Unit9 show in detail some of their Website work. They first show the Adobe Creative Mind in detail, and a bit of the “behind the scenes” of the Foster Farms project.

Unit 9 and the Adobe’s Creative Mind (right)

Unit9 concludes with a demonstration of the physics engine they have built for the V-festival on-line game (unfortunately off-line by now). This engine has been also used in the “Discover Card Elf” project though.

The Graffiti Research Lab is a mixture of graffiti art and hi-tech, what they call the “geek graffiti”.

G.R.L. and Theodor Watson

With a background between graffiti tracing research works and robotics for the U.S. Government (yes, this is correct), these guys formed an “Open Source” collective ready to hack urban spaces and spread some messages in a very singular way.

Probably everybody has seen already a video or some pictures from the great L.A.S.E.R. graffiti tool. Theodor Watson joined the G.R.L. to develop this tool using the Open Frameworks library.

With L.A.S.E.R. it is possible to leave temporary graffiti style messages on huge buildings by using a piece of software able to track a long-distance laser light source.

Another very popular project is “Throwies”, a led light attached to a small magnetic battery that sticks on any metal surface. The led lights last for three days and are the perfect tool for hacking big advertisement campaigns or anything printed on metal surfaces.

Everything developed at G.R.L. is truly Open Source or How-To in case of hardware. Their Open Lab offers also some resources accessible to everybody.

Josh Nimoy presents his work with Motion Theory.

Josh Nimoy talks about his past

With a background in fine arts, Josh started to explore the beauty of motion scripted graphics very soon. He makes a demonstration of “Balldroppings“, a very beautiful interactive audiovisual piece. He concludes showing his contribution to Motion Theory. Josh does some scripted animated parts of their cool commercials, such as HP Pharrell, Bud Select or Nike One.

When talking about German audiovisual art, words like minimal or electro suddenly appear. Carsten Nicolai, Olaf Bender and Frank Bretschneider are on stage to talk about some of the stuff they do and to make a live performance. Actually, their session starts with a performance from Frank Bretschneider and we feel immersed into a black and white electronic audio in motion.

Frank Bretschneider’s audiovisual performance

Afterwards, Olaf talks about “Raster Noton – Archiv für ton und nicht ton”, a label featuring artists experimenting with music, science and visualization. Carsten Nicolai, Frank Bretschneider or Ryuichi Sakamoto are some of the artists featured by Raster Noton so far. Olaf talks about the cover and packaging design of the several volumes edited by Raster Noton.

Carsten is a well-known artist working between art and science and focused on visualizing/generating audio frequencies into different forms of installations and performances. He shows some of his work and I feel very impressed with a simple audio visualization experiment idea: Carsten connects the CD audio-out into the TV video-in to observe what happens. Clever!

From left to right: Olaf Bender, Carsten Nicolai and Frank Bretschneider

The session ends with a very cool & loud performance. More music in motion!

The second day closes with two OFFF classics. Neville Brody and Joshua Davis are having a debate/conference titled as the festival. Re:fresh!

Neville Brody (left) and Joshua Davis

Neville and Joshua have very different approaches to work. The first one enjoys by working on a more or less big team, having the constant people’s feedback and that’s why he enjoys having offices in London, Paris, Berlin and New York. Neville is also very concerned about the message that designers can imprint on the society and he feels responsible about it.

Joshua enjoys better keeping it small (up to three people in his studio). He likes to do one “money job” once in a while and keep researching the rest of the time, he says. He shows his generative programs once more, something that the people who have seen him in the past editions of the festival already know very good.