thank my groupmembers Rebecca, Alva, Johannes and Frederik for their hard work as zeroexperienced motiongraphers!):

SEPO (and how i manage to survive)

Yes. I'm staying here. I had a good chat with the Hyper officials yesterday. And they want me to stay here as much I want too. So I got their support, no discounts, but supports. They are going to try to contact the 'IB groep' and 'Nuffic' to talk some sense to them. If everything works out fine, I will get my deserved loan (denglish) and live up to the swedish standards.

If not, than we will figure some other way out. They offered to forward me some interesting freelance jobs that could cover my living expensenses. Here my parents jump in as well, they are really supporting me really much, and as much as I need. I finally can get this weight a bit off my mind. And even my classmates are supporting me in the ways they are able. (buying me beers and such). It's so nice to get all this support from everyone and I want to thank everyone. So this SEPO is devoted to all these enlighted souls!

(and yeah I learned to say the word kladdkuk quite quick)

FIPO!

So I'll start off beeing geeky right away. For those who never seen the lights of internets shining from their screens, a FIPO is short for First Post, a popular saying in teh forum cultures. (saying 'teh forum cultures' and 'the internets' can be measured in the same amount of geekyness).

Duckburg & Internets

Jumping in on the internets, the internets at our 'Duckburg' castle are quite slow, I will never manage my great scheme to download them all! Our humble homeowner Bosse has moved his router around the place, but the signal is still poor. We suspect the dozens spiders running around the house of evil internets draining conspiracies.

Duckburg is the place where I live right now, with three other Hypernauts (Jocke, Johannes & Max). We called it duckburg because the place is stuffed with stuff, and in special porcelain ducks. But I can't complain. It's really nice, the homeowners took care of everything and we've got everything from porcelain ducks, over a hundred pieces of cutlery and a great amount of swedish lecture to a dishwasher, a piano, beautiful views and a swimming pool.

Tonight were are going to celebrate duckburg and the fact im staying with tacos & wine. I will post some more info's about Hyper and my most interesting life as soon as I learned to say "kladdkuk".