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Vol. 21

admin — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 12:23:53 +0000

Tuesday, 2nd of March 2010, 8-11 pm

Speakers to be announced soon.

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Vol. 20

admin — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 18:22:04 +0000

Tuesday, 2nd of February 2010, 8-11 pm

Our 20th Talk About The Weather will feature the following speakers.

The SOZIALHELDEN started in 2005. Time has gone by. And with the help of the two student initiators the SOZIALHELDEN have turned into a big network of voluntaries and a charitable organization. With creative projects they draw attention to social problems and – in the best case – remove them.
Raúl Aguayo-Krauthausen will present their latest project http://wheelmap.org/. The internet platform enables users to enter, change and find accessible and not so accessible locations.

http://sozialhelden.de/

For more than 5 years cinematographer Tomas Erhart has been taking still-pictures with his first generation cellphone-camera. One can see his highly respected work in exhibitions and on his website: http://cellphonology.com/
In “Talk about the Weather” Tomas speaks about pixels, Lomography, digital pictures and the hardship and pleasure of being a part-time foto-artist.

http://tomaserhart.com/

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Vol. 19

admin — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 09:42:57 +0000

Tuesday, 5th of January 2010, 8-11 pm

The first Talk About The Weather in 2010 will feature the following speakers. Details will be announced soon.

Michela Vieser introduces weird German places.
Werner Kranwetvogel shows his photos of North Korean mass games.
Celia Czerlinski talks about her label for handmade haute couture handbags.

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Vol. 18

admin — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 14:21:55 +0000

Tuesday, 1st of December, 8-11 pm

Speakers to be announced soon.

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Vol. 17

admin — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 12:37:05 +0000

Tuesday, 3rd of November, 8-11 pm

Ela Kagel is a freelance curator and producer, living and working in Berlin. She is currently developing the “Free Culture Incubator”, a project for next year’s Transmediale. The incubator strives to create a model of how a creative business can actually work: community-driven, self-determined and based on personal resources & networks.

Ela is engaged in a number of cultural activities, such as being a member of Public Art Lab Berlin (http://www.publicartlab.org) or running the Upgrade! events (http://www.upgrade-berlin.net). Since this year, she is also working in the curatorial team of the Transmediale Festival for Art and Digital Culture (http://www.transmediale.de).

Contentismissing is a group of professionals from the distinctive fields of architecture, design & music with the objective to ensure a creative environment for collaboration as well as independent work.
They will show how they provided missing content; design, code and motion for three different projects: the video installation New Life, a branding proposal for Opera and a multitouch-application for Deutsche Telekom Laboratories.

http://www.contentismissing.net

Okawari will serve delicious Tokyo style finger food.

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Vol. 17

admin — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 09:50:36 +0000

Tuesday, 3rd of November, 8-11 pm

Speakers to be announced soon. Click here for general information on Talk about the Weather.

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Vol. 16

admin — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 16:34:59 +0000

Tuesday, 6th of October, 8-11 pm

Okawari will serve delicious Tokyo style finger food during the course of the evening. http://www.okawari.de/

Joerg Pfeiffer will talk about interactive videoreports for his column km42.spiegel.de, working in camper-vans and life as a digital normad. It’s also about videojournalism and the sense of travelling professionally.

http://www.joergpfeiffer.de/

Sporadic bloggers Dirk and Mac talk about how a virtual graffiti in their weblog www.dataloo.de got out of control and appeared on city streets, newspapers, protest marches, national TV and all over the German internet scene. They recall the time when they suddenly became political, accidentally created the key visual for a protest movement, collected a 5-digit sum, jumped the German blog charts and suspected that the secret service is tapping their phones.

http://www.dataloo.de/

Sebastian Purfürst is a Berlin-based new media artist with a strong focus on stage visuals and music. He will be presenting the experimental documentary, “The Fine Art of Designing Silence”, produced in 2005 in cooperation with Christian Mahler. The film attempts to explore the artistic potential of acoustic silence in film and music – a time-lapse voyage through the history of cinema, sonic enviroments and human perception in its ever-changing, technologically influenced form, from On and Off to 1 and 0.

This film is part of the long-term film project, “Design Strategies for Converging Media”.

http://www.lem-studios.com/WORKS/DSFCM/DSFCM.htm

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Vol. 15

admin — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 16:59:34 +0000

Tuesday, 1st of September, 8-11 pm

*** Okawari will serve delicious Tokyo style finger food during the course of the evening. http://www.okawari.de/ ***

Christian Mahler will talk about his project “EIGENFACE – interconnected pictures” and how he is trying to develop aesthetics, poetics and maybe knowledge or beauty in the era of mass customized, machine-readable data.

http://www.lem-studios.com/EXHIBITIONS/eigenface.htm

Andreas Gehrke, photographer, will be showing his series ‘The Ionian Road’. He photographed these landscapes on the greek Peloponnesian peninsula, where in August 2007, large parts of the island were burnt in wildfires. The work is a hommage to this recent natural disaster.

http://www.andreasgehrke.de/

Satch Hoyt International visual artist and musician discusses his multilayered practice. Comprising of sculpture, and installations accompanied by sound. He has collaborated on projects with artists as far reaching as Louise Bourgeois to Grace Jones.

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Admin’s Weekly. Episode 2: Routing Routines.

Marcus of Less Rain Berlin — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 16:40:03 +0000

This week’s edition is about overcoming this admin’s lonesome summer.
The bad news first: Unfortunately, the announced Scooby Doo interview has to be postponed due to an urgent surgery. Scoob is just getting a respiratory tract transplantation. Could this be a result of a long media carrier? I will ask him about that, when Mr. Doo is back on top. At least, he seems not to share a doctor with Michael Jackson.

What has happened so far? It’s summer time at the Less Rain office, everybody enjoys the summer outside. Execept me. While the upper floors are dark and empty, there’s still that gloomy well-known shining on the walls. While the telephones are softly covered with dust, my desk is covered with empty pizza boxes, RedBull tins and take away coffee cups, forming a strange yet interesting castle around the screens and keyboards.

So this is my state-of-mind while I am writing this post; the creepy conclusion in the back of mind, the shining screens in front. The only thing left to me is the chance to answer the fantastic question: “Where would I go if I could as I please?”

(more…)

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Talking about the Weather in August

admin — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 14:28:06 +0000

due to rising temperatures during the most incredible summer since the Big Bang we decided that there is nothing to talk about the weather this month.
We hope you enjoy the coming Tuesday in some park, with your feet in the water or on some lush roof top terrace instead.

Hope to see you back again on September the 1st.
And please come forward and let us know if you have something to talk about and wish to raise your voice.

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Admin’s Weekly. Episode 1: Holiday Horror.

Marcus of Less Rain Berlin — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 13:12:41 +0000

Being the company’s only system administrator is not easy. Surely, you have the power to control each and every electron which is quite cool. This ultimate digital power on the one hand dooms you to be irreplaceable on the other hand. That’s when lyrics like “Wouldn’t it be nice if I were redundant / then I could roam all the world” come into my mind. However, the trend leads to keeping of admins in a species-appropriate environment: pairwise. Until species’ protection gets in here, it seems as if I can stuff backpacker world tours. The reason is quite obvious: Servers tend to sudden death and don’t have the wishful ability to reawaken by themselves. If they had, they were cats. The interested reader might chip in with the nearly complete GSM-coverage. Right: Nearly. Ever tried to tweet your thoughts while crossing the Sahara desert or did a complete server update on your way to the top on mount Kilimanjaro? You probably won’t enjoy that much. Hence, I need to add “take yet another extra WalMart bag to carry notebook and mobile satellite receiver as well as an emergency engine with a diesel tank with you” on my personal list. Who ever carried 50 gallons of fuel on his back knows what I will have to expect and how much fun this won’t be.

I would go so far as to say that even trans-atlantic flights, a welcomed entertaining offline break for the average Facebook consumer, turn out to be my personal perfect horror trip. Arriving at the airport, some uniformed men suddenly appear and ask me why I do carry a running mobile satellite receiver with me. Surprisingly, they are not satisfied with the most obvious answer: I am an administrator who takes his job seriously. Moreover, they tell me an outrageous story of world-wide terrorism and try to explain the world in a simple yet strange way.

Furthermore, they even force me to shut up and down – the former meaning my objections, the latter my equipment – and have nerve to call me paranoid. Anyway. I am an admin, not a rebel. So I conform and quickly rush through the security check. Some never ending 15 minutes later, I take a seat in the plane. But the worse part of the trip is just about to begin. Innocently I sit in that plane, trying to connect to my servers which means bring both laptop and mobile satellite receiver online to bring this frustrating offline period to an end. The stewardesses, usually known for their never-ending smile, suddenly freak out and for a second I feel like George Clooney realizing that he is in a vampire temple in disguise.

From one second to another their smiles turn into grotesque faces and from one second to another there’s a bunch of hyperventilating stewardesses yelling at me to turn off my phone and notebook because this ought to be forbidden. Please. For me, it’s yet another fake world conspiracy trying to cut the magic band between an admin and his servers. Okay. Got me. Terrorists win. However, I’m still an admin, not a rebel. So I conform again. I decide to wait until the maximum altitude has been reached and brought me as close as possible to my favorite satellite. This takes me another 45 endless minutes. Watching the latest Disney movie doesn’t help either.

But having reached the summit I quickly resume my sessions and connect me to my servers. Everything is working smoothly. Unfortunately, the vampires return – with some reinforcements in tow. It’s the gentlemen from the cockpit telling me the reason that our plane is going to hit the ground very soon would be my internet connection. Again, I am doomed to the agony of being offline because of the selfish behavior of a few. To tell the truth, it’s just their lack of not being able to fly a plane without all that blinking and computing electronic helpers that actually do all the work while the so-called pilots just try to be good-looking and touch down all the time. Anyway. If you don’t keep your admin in a species-appropriate environment, his personal holiday destination look-up procedure has a quite limited framework.

In the next episode of Admin’s Weekly:
I will save the world and get over my yearly summer depression. Afterwards, I’ll visit Scooby-Doo at his nursing home to interview him about love and intrigues at Mystery Inc. during the 70s.

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Fly me to the moon

Marcus of Less Rain Berlin — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 16:28:32 +0000

Google released the source code of the Apollo 11 mission – together with an emulator.

On the first sight this may seem as yet another nerdish project, but it’s much more than that.

If you belong to the rare specie of Assembler programmers, you will have the unique chance to follow the thoughts of the people who coded a program that controlled a computer which flew a space-ship from Earth to the moon and back. Moreover, you have the possibility to see how the Lunar Module was programmed.

But for the rest of us, although we do not understand anything of that code, it’s an important artifact of history of mankind. Frankly, how many of those artifacts are we able to read? Hieroglyphs? Are they an important artifact of human history? Definitely.

Finally, there is an emulator to run the programmes on any computer. Somebody even made it possible to run that software on a handheld! 40 years ago, people racked their brains how to have an efficient computer that does not consume too much space and energy and today we could do the same with a mobile. I love IT.

Here’s the video…

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