Life as an Artificial Lifeform

We are proud to finally announce that we have teamed up with the E-Gruppe Berlin to deliver a fantastic crazy Berlin style open air event this Friday May 1st.

Raum - E originally an indoor event featuring a massive display of moving visual art and Berlin electronic music is now moving outdoors to bring you even more moving visual art under the summer sky of Berlin. The location - Die Sysiphos Hallen - is an absolutely crazy abandoned factory and has this Berlin underground flair that has been missing from the shiny sterile clubs of the city center. The party itself reflects this feeling with a lot of the people who grew up with in the scene and have since become artists supporting a lifestyle and a message that reflects that community feeling that had been predominant before the investors took over the party folks.

The E-Gruppe has been involved in making visuals and decoration and also organizing parties since 14 years and is celebrating its birthday. Prototypen has made a splash with the first massive open air at the abandoned russian military airport "Altes Lager" with its 1995 Planet Port and has since also supplied visuals, music and organization to a multitude of parties in and around Berlin and is this year celebrating its 15th birthday. Visual Berlin has grouped all the VJs and motion visual artists of Berlin and gave them a voice an a message - together with the help of friends and artist from the city we are bound to give everybody a great audiovisual feast into May.

If you have been helping the Prototypen in the past in any kind of project we would like to take this moment to thank you - please get in touch with us we will provide you with a free ticket. If that does not apply to you - we will give out 2x2 free tickets to the first people who follow us @prototypen on twitter.

The Event is located at Berlin/Germany Hauptstrasse 15. Nearest S-Bahn Station is Ostkreuz from there you take the shuttle or walk 15 minutes south (direction of the big chimneys with the blinking lights).

So bring some good spirit and we will see you all on Friday.

Audio LineUp:
area 1 - listening / aber auch beats:
22:00 - 23:00 uhr: Mex Schlüpfer - live
23:00 - 00:30 uhr: MoGreens
00:30 - 02:00 uhr: Das Kraftfuttermischwerk - live
02:00 - 03:30 uhr: Paskal
03:30 - 05:00 uhr: The Marx Trukker - live
05:00 - 07:00 uhr: ED 2000 + Vela
07:00 - 09:00 uhr: Gaya Kloud + MoGreens

area 2 - dancefloor:
22:00 - 00:00 uhr: Georg Wedel
00:00 - 01:00 uhr: Der Monotone Rauschzustand - live
01:00 - 02:00 uhr: Jaxson
02:00 - 03:00 uhr: Shackelton + Sin C.T. - live
03:00 - 04:00 uhr: Deph
04:00 - 05:00 uhr: Der Arzt
05:00 - 06:00 uhr: Sebastian Wolff
06:00 - 07:00 uhr: Morte
07:00 - 08:00 uhr: Johannes Palissa
08:00 - 09:00 uhr: Conocybe

Visual Artists (on THREE floors):
(visualberlin selection)
e-gruppe
fALk (proto.beamaz)
=ff=
lichtpiraten
pixel-royal aka leinwandler
hilmikillme
tofa
dr. mo
vj pixelschubser
vj king of chaos aka steffen baermann
jorgk
servando
cypher
lucas b.
austastlücke
christian sonntag
devon miles
tobi
illuminated art
c.a.f. + hollie & flockey

Posted by fALk at 6:59 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I love original ideas to circumvent the traditional structures and if you do it with style and message I am ALL out behind it.
There is this screenwriter who seems very fed up with Hollywood and "The Industry" and wants to do his own movie. To finance his endeavor he sells self made Lemonade with a great "disclaimer" text on the label that explains what he wants to do and how much he hates corporate Hollywood structure.

THANK YOU FOR INVESTING IN MY MOVIE!
My name is Matthew and I am one of the best screenwriters in Hollywood. Unfortunately, the television networks and movie studios don't know that yet. As it stands, the decision of which films get produced are left in the hands of emotionally-immature, substance-abusing ex-lawyers who live in dread paranoia that everyone in the universe is out to get them. They spend the bulk of their time spying on their fellow executives, composing nasty counter-intelligence rumors and spreading them through their network of FA-BU-LOUS, yet cunning assistants.

His lemonade is made up of the following:

A REFRESHING BLEND OF WATER, CERTIFIED ORGANIC LIMES, CERTIFIED ORGANIC CANE SUGAR, AND CERTIFIED ORGANIC BASIL.

sounds delicious. You can by a 1-quart bottle for $5 or a 10 bottle crate for $30.
@malibumonkey.

via boingboing.

Posted by fALk at 10:46 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The search for midi/osc controllers knows no limits around the world as everybody is struggling to get some manual control to the thousands of virtuals knobs and sliders and buttons. There are lots of wild tries to cram as many buttons in as portable rigs as possible. I think that most people would agree that there is nothing out there that is perfect. A step closer (until Apple frees us from the controller nightmare with a fully dual multitouch display or such) come the designers Young-Shin Lee & Hae-Jin Jung. They simply made a whole new computer that is just designed to be a musical instrument. I actually think they have something - if it would be ultra cheap and could be used as just a controller. I know that VJs would probably love it - imaging having a second screen with you loops and some nifty controller and some multitouch action and a keyboard in addition to your usual setup.

More info here.
More pics here.

Posted by fALk at 8:02 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

As a matter of silent protest I post hereby the alternative STOPP sign to protest against the censorship of the german internet by Germanys four biggest providers, Deutsche Telekom, Vodafone/Arcor, Hansenet/Alice, Telefonica/O2 and Kabel Deutschland. I will also cancel my contract with Vodaphone/Arcor at the next possible date. I detest the idea that 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of East German governmental suppression this country is going along the same path again and there seems to be no big public outcry - especially since the involved politicians are susceptible of misusing such tools to push their own personal religious right-wing agenda.
For all german internet users there is now a free open DNS server run by foebud.org without censorship which can be reached under: 85.214.73.63 (thanks @murdelta)

Posted by fALk at 15:09 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

There have been two noteworthy content additions to the internet yesterday that portray a story that I have been battling with for the last year and a bit. The big question these days for numerous people and whole industries is: How do you make money by creating novel content for the internet?
There is the newspaper industry mentioned in the last blog post, there is the tv industry, the bloggers, the musicians, the online-vjs, the painters, the photographers, the illustrators - about each and every person in the creative business has this big question mark over their head. For me I always thought that at least some have no big problem because they have big enough a brand that money just flows in no matter what they do. Such was my thinking with the NineInchNails (NIN) who have had such a huge meme going by untether
them-self from the grasp of a big music company and self publish their heralded music under a creative common license with a "pay what you want" model that included "pay nothing". As far as I heard they had millions of downloads and the whole thing was a huge success. Now I hear this really long substantial indepth interview with Trent Reznor - lead of NIN in the Digg Dialog Series (Digg users ask questions).

I encourage anyone making content on the internet and trying to make money to watch it. He explains a lot of the inside of the grant experiment with the internet and while he is - like many of us - absolutely enthralled by the possibilities of reaching out to millions of people and spreading his art to places that a generation before us could have never dreamed of - he makes it very clear - not even for a big brand like his is it possible to easily generate money and they barely made a profit with merchandise - donation and pay what you like has in his eyes completely failed - that means the 1000 fans rule that has been talked about is really not that true because NIN has definately more then 1000 fans. (yes they scrape by and probably better then most other musicians on the net judging from the massive amount of hardware in the background but he says twice that they are barely making a profit and I believe it 100%). Now he is reiterating what I thought when it comes to advertisement - there is so many and its not really that usefull for generating money and you loose people who are just sick and tired of seeing pages full of ads with a tiny bit of content in the middle - I will get back to that point in a second.
The most revealing thing he said for musicians out there is that its simply almost impossible to try to sell the music itself as music is comprised of bits and bytes there is certainly always a copy floating around the net for free and people prefer free over anything - the iTunes store does not help this situation at all - contrary to what the big press tries to spread. Very insightful interview an absolute must watch.

Some now might say "oh there are so many sites that are advertisment supported and seem to make a good living". I thought so too but another article from yesterday seems to absolutely ridicule that line of thought and makes you wonder if money and the net goes together in any kind of form or shape. The same article also supports another theory of mine - namely that you shouldn´t spend hours on for profit social media sites because they can go boom any minute and then all your content goes boom with it - all the time spend is then lost - you get nothing and you didn´t even do anything wrong (other then giving your time to a big company that is).
I am talking of nothing smaller then YouTube. The article in question is called "YouTube is Doomed". First I wanted to shrug it off as somebody seeking attention with such a headline but the reasoning is sound as it is scary, clear and probably quite right.
YouTube - and I hope you are tied to your seat - made a loss in revenue of roughly $500 million. That is after 3 years in googles hand. Not even Google can sustain such a lossleader for a very long time - no matter how much they paid for it in the first place. I completely agree with the article on that. Then the article does some real good investigative reporting by trying to see if YouTube could ever be profitable - and the clear answer is no. There is no math that would support this even if Google would plaster adverts over any and all videos and charge 3 times as much as they do today they would still loose money - especially with their operating costs multiplying as their catalog of dogs on skateboard movies grows.
Now if Google can´t make money on the internet with content that they don´t even need to pay for - how in the world would a content creator earn any money?
I mean its probably possible to survive but these two anecdotes by what is perceived the most successful in their niche on the net just show to me that there is no sound business model. Still all content comes to the net with full force. I would conclude that the internet and capitalism as it is right now just don´t go together and probably never will. Bits are free. You can´t cage them because then nobody sees them and then nobody knows that they exist. If you send them around with a cage around them somebody will find a way to help them be free - that is their nature and there is nothing that can be done about it except for caging the people them self.

YouTube is doomed @ business insider
Digg Dialogg with Trent Reznor

Posted by fALk at 9:01 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

There is a fantastic rant / fictitious speech from Jeff Jarvis on what the Masters of the News have done wrong in the last 15-20 years and how they completely and utterly destroyed their businesses by failing to see the reality of the internet unfold in front of their eyes and failing to act accordingly. He calls the angry white old man out for their inability to adapt from a content economy to a link economy to the short sighted view that google should pay for aggregated headlines never mentioning that its also google that generates 1/3rd of the traffic to these sites.
If you are even remotely interested why its going downhill so fast and strong for the newspaper business that is the article to read and understand why.
Oh and this is how the article ends:

It's simply too late. The best thing some of you can do is get out of the way and make room for the next generation of net natives who understand this new economy and society and care about news and will reinvent it, building what comes after you from the ground up. There's huge opportunity there, for them.

Posted by fALk at 19:36 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Not much more to be said to this picture of the day that comes from the G20 summits via faz.de

Posted by fALk at 11:34 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)