Kickin' it with Visomat
On Thursday night the Roadtrip crew hiked down to Alexanderplatz for a lecture by a group of local new media artists and VJ's. Upon entering a large room, complete with a large styrofoam sculpture, numerous screens and projectors, as well as a fluorescent light art installation, we were greeted by Torsten Oetken and Michael Weinhol, founders of Visomat. Visomat is their two-man company which works with many facets of new media art, ranging from video-art pieces which focus largely on architecture, the creation of an automated bar, to the creation of open spaces for artists and the public to jump into the mix. Their latest endeavor was actually the room where we meeting them. They fully realized the space, called M12, last February as a club for all sorts of new media works to take place, from VJ and DJ shows to new media workshops and art installations (such as the styrofoam sculpture and the fluorescent lights).
We chatted it up with them for a while, and they showed us videos of a lot of the work that they've done over the last few years. The most interesting videos, in my opinion, were their video-art works exploring the architecture of Berlin. You can see a quick sample of one of their architecture video-art pieces by navigating to DIN AV and navigating down the "video" list until you reach "Visomat Inc". Also, they had a piece called "Raw Data" (Page number 290 on their site, although I can't link to it because of their flash-based site) which I found quite compelling. The basic idea is that there is a screen displayed from a large window facing the sidewalk of a busy street, and passers-by can use their mobile phones to interact with the screens and use them to display "raw data" about the city as well as the building which houses the screens. We finished off with a very interesting talk about psychogeography, (which you may remember was a hot topic at Conflux) especially about its implications within Berlin. After the lecture we were invited to stick around for the main event of the night, in which a DJ show is combined with a live graphic artist creating the flyers for the next month's happenings during a three hour block, with his progress being displayed to the club attendees via projectors.
These were our final scheduled guest speakers of the trip, as we're due back home in a matter of days. However, I'm sure that there will be a fair share of adventures over our last few days, with a public showing of our final projects at Tesla, as well as a performance by the Czech Philharmonie Orchestra, a soccer game on Saturday, and I suspect much more. Keep tuned!
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