The first rough cut from my video poetry collaboration with DJ Cue is up. The music was composed by DJ Cue (Bobby Cuevas) while I provided the visuals and recorded ambient audio. This was made possible thanks to Talenthouse.com and their Creative Invite collaboration platform. This is a rough cut, so it doesn’t include the poetry dialogue that I will eventually add (actually, I’m looking for a woman with a nice classic German accent to do some voice recording), but it’s a nice visual representation of what I’m trying to create. Video imagery includes the abandoned Bärenquell Brauerei in East Berlin, Barbara running through Zurich Bahnhofstrasse (shoot organized with Ethan Oelman), and also a quick look from a underground club night in Berlin, part of an Alternative Berlin night tour I did in the city. Thanks to everyone involved, now that I’ve setup my computers in my new apartment I can get back to shooting and creating on a more normal basis. Enjoy…

Click here to view the embedded video.

I gave talk at the 1st Ignite Zurich (Dec. 2nd at The Hub Zurich) centered on art, rarity, and what that means in the context of the internet and web technologies. A big thank you to Inês Santos Silva for organizing, the night was an awesome inspirational event. Here’s a break down of the ideas I put into my talk…

The Value of Art

What is the value of art, why is it traded for money and why is it sometime considered priceless? The value of art is a combination of traditional supply and demand, rarity, and context. you can’t assign value to art without considering the context of it’s creation. the time and place, and how it fits in with the overall context of the art scene at that particular point in time, that will never come again. Yes, it’s possible that your five year old could have painted that, but they didn’t. Art is idea execution. If you were the first person to put your shit in a can and sell it, you would eventually command a price of over 100,000 USD, but if you do it now it’s just considered a strange precousur to insanity and generally socially unacceptable.

What is Art?

Art is a combination of having the new idea and executing it. Art is not an idea, it is the creation of something significant, just as an idea is worthless in a startup company that doesn’t execute it well. Facebook, Google, Apple, Microsoft all executed their ideas at the right points in time, but they weren’t necessarily the first. It doesn’t matter is someone “stole” your startup idea, it matters if a company was created from that idea. That’s the execution and beauty of it. Now, at this point in time you can launch your own social network, search engine, and software company, but it won’t have the same impact, unless it brings something new and is understood to be genius in the current context of the tech scene. It doesn’t matter if you paint a new Mona Lisa, the idea is done (and overdone and redone in reproductions).

The unique thing about art is that the work gets value at any point in time so long as it fits the context of the history of an art movement, or rather is a disruption. Vincent van Gothe died barely selling a painting. If it’s not discovered and put into context it’s worthless. This is why artists get discovered later on but younger artists are promoted more than older ones when they come onto the art scene. You want the work of the young artists before they become “big” but it’s just a gamble that that will actually happen. So, logically you should create some great work and then kill yourself, because this ensures that you won’t be able to produce any more excellent art. The first person to paint grey instead of blue and red and green would be considered amazing, and all the rest that follow will just be part of the movement. Without the movement, no one cares about the first one, it has no value.

Context vs Content

How can an artist create the context for the work to have value? Or should you just create things and hope that they have some value for other people? The Doktor of Science in me says you get to the heart of the beast and just create or engineer your own context to create value. A piece of art work is a container for an idea, it’s a physical execution of an idea that can be viewed and reinterpreted as needed by society. Nobody cares what the first design of Google looked like, we just want to use it. Maybe the first sketch will sell for a million dollars one day, like the first apple computer, but only because of the context of history. This is because on the internet content is king. People was to use the technologies of the internet, not just be influenced by the ideas.

The UX Perspective

One thing I learned from hanging out with people at the Zurch UX Book club is some of the psychology behind buying things. When things are rare, inside of you is triggered that, “buy it now” mentality. When you see there’s only a few things left in stock, you’re pressured to buy it now. This probably goes back to the natural instinct to collect things and then trade them later on for things you might want from other people, the beginnings of capitalism. So I thought, how can I create a “buy it now” context for my art? In a world of immersion and augmented reality, installations will be the containers. Will we really care if things are real or not? Will it matter if it’s the real Mona Lisa or not? The experience will probably become more and more necessary to have an impact, but we’re not there just yet.

Art Death Concept

The Art Death concept is an auction platform idea I started putting together after taking a professional artist seminar at the F&F Kunst Schule with Olga Stefan. To combine the ideas of art with value related to context and the percieved value of art increasing due to psychological tendencies related to rarity, the best thing is to create an auction where the context of value is engineered into the platform, or rather, the performance.

I can accomplish this by putting up my art for auction on a combined internet and real world platform, having a reserve bid for each piece and a time constraint. If the work doesn’t sell for the reserve price, I have to destroy it personally with various dramatic methods. Like taking a rusty chainsaw or a flame thrower and purifiying the world of my mistakes that don’t sell because they have no value to society. It will take some preparation to do this thing right, and I think some fundraising via Kickstarter is in order.

Various events in life now make it necessary to find a new renter for my current apartment, my wohnung is now free zu mieten. It’s at Arnistrasse 16, CH-8908 Hedingen in the Zurich countryside. In order to promote the project, I decided to make a website for it. It was a great time to apply my knowledge of SEO, and first I picked up the domain www.hedingen-wohnung.ch and then starting putting together some photography for the site. I needed some proper pictures for the apartment  – well, technically it’s more of a house, anyways, it was the ideal time to start playing with HDR photography. I played with the HDR option in Photoshop (CS3) and it resulted in some amazingly horrible results. So, I decided to get a proper program HDR tone-mapping program. After a little searching I decided on Photomatix Pro, a fine piece of software that makes high dynamic range imaging painless and the results are fantastic.

The apartment is fabulous combination of an old 200 year farm house rebuilt from the inside, but retaining much of the original wood and structure. A steel stair case connects the floors and the whole place is like a warm hug. On the top floor there’s a gallery and I put my photo studio up there. The ceiling is high enough for a small trampoline, but I just have a background setup.

Getting the place ready to shoot also entailed clearing things away to make it all minimalist and show off the design (as opposed to views of my camera equipment cluttering up the floor space). When you get that far you might as well wash the floors too, so I did that and then setup my Sony A900 with a 20mm Minolta lens to shoot my first interior images. I’ve seen amazing house photography before, but was mainly just hoping to produce some nice images. Happily, Photomatix is an excellent software program and you can easily produce natural looking images with minimal time input. I supplemented the natural light in one image with an Elinchrom strobe, but otherwise it was all just natural light. Photomatix gives you different tone mapping options which range from that horrible gaudy-over-saturation look to the very natural, almost like you’re standing there, but with a little pop so it feels just a tad like the image is from Wonderland look.

Arnistrasse 16 is easily the best designed place I’ve ever lived in, and I feel like I’m walking through a magazine some days. It includes such funky amenities as an induction oven and internet connection in every room. It’s a certified Minergie place, which means it uses the minimal energy for heating and cooling. It technically has four floors, with an open gallery on the top level where you can setup a studio, or an office if you like. More information on the wohnung is on the main site, www.hedingen-wohnung.ch and if you’re interested in visiting the place I would be happy to show you around.

The latest addition to the Web Portraits Zurich project is Pitor Soluch, he just opened his web design business in Zurich, and I photographed in my new studio space in Hedingen. I hadn’t worked many projects lately, between moving out and moving in and running a few marathons I didn’t find a lot of time to organize any shoots or projects this summer. I met Piotr at a few web gatherings in Zurich like Web Monday, and we also ran into one another at the 2011 Swiss Startup camp in Basel. He’s an intricate designer with that required attention to detail that makes the difference between a professional site, and the ones that I throw together. For the shoot be came by with cookies and Polish beer. This was a fantastic combination and the shoot went smoothly for both of us.

I wanted to get back to fine painterly shadows and images with a dramatic feeling. This included lighting Piotr with some CreativeLight strip boxes from behind either shoulder, a Metz MZ40 in a beauty dish from the front and LastoLite TriLite reflectors from the front. I then pulled in some textures from Rome and the abandoned hospital of Beelitz, just outside of Berlin. There’s no substitute for fantastic texture images. I’ll walk around a city for hours shooting walls and the streets and then maybe not use them till a year later. They add something you never expected when the shoot started.

It was a fine summer Zurich night, and I was heading back to the Web Monday Zurich gathering to check out what was happening at our wonderful host, Interxion. There were many events worth noting during this Monday, but the main points include Interxion, 42 Matters, Restorm, and above and beyond customer support by a Googler.

Interxion

Eddy van den Broeck presented Interxtion, a data center in Glattbrugg in Zurich, and the host of this 21st Web Monday Zurich. I had a little trouble finding the Interxion building, but it’s probably a little hard to find because it’s better that way for the security of their business. Interxion is a data center. A large data center. In fact, a very large data center in the center of Europe. I never really appreciated the data center business until this presentation. Interxion sells secure reliable data space. A simple idea executed with high precision and reliability. The scope of their operation is huge, and these types of centers will be the backbone of our digital future (actually they’re already pretty integral to everything). Politicians keep harping on cyber security and the next big war, but I’m guessing that in the future if you really want to fight a war with someone you won’t care about their military bases or missile silos, you’ll just target their data centers with tunneling cluster bombs in an effort to cut the beast off at its head (this part about wars and beasts and decapitation with cluster bombs is my own fantasy – not part of the Interxion presentation).

Interxtion is located in the very near vicinity of the Zurich airport. I didn’t realize this was relevant information, but I’m sometimes slow comprehending the world around me. Why near the airport and why in Switzerland? Power, fiber optics, customers, political stability, connectivity. All things a giant information storage space needs to be successful. As we do more and more on the net we tend to forget that big data needs to be somewhere…physical. Even the cloud has be a cloud somewhere, it’s not just a fanciful collection of Smurfs shuffling your data between magic mushroom fields and your iPad or Asus Transformer – and there are many real-world factors that need to be in place. For example, Interxion uses more power than the Zurich airport and yet are CO2 neutral. The mechanical engineer in me found this absolutely fascinating. I actually chose my latest internet service provider iMountain largely because they run their operation on solar power, and I like to support Green. Interxtion offers this choice to their customers as well, allowing and promoting the use of alternative energy sources for customers, for example, wind power sources for energy consumption instead of nuclear. Why Switzerland? Best power grid in Europe, politically stable, in the center of everything – makes sense to me (I can list these same reasons for choosing to live and work in der Schwiez myself).

In closing Eddy spoke about the drive to create a Silicon Valley inspired innovation culture in the Zurich area – code named: The Zurich IT Valley. This is a theme people are often talking about, but implementation is always a question. Swiss startup folks visit places like San Francisco and them come back with tales of how awesome it is over there and how things need to change in the Zurich area. However, Silicon Valley wasn’t built by purpose (at least there was no city planning blue-print, even Apple doesn’t have a central campus yet), it was an organic evolution of the innovation society, probably dating all the way back to the atomic bomb. There are real grass-roots movements in the Zurich area like Web Monday, Mobile Monday, Web Tuesday and The Hub, where the locals meet and organically develop communities that define a healthy environment for startups and innovation culture. The Zurich IT Valley sounds like a more structured approach, let’s see what the next five years will bring.

42 Matters

The first startup presentation was by Andrea about AppAware.org – the first app offering from a new startup out of ETH Zurich called 42 Matters. The name of the company is self-explanatory if you’ve read the till the end of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and it not then it doesn’t matter. I mean, the relevance of the name, not the worth of the company. AppAware is an application which shows you what people are installing on Android devices. You can see the installation trends, see what’s hot, what’s not, and based on that info decide for yourself what apps to install on your own device. AppAware is location aware, so you can see what the people around Zurich have installed (and uninstalled). Naturally you can connect to friends to see what they’re doing and copy their behavior if you happen to be a sheep grazing in the mobile app feeding fields. You can tag apps and…do what most social network type apps are doing – and in this field, idea execution is everything. As I began to consider an ASUS Transformer I understand why this sort of app is needed. By contrast you can easily see in the Apple app store if a an app is good or not, read reviews and see if there’s compatibility issues with the latest release. I couldn’t really find the same info planning which apps to buy for an Android device, and AppAware would fill that need.

Is there a way that AppAware is making money? Not at the moment, but there are high hopes for the future, such as providing apps for money and data mining. AppAware/42 Matters is an ETH startup, it originally began as part of a PhD project, and was successful enough to found a company. Seems like a reasonable direction, but in the SWOT sense of the mobile landscape it seems like AppAware could be a stepping stone to something better for the founders – as opposed to the final killer product. The thing is, apps like AppAware have no security against competitors, and even if you’re the first to market it doesn’t necessarily mean anything. A new hot trending app can come along with the samesimilar technology and suck up your users like a sponge wiping across the universe or a second straw in your milkshake. Still, part of the reason the founders put their ETH studies on hold was because their idea got so big so quickly, and that pulse could continue to grow with the explosion of mobile devices on the world. I wish them well.

Restorm.com

I’m a Doktor of Science, but I’m also into photography, painting, and small production video creation. So Restorm.com was naturally very interesting for me to learn about. There is a very large market for licensed music and media on the internet, but a lot of it is simply shared or pirated. I know this well, and there are many times I want to use a piece of music in a video production, but as an independent hobby-director I have no way to license music legally to use in my work. I’ve resorted to creating my own music, and now I’m collaborating with a DJ from Atlanta I met on Talenthouse.com. Working with DJCue is a great solution for me, and this anecdote is actually a success story for Talenthouse, but the vast majority of folks don’t have time to forge partnerships like I’ve had the ability to do, and just want to easily license music for their projects as easily as buying the song on iTunes. Restorm is a company trying to do that (well, compared to the way it is now it would be as easy as iTunes).

Philippe (from Restorm) wants to make it easy to allow direct licensing agreements between musicians and producers needing music for films and other projects. This is huge for people like me, who have been wondering since the beginning of time (ok, maybe 3 years at least) why we can’t do this already. From the presentation, it seems like Restorm is taking the right angle on the licensing issue. The photography stock market has basically been destroyed by microstock companies such as ShutterStock, who built unsustainable business models ideal for designers needing cheap images but pretty poor for photographers (think ShutterStock) looking to profit from their imagery. Companies like Photoshelter and Alamy provide credible licensing options for photographers, but I think that Restorm can do something really significant in the area of creative works licensing if they’re successful starting with licensing music. I’m looking forward to their full launch.

The After Party

After the presentations the best part of any given Web Monday begins, the time of drinks by the BBQ and networking with all manner of interesting people. I was mingling and hanging out with folks like Mike Byte to catch up on his latest projects and by the end of the night witnessed a customer feedback session that forever proves in my mind that Google is not evil, and is composed of caring people focused on providing an enjoyable experience for their customers.

It went down like this, I was talking in a circle of friendly conversation with some folks (including a Googler), admiring business cards (I had forgotten mine) and making smart remarks about this and that newest thing. I vaguely recall something about tactile surfaces perhaps, or a smart phone display built wth thin-film piezo technology, which will power the devices by user gestures. Then a tall man in a light colored suit, and pressed shirt walked up to us. He seemed out of place at a Web Monday, where even the folks from IBM don’t come in suits. He was a well-dressed man with well-groomed hair and a suit and a tie in a sea of web hipsters with tactile business cards, Freitag bags, disheveled hair cuts, and relaxed-fit jeans (I was sporting a fine pair of white leather Adidas by the way).

One of our circle of conversation was a Googler, wearing his fine Google t-shirt. The well-dressed man didn’t seem to be very happy, and we soon found out it had to do with Google. The conversation started off innocently, our Googler was showing off his phone sporting Android, and we were engaged in dialogue about how some people put a piece of paper over the camera port on their iMac because they’re a little freaked out at the new technology (as did I at first). The iPhone location tracking scandal was in the news at that time, and then our well-dressed friend began making remarks about Google being evil and how he deleted his account. We asked about his line of work and turns out he was a risk manager. So he was keenly clued in to all manner of freaky things that could go wrong in life, backed up by mathematical models, and I think he was a little paranoid – Paranoid that Google was evil and hell bent on taking over all our lives, but then the real reason for his quiet rage came out.

You see, he had set up a Google AdWords account, and he was pissed off that AdWords wasn’t showing up on his chosen search terms, even when his colleagues tried to search from different browsers. He seemed like a meticulous person, and as it turns out, had double checked and tried everything. The main page of his company was on the front page of Google (thanks to organic search optimization), but apparently for AdWords the search terms didn’t hit. There’s no customer service line for AdWords, and he was uber frustrated at the whole experience. Our Googler friend began a solution-oriented approach, bringing up different things that could be wrong, desperately trying to help our well-dressed friend with now fiery eyes, slightly reminiscent of lava about to explode from a deep crack in the surface of the Earth. This went on for maybe 10 minutes…did you try..ah…YES I TRIED THAT..what about..YES I DID THAT AS WELL.

It’s hard to describe the crescendo of rage that was now emanated from the eyes of our well-dressed friend, and for a second I thought we were heading to an apex in energy and he was going to rip off his blazer and punch our Googler in the face because of his poor AdWords user-experience. I’ve been studying user experience this past year, and also have shared this personal rage at wanting to throw a computer out the window, but when you have a representative of the company at the root of your rage directly in front of you, well, the bull’s eye is obvious for your rage canon. This is the point in a confrontation when you either fight back or accommodate to and empathize with the feelings of the aggressor and diffuse the bomb as it were. Our brave Googler handled the situation as any upstanding professional should. He pulled out his Google business card and offered to personally help in the matter.

This defused the situation because some one was listening – and listening is at the heart of user experience satisfaction. It’s the difference between OSX and Windows Vista. It’s the center that this social media tech world revolves around. A real person was offering to help and get to the root of the issue and was sincere in showing that he cares. In an instant the fiery eyes cooled and the rage diffused into the cool Zurich night sky. Our well-dressed friend remarked to me (now with a slight smile on his face), that if Google didn’t change its ways that everyone would simply leave and go to some other search giant. I remarked, that unlike the US economy, Google is too big to fail. He laughed now with genuine joy and agreed with me – a huge smile upon his face, and faded into the fine Zurich night like the Cheshire Cat blending into the background of Wonderland.