Diolch yn fawr iawn am wylio'r fideo. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Продолжение следует... Thank you. I'm sorry. Hello, very warm welcome to the ninth edition of the symposium Expanded Animation here at the University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria Hagenberg Campus. My name is Jürgen Hager, I am the director of the Ars Electronica Animation Festival and professor here at the campus. It's a great pleasure to kick off this Expanded Animation Sy symposium again. We have, unfortunately, these challenging circumstances and we cannot do this with our audience. So this will be, again, an online symposium as we did it already last year. So we have some guests invited to our studio at the Campus Hagenberg, but you can only join us online and you have also the possibility to leave some questions in the chat. So the Expanded Animation Symposium is under the umbrella of the Ars Electronica Animation Festival since several years. And the Animation Festival covers a screening program so if you are here in linz you have the possibility to see some screenings some selections are from the pre-ars electronica category computer animation which is actually the starting point for media arts in this media art competition, Prius Electronica, and is also a pillar for the Expanded Animation Symposium. Then there are additional Deep Space 8K screenings. So we already had a screening today with Eric O. Tomorrow there will also follow some very exciting Deep Space 8K presentations. In addition, you have the possibility to see some installations selections from the award winners this year at the OCA center and of course there is the expanded animation symposium so overall screenings exhibitions and more than 30 presentations the symposium started in 2013 with the overarching or very ambitious topic mapping an unlimited landscape so I will introduce you briefly to the evolution of the expanded animation symposium. It was originally designed as a one-day unique event. We had a lineup with 10 speakers. Susan Buckham was our keynote speaker on the topic pervasive animation. And we actually continued and addressed the topic exploring the vastness of art theory and play. So we tackled this very interesting intersection between animation and game. A year later, we had this opportunity to host the Expanded Animation Symposium under the umbrella of the Animation Festival in conjunction with the pre-forum. This is the place where the winners, the Golden Ica winner and the Award of Distinction winners discuss with jury members discussing their projects actually. A year later, we continued with the topic The Alchemists of Animation, closed, connected to the yearly theme of Ars Electronica in 2016, Radical Atoms, The Alchemists of Our Time. A year later, we started discussing the topic Hybrid Technology in animation. We invited some guests from the industry, but also from research and in conjunction with artists. We continued this discussion a year later in 2018 with the topic Interfaces in Motion. We had discussed this topic with these upcoming virtual reality interfaces as well as virtual productions in 2019 we presented the ontology mapping and unlimited landscape a recap kept so to speak with these first five six editions the topic was out of the box strong connected to expanded cinema, expanded animation, so going back to the roots of this initiative. Last year we tackled the topic, the appeal of the analogue, quite interesting because this was a virtual conference so to speak, and we expanded the conference to a three-day conference with the University for Creative Arts with the conference Synesthetic Syntax Seeing Visuals Hearing Sound and this is a conference that we will continue this year as well. This year we have the title Tectonic Shift. There is the main question, is there a kind of tectonic shift that we are facing now in production, in conception, but also in reception and distribution. So there are a couple of new things evolving all the time. And the question is, is there a shift? Is there something that we can see now? Or is it a smooth transition as well? So it's great to have overall these 30 presentations and we are really looking forward to see these contributions from so many people from the industry but also artist positions and researchers. So thank you so much to all the speakers for their contribution. Such an event of course is not possible without a great deal of support. So I would like to mention my co-organizers Jeremiah Teebals, Alexander Wilhelm, Wolfgang Hochleitner, Christoph Schaufler, Patrick Breuer, Houston Rodriguez. Thank you so much to Ars Electronica, to the University for Creative Arts for this collaboration and also to all our partners Maxon and of course all these sponsors that are supporting this great event the research group playful interactive environment supertron the further for an FH Hagenberg alumni group FHO best like axis for news and the Vita's karma over is try thank you to all the students that are supporting this event and also a special thank you to the trailer team for their fantastic trailer. It's great to kick off this symposium again under these challenging circumstances and it's great to have Gefried Stocker, Artistic Director, here with us. Thank you so much. Hello and a very warm and excited welcome also from my side to Expanded Animation. My name is Gerfried Stocker, I'm the Artistic Director of Ars Electronica and I have this wonderful opportunity to talk to you here from the Kepler Gardens. The Expanded Animation Symposium is a very important part of the annual animation festival and therefore a very important part of the annual Ars Electronica festival. Computer animation in particular has been one of the defining topics of the pre-Ars Electronica, the big international award for computer art and digital art that Ars Electronica is giving out since 1987. And when we look back in these very early years when computer animation just was kind of becoming fashionable, where big expectations started that this sometimes would be a technology that could allow us to simulate reality. And when we look now at this whole vast universe of digital visual technologies, then we really see this extremely interesting transformation and development. Now in the age of artificial intelligence and all the new tools that are there to not only simulate reality but actually to create, to invent realities that haven't been here before, we see on the one side this exciting technological development but I would say we even much stronger see the very importance the need for artistic contribution we see how important it is to have the energy the creativity the inspiration of artists exploring the possibilities of these tools, but also giving us opportunities to see these developments maybe with different perspectives. To not only see the possibilities, but to see the challenges and the problems. And this is what the whole Ars Electronica festival is about. This is what we are talking this year under the title, a new digital deal in so many areas of the festival and I would really like to use this opportunity to thank Jürgen Hagler, his exciting team at the Fachhochschule, the upper Austrian Fachhochschule, in particular the partners in Hagenberg and all the other people that are working with him for their energy, for their contribution and for this really wonderful long-term collaboration that we have been able to establish. It's an important part of our global international network and I'm very happy that just a few kilometers out of Linz we have such a strong partner here as well. So thanks to the organizers, thanks to Jürgen and to all the visitors here. I hope you're really enjoying this program. Thank you. Hello and willkommen. I would like to give you a brief overview of the panels of the next days and the contents we have to share in the stream. contents we have to share in the stream. First of all you maybe see this program here and we can switch to it. We start today with the artists position and this panel contains talks of outstanding artists who will talk about their remarkable work and their motivation and passion and why they do all the things they do. We're starting this with Sine Oetzbilge, who will also be here live in the studio and talk with Jürgen after the talk. Tomorrow is a pretty long day with our main topic. This year's main topic is tectonic shift, like Jürgen mentioned already. And we have three long panels that will negotiate the difficulties and changes that the pandemic brought to the animation and VFX industry and how this influenced the workflows for the artists. But also we will talk about paradigm shifts within technology. And this will be discussed from artistic perspectives and the changing of methods like procedural design. procedural design. We have three panels with different perspectives on this main topic. On Sunday we also have a full-packed program with synesthetic syntax that this symposium extension, so to say, presents researches and experiments within the field of audiovisual creation in a very broad manner. One thing I would like to mention very much is the pre-forum, which normal-wise opened our symposium, but out of time schedule issues it is now placed in the middle of the Sunday 15.15 or 3 p.m. 15 at our place There is a calculator in our program that you can find on the homepage that can calculate which time this means for you, depending on your place. So, the brief forum will be presented by the Oscar nominee Eric O., who is a well-known artist at the Ars Laetronica II, and he will talk to the prize winners in the Ars category, computer animation, and will reflect with them on their awarded works. It's highly recommended and one of our favorite panels we can show you. So, have fun and now a talk with Sine, audiovisual director and visual artist. Often times I collaborate with my artistic partner and sister Imge Özgülge. Together we work as each other's mirrors, experimenting with the medium of animation, the 16 to 9 screen, digital installation art and the use of mixed media. While doing so, we explore new connotations and stylistic forms. Just as we create in a duo, we also lead separate artistic practices. Today, I will give insights to my personal artistic oeuvre, which revolves around research that questions and seeks out artistic possibilities which arise in the post-net limbo that lies between our real physical worlds as well as cyberspace. To give you more insights I would like to start with an introduction of where I see us as a species and the current zeitgeist and explain why this is important in contemporary art practices today. The online living culture that we as the 21st century Homo sapiens digitalis have welcomed with open arms has become seriously rooted in our existence. We would think that life had always been this way, that it is normal that we use devices and the internet for almost everything in our daily lives. We wake up staring at our phones, continue our workday on computers and end up watching movies on a screen in the evenings. We might say this is a personal choice, yet this digital infrastructure has creeped into nearly all of our essential needs, making it impossible to function without technology and rendering this an obligation rather than a choice really. Nowadays, for instance, at some cafes or restaurants, you cannot consume anything unless you own a smartphone with a Payconic app. This can prevent some people from ordering their drinks or food, as they might not have the know-how on installing an app, let alone own a smartphone. It might sound strange, but it is still the reality for some people. This issue seems to be of concern to many of us. For example, the curator Omar Kulif in his book Goodbye World, Looking at Art in the Digital Age, describes the struggles he faces with digital services while waiting for his flight at an airport. He narrates similar situations while also questioning what this means and how far machines will and are replacing human labor as well as interaction. And what happens when machines fail us? Since the onset of COVID, cash is being eradicated, education is becoming monopolized, half data digitized and many more changes are currently being established, which transform each one of us into ephemeral digital beings, whose existence literally depends on the service of digital providers and privatized companies. Without your LinkedIn, you cannot apply to certain jobs. Without your bank apps, you cannot pay your rent. Without your identity app, you cannot access your bureaucratic documents, apply for a visa, or receive a COVID certificate to travel. You can actually not function. While the use of such technology might feel intuitive to generation Y and generation Z, the architects of the system, generation X, is already starting to lag behind. However, if we look back on how our current cyber culture has evolved, we will realize that this phenomenon is surprisingly young. The Internet as we know it exists merely for approximately three decades. Yet its influence on our physical world and physical bodies is immense. For example, Christina Criddle, technology reporter at BBC News, writes about the Cambridge University research that analyses the real-world energy consumption of the cryptocurrency Bitcoin. The data suggests that this digital currency burns more electricity than the entirety of Argentina. Energy that derives mostly from coal, so real physical matter, is translated into digital capital. There is also new research on the impact of the technological devices that we use on our cognitive behaviours. Simply put, research on how our interaction with cyberspace is altering the way we organic humans perceive and synthesize digital content. Pressure inflicted online has often real psychological or physical effects, from bullying trolls to cyberattacks on companies and private citizens. Furthermore, people tend to act differently in virtual spaces than in physical spaces, while the effects of both are equally challenging. On top of this, researchers Junko Yamamoto and Simeon Ananou state in their publication Humanity in the Digital Age Cognitive, Social, Emotional and Ethical ethical implications, that the increased use of online social networks, text messaging and email can collectively result in decreased face-to-face interaction. This may in return also result in less empathy and the loss of interpersonal bonding. Imagine the devastating outcomes of a society without empathy. Imagine the devastating outcomes of a society without empathy. So in short, our actions in what I call the digital hemisphere have an undeniable real-time effect on our physical world. And this effect is changing the way we exist and what we are. It is natural to assume that in this case art itself is also intrinsically affected by the digitalization of our lives. In the introduction of the anthology No Internet, No Art, Melanie Bühler explains that in our present era there can be no art that is not somehow connected to or reliant upon the Internet. She says even when artists are not working with digital technologies as their primary medium, these technologies are nevertheless involved in the process of producing, disseminating and or selling an artwork. Be it that the materials were sourced on eBay, Wikipedia was consulted for research, an assistant retouched the documentation in Photoshop, or the gallerist posted images of the work on Instagram. She started the Lunch Bites anthology in 2011. Since then, her as well as other professionals in the art domain have furthered their inquiry into this subject. As I mentioned before, the conquest of the internet over the physical world is progressing at a high speed level. In the past 10 years, the art landscape has most definitely changed further and has engulfed itself far deeper into the deep webs of cyberspace. And this change is continuing at an accelerated pace, rendering it important for us to ongoingly investigate the millions of new phenomena that arise from it. While academics look into research from a strongly theoretical and factual perspective, I believe artists are often acting upon their intuition and gut feelings. We tend to discover things along the way while playing and experimenting, oftentimes without exactly knowing what we are looking for. experimenting, often times without exactly knowing what we are looking for. My own experimental practice has paved the way to my own research in this field, while bringing forth projects that I have enjoyed immensely. I will now introduce a few of these and explain their link with the subject at hand. A project where the influence of the digital on the human existence is observed and researched through artistic practice is my animated short film Hashtag 21XOXO co-directed by Imge Özbilge. Hashtag 21XOXO is an experimental animated short film that reflects on the impact of 21st century technologies on intimacy, love and relationships. It revolves around the nihilistic, narcissistic and millennial adventures of a girl in a parallel digital universe, interlaced with cyber love, dating hipster culture meme and vaporwave aesthetics as well as post-net attitudes absurd surreal and metamorphic scenes of digital nonsense intertwine with 90s nostalgia design culture femininity the subconscious and pop art in order to paint a picture of today's zeitgeist. It has a mixed media basis where animation and live action fuse in order to explore new connotations and stylistic forms, generating sub-layers, open endings and distorted realities. and distorted realities. While making this film, I was greatly fascinated by the way we navigate and interact with social media. I found a study conducted by researchers at the University of Science and Technology of China, which reveals that social media has a major impact on university students. social media has a major impact on university students. They state that the excessive use of social media leads to an overload of information and increases technostress as well as exhaustion. Technostress refers to the stress derived from the use of information technology. The great number of digital stimuli, information as well as communication overload is a new phenomenon that did not exist in the pre-internet times. In the official journal of the World Psychiatric Association, they talk about how internet usage directly impacts our brain's grey matter as well as neuroplastic mechanisms. They lay out how the current digital tools in connection to the internet encourage interaction with multiple inputs at the same time, on a shallow level. This is called media multitasking, and it is negatively altering our brain structure. During the making of hashtag 2021xOxO, I found myself intuitively experimenting with the editing of the trippy nightmare sequence, in a similar way to how we tend to scroll down on our social media feeds, or how we switch from one post to another, swipe on Tinder and cruise on Instagram. This resulted in the creation of a continuous yet extremely fragmented visual experience. The more I started looking theoretically into my intuitive editing choices, the more I realized that we as audiovisual creators are adapting to this shift in cognition as well. Hmm Субтитры создавал DimaTorzok Thank you. Kjell Kjell I I believe that we are currently developing new forms of cinematography that no longer align with past movements and theories. A cinematography that reflects our current digital lifestyles. Contemporary video clutter, media-related filmic aesthetics, are infiltrating our everyday lives through social media and technological gadgets, resulting in visual output such as fisheye lenses, Skype angles, GoPro footage, Instagram cadrages, and much more. I had much fun integrating these into the scenes of my film, filtering them through the language of animation. As this kind of application is considerably new, there is also not a lot of research done around this subject, especially in the field of animation. Yet, artists as well as students from all over the world are subconsciously embedding these elements in their work. Just in the last Masters Jury this summer at KASK, the Royal Academy of Arts in Ghent, I witnessed another interesting execution of this. One of our students had reconstructed an animated scene, imitating a recording of a solar eclipse taken with a smartphone. Besides the specific camera angle and cadrage, she had also used frame-by-frame watercolor texture to imitate the shaking of the handheld smartphone camera. And she combined this with sound design to enhance the effect. So actually she used a material, watercolour, to reproduce a digital effect and a digital sense and motion. We are intrinsically trying to recreate these digital cognitive elements in our experiences as artists. After XOXO, I developed a curiosity for post-cyberfeminism, coming across a 2019 published edition of the exhibition Producing Futures from the Migros Museum of Contemporary Art. Thanks to this book, I made acquaintance with the artists that are building upon the legacy of the cyber feminists of the 90s. Certainly a fascinating movement, as it addresses the effects of digital actions on societal structures. The prophecy of the cyber feminists of the 90s was that the internet would liberate us by dismantling hierarchies as well as structures of power, sexism and discrimination. To what extent this has come true is of course debatable. While some improvements have certainly taken place, the virtual has simultaneously created or at times augmented other issues that need to be addressed. The post-cyber feminists therefore use the term post, as they are reconstructing their predecessors' movement while adapting it to the current timeframe. movement while adapting it to the current timeframe. These readings gave birth to my ongoing investigative project, the Uterine Cyber Partition, in which I envision an alternate parallel where the Internet fosters her consciousness through the act of creation, regaining universal vision and liberating herself from the shackles that were imposed upon her. © transcript Emily Beynon © transcript Emily Beynon Thank you. © transcript Emily Beynon I create a cyber myth centered around the, whom I render female in this case. This myth enables the investigation of gender-related symbolism. In Western culture as well as in other cultures, there are traces of misogynist remains in almost all imaginable domains. Many artists and activists are trying to dismantle this gender-biased legacy in order to create a more wholesome and harmonious society, which also is accepting of any person no matter their gender or sexual orientation. This misogynist legacy, however, is deeply interwoven in our cultures and is in urgent need of reconstruction. In English-lingua, for instance, a commonly used expression for the lack of courage is linked to being female. David Shariat-Madari, writer and editor at The Guardian, wrote an article in 2016 on sexism in language, pointing out that the word rabbit was, according to the dictionary publisher, described as feminist. He wrote that the publisher had been criticized for a sexist bias in his illustrations of how certain words are used. Nagging was followed by wife, grating and shrill appeared in sentences describing women's voices. Luckily, today these terms have been adjusted. Other examples can be found in the medical jargon used in textbooks which is still heavily based on outdated terminology. The term hysterectomy for instance is still related to the women specific made-up mental illness hysteria. In the past it was believed that removing the uterus would cure hysteria, while this fake illness was removed from the DSM, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, in 1980, the term hysterectomy is still used for the operations of the removal of the uterus. Definitely a term in urgent need of reformation. This list can go on, but I think I've pointed out the issue. The story of the uterine cyberpartition, in short UCP, empowers the female by using female organs in a celebratory fashion. Just as Donna Haraway, the inspirational author and professor of the cyberfeminist movement, uses the cyborg as a means to deconstruct gender stereotypes in societies and to reconstruct new, liberated beings, I make use of the UCP as a cyber-mythical tool of investigation and celebration. The reason to construct a myth as a tool is linked to Joseph Campbell's theories, the author of The Power of Myth. He points out the ability for myths to incorporate the beliefs of a whole society and to provide the mythology to unify a nation. Apart from post-cyberfeminism's attempt to recode society through the digital hemisphere, I've also experimented with the practical part of the UCP. This part involves the creation of physical objects. I have created various so-called cyber-artifacts for this project that serve as proof of the existence of my myth. The uterus that I've designed for the UCP has been modeled through a VR headset using a VR sculpting program. This means that I sculpted its form with the movements of my own physical body and physical hand gestures, but in a virtual space. My analog movements were translated into digital code. Later on, I 3D printed my sculpted piece with a 3D printer, bringing it back to the physical, real space. However, this time the uterus was filtered through the 3D printer's printing algorithm. So that means that my work went through four stages. First physical, then two times digital, and finally one more physical stage in order to become the artifact that represents the UCP. And this transformative behavior of the sculpted uterus actually sums up my topic for this artist talk, as it is a literal representation of how physical elements enter cyberspace and how cyber elements are introduced or affect things in the physical world. And eventually, how this can and is becoming part of art making in the current era. Thank you. Thank you Sine for this fantastic presentation. It's great to have you here in Hagenberg at the studio and it's also great to have Remco, the sound designer, here with us. So let's start with the Q&A for the audience. So if you want to address a question, just leave a message in the chat and I can read it to you and we can discuss it. So, Sine, it's quite interesting to see that sisters are working together. Brother's Gwei is something that came to my mind when I saw your work the first time. You couldn't make it, but you are collaborating since a couple of years. This is, I think, the second or third animated shorts that are you working together with your sister. This is quite challenging, or is it easy? So how do you collaborate in the beginning? Is there a concept that you do together? How do we do that? Yeah, firstly, thank you for having us. It's very exciting to be here. Inge couldn't make it, but she's also very happy to be part of Ars Electronica, as it's also the second year. So the collaboration that we have is mostly, so far it was that we would write the stories separately and also create the artistic world separately but we would co-direct so during production we were making sure that we are each other's sparing partner and support partner in it. Currently we are working on a project that we are completely writing by ourselves together this time and we are merging our visual words as well so exciting times ahead. So is this totally different because for hashtag 21XOXO you wrote the script and then Imke joined the production, so to speak. Indeed, yes. And Mosaic, it was kind of vice versa. Yes, exactly. So, hashtag 2020XOXO is more visually from my side, from the experimentation and also the story. and also the story, but Mosaic is definitely Imke's story and visual world as she is specialized in Middle Eastern mythologies and miniature art, so you can also see that a lot in the way she creates characters, but the co-directing, so the choosing of how we're gonna film it and how we're gonna animate it, that part we do always together. So for the audience, I have a tip. Tomorrow there is a Deep Space presentation where you can see Mosaic and hashtag 21XOXO in huge resolution on a large screen. And yeah, you actually got an award, a honorary mention for both last year and this year. I was joining the jury when they discussed last year the project, the animated short hashtag 21XOXO. So it was really fantastic to see this story from this perspective and very fresh unique animations so congratulations to both projects. I was curious about this importance of your story so in both projects you have different writers so to speak, you have different artistic practice in your bio. I saw that you are more interested in feminism and cyber aesthetic and Imke is more interested in psychological matters. Is this something that is fluid or is it really like like you wrote in in your bio it is quite like that since our childhood we we create because our mother is a painter and we always had like always something creative and we would express ourselves with drawings for instance and I would definitely say that it's true that Imge is reflecting on the societal matters while I really look more into the psychological things and you can you can see that kind of in the short films as well because in hashtag 21XOXO it's the internal journey of a young girl who is looking for love actually in digital times and in Mosaic it's the reflection of a societal issue and it's concentrated on the Middle Eastern cultural richness basically. So yeah, and the new film's titled The Curator. We want to bring these two ways of researching of psychological and societal together and we will see what comes out of it. You mentioned that this is a quite interesting approach in this interactivity so it will be a short film but also some you are experimenting with some different forms yes so it's it's an upcoming project can you give us a an insight into what you are actually planning to do yes so we were given often from festivals and valuable curators the feedback that our films are very rich in research and that they sometimes like to watch it again because we hide so much information in character design or something in the back. And then we realized, wow, we are just working with this linear medium, the short film, which just gives you something of approximately 15 minutes. And it's like an experience in a cinema. But we have so much more research and the world around these stories that we want to also share that. So now we are working for the curator on a 360 project that's called or a satellite project which will encompass also a game and maybe museum installations as well we will see how far we will expand it and the interesting thing is you can really play with narration in a game because it's not linear and you can give the audience really the option to choose what they're going to observe first and how they come to the resolution it's great to hear this and we are looking forward to see this project this is quite interesting in terms of what is first I know some projects in the past we have already discussed for instance David O'Reilly's piece and he's also in this fringe of animation and games as well so it's my question is what is first as you are filmmaker are you starting with a traditional storyboard and animation and then think about activity and non-linear things? Is this in the flux? Is this something that you still have to do, to research? Very good question. I think we will try to do it simultaneously. So far we did it. We have already everything ready for the short film. So that hopefully will go into production in a year, depending on funding possibilities, of course. But we also have the pre... like the application for the prototype ready for the game. We did it together because it's important to question both media's possibilities. And sometimes if you do just a game from a film for instance you can really not give all the credit to the game that you are making because actually a game is different. Often there are films from whom they make a game but it's the same story for instance and it doesn't really go fully into the potential but I think I will be able to answer this better in a few months when we're really diving into it and by the way I love David O'Reilly so it's great to hear that there are a couple of great examples we had a presentation today with Eric O. This is a huge tableau, also a kind of expansion of filmmaking, so to speak. It's a similar approach and he also mentioned thinking about interactivity and this is obvious, so quite an interesting question. Remco, you are the sound designer for Hashtag 21XOXO, so can you give us an insight into your approach and also maybe thinking about together about interactive sound design? Yeah, so what was interesting for that project is that I kind of did the sound design and music a bit at the same time. Actually I started more with sound design because Sine already had this idea in her head to have like these social media sounds to use those in some sort of way. So I started with doing some research and just looking for some of those social media sounds and getting like a database of these sounds and trying to see what I could do with them. And then I started making some musical sketches on what I, the project back then was still in early stages, I think, but I had like some clues on what kind of style I would want to make to fit the narrative. And then I just made a lot of sketches and then together with Cine we looked like what could work for different parts. And then once we settled a bit on which ones to use, I expanded those further. And I think a lot of, so there's like the music, but a lot of the sounds of things that appear in the background or like scene transitions are also already incorporated in the soundtrack. So that was kind of interesting to do, to like make like a combination of the soundtrack and the sound design in one track. And then there's like the whole the track in the more trippy scene, which is like a very rhythmic track, more like a clubby track, which was also very challenging for me to do in the beginning because it was I had to do like the sound design with all everything going on and then also match the whole structure to the to the edit of the film so that it fits with every transition, which was quite challenging with the very rhythmic structure of that song, but it was really fun to do. Yeah, it was just great because in Ixo Ixo we experimented a lot and he also works experimentally so we could together discover what the possibilities are. experimental so we could together discover what the possibilities are. It was a great collaboration. Yeah, it was basically a lot of fun to do and I had mostly what I used was like this Roland Geno 60 synthesizer and I just made almost every sound with just the synthesizer, but it was really fun to just see what I could get out of the synthesizer. And the sound was quite fitting with the movie, I think, and also the aesthetic. So yeah, it was really fun to explore. It's the same challenge for sound designers as for animators and filmmakers if you go the next step interactive environments 360 how to handle sound sound design music because it's linear and then it's interactive even in the 3d space and it's really a lot of things to consider yes and also actually for the next project, the game, I will also be looking into doing the sound design and the music, which will also be a new challenge to see how we can use sounds interactive and in the in the space and how to work that out. Yeah, indeed. I was just refreshing the stream. So if you have any questions, we're still discussing some other topics just leave it in the chat and I can address it to you I would also like to talk about your last project your current project this is already kind of exhibited but it's not in the way you thought about it? Or can you give us an insight how you would like to be a uterine cybopatrician be exhibited? So you have these artifacts, but you also have these cyber myths. How should this be in a proper way exhibited? Yeah, so the uterine cyber-titration, it's still an ongoing project, it's an investigation, and I'm looking into the possibilities of creating a myth, and the myth is centered around the internet that gives birth to her own uterus and creativity. I am currently looking at what the best exhibition for this would be if it can be an interactive installation where people can also make 3D objects and print them because the artifacts the 3d artifacts that I'm talking about are human made and they're kind of the proof of the existence of the uterine cyber parturition but during the process I also had a great opportunity to showcase one of the fragments of it at the Denver Digerati in Denver. It's an amazing art platform and festival. The festival is called Supernova with great curators and they selected it to show it at the Urban Expo screening. There is in the artist talk you can see an image from that. So they were extremely supportive and eventually the media company that rents the screens had a bit of an issue because the original video footage had the uterus in it. But they found that a bit too sexual or offensive, and so we had to change it, and I changed it into Ovaries in Disguise, the title of the piece, which was eventually exhibited. The original text on the side screen was also saying that Freud is a sad man. That was translated to The Weather is Nice. Okay, quite interesting. So this is very important for you to have these gap between transitions between the digital and the analog. In this case of this object, you started with a body movement, so to speak, and then at the end there is an object that can be touched in an exhibition. So this kind of switch between cyber and real, is this something that is important in your whole body of work? Even if you think about hashtag 21XOXO, there is also a transition between the real and... Is this something that is quite important in your whole world? Definitely. Before hashtag 21XOXO, there was my graduation film, The Three-Winged Circus, which was also a bit of a Melliesque live action and drawing mix. Back then I already started looking into possibilities of reality games that come out of the combination of animation and live action. And now of course with digital technologies I'm continuing more into AR and 3d printing and still observing what it means that something is digital is it like an alternative reality when is something tangible when I 3d print something I can touch it what does that mean is it it more real then? So for the U-turn cyber partition artefacts I love contemporary art history and I always appreciated the abstract expressionists that use their own bodies to paint. For instance, Pollock was doing that, his movements were translating into painting. And with this project it's the VR where you actually really sculpt in a virtual space with your own body movement and then that is translated into digital data but eventually again printed into the real physical world as we are running out of time and there is no question I think I have to refresh it but I don't think there is a question I will address the last one you mentioned in talk that you gave with your sister last year that you are very keen on characters that are so to speak appealing and uncanny at the same time. This is the case in EXO. Kind of in the current animated short as well. Is this a very particular device of animation to have this possibility of this gap between uncanny and appealing? This is definitely for Hashtag 29XOXO the case. For other movies we kind of tailor make the characters that should fit the storyline. For instance Mosaic has much more of an emotional connection with the characters. But in Hasht hashtag 29XOXO it was on purpose supposed to be disturbing. And that's why we used rotoscopy but in a way that the characters didn't have eyes. They had like this empty Photoshop texture when you looked into the eyes and the mouth. Their speech was text-to-speech and our actresses had to really think it while acting for it. So we really wanted to make people feel uncomfortable, disconnected, but also intrigued about it. Thank you so much, Sine, for this great insight and for the fantastic presentation. Also thank you, Renko, for joining. We just had a little conversation on the sound design, but thank you so much. We will continue with the next talk. Matthias Winkelmann will talk about a current project Rachel is not real and he will talk about strategies in social media that he will use for and what that is creating meaningful images Hello everyone, thank you so much for having me here at Ask Electronica. Thank you Jürgen, thank you Rodrigues for inviting me to give a talk about a project I created last year, which is called Rachel is Not Real. Before I start talking about the project, I should probably introduce myself. My name is Matthias Winkelmann. I am a creative director and digital designer based in Berlin. The majority of my work happens more in the commercial sector of motion design and animation. I work with different clients all over the world, predominantly in combination with different studios. For example, I worked a lot with Microsoft with a studio called Foam Studio that I ran in Berlin in the last years. And we created different kind of animations and social media content for Microsoft to show new features in their products or actually announce new products or also just create some nice animations for their social media content. I also work a lot with clients more in the design field to do branding and kind of help them sharpen their branding imagery. This is a project created for BASF also with Foam Studio where we created abstract artistic collages inspired by some of the sociological research that BASF has done within the company. In between I also make more traditional animation films. For example I did two films for Maxon in the last years. This one is called Influencers and then the second one was called Versus about which I actually also talked at Ars Electronica a few years ago already. This was created at Man Vs Machine in London, where I worked before I moved to Berlin. And then the application of what I do or what we do as 3D designers is quite wide. It starts somewhere in motion graphics and motion design, also animation advertisement, but also even goes as far as like doing technological research for different companies, which is kind of interesting because it's something that's been happening more in the last years. I've worked for Microsoft and Google in the last year to do some tech research. But for example, this was made for IKEA a couple of years ago, together with Space 10, a think tank in Copenhagen. And it was a project where we basically aspired to design autonomously driving vehicles of the future, how we would like them to see to be more human, more friendly, more warm. When you work in motion design, you traditionally will work with TV channels as well from time to time. This is some branding we did for ITV2 a few years ago at Man Vs Machine or the opening title of the Film 4 production company that I created also a few years ago. And traditionally you will do advertisement from time to time so these are some pieces I did for Honda or another piece we did at Man Vs Machine for Ilohas. It's a Japanese water company that also is more like kind of animation, very animation heavy, but more in the context of advertisement. Nike is a very frequent client for everyone who works in that field. So from time to time, you have to animate some shoes. If I don't work for clients, I'm very interested in thinking about how our medium as motion designers evolves, and what will be the next thing in a way, but also sort of critically examine with creative projects what we are actually doing as designers in our fast-paced world today. And I think that curiosity was something that also led me into doing that work, but it's also something that has kind of been driving the industry and the community quite a lot, that has kind of been driving the industry and the community quite a lot, because the community thrives from that evolution and from that new technology that is coming up and all these new things that are popping up all the time. And that is why I created Rachel is not real in the first place. It was on one hand, an exploration of new technology. But then on the other hand, also a critical examination of the technology we are using already and what kind of impact it has on the creative work we do. A little bit of a background to motion design and motion graphics and I'm trying to keep this short but not everybody might be super familiar with the kind of work and that sort of niche industry that exists around it but motion design in a way or motion graphics can be traced back to 100 years ago with with movements like absolute a film or cinema pure in which experimental filmmakers strived to create abstract animations that sort of reflect on an alternative reality outside of the commonly known film medium already then it really got more attention with the title design of the 70s people like Saul Bass who were really pioneers of the medium and and kind of gave it a new platform. For me personally, it became very interesting, also age-wise with MTV in the 90s, where music videos and also like just abstract 3D animation was really celebrated on the platform. And this is also where I got into it. But back in the days, it was like music videos were several minutes long and yeah, either they could be animated or motion motion graphics but also quite often it was like very stylized video shoots or film shoots and that still falls sort of in the section of motion design. When I actually practically started working in the industry Vimeo was a big deal. It was everybody was sort of pushing their work on Vimeo and you try to publish a film once or twice every year and these films were like several minutes long. So you needed a strong concept and a narrative to keep people interested throughout the film and actually also kind of not just through the visual design and the images, but also tell a story or like at least an idea. With Instagram in the last years, especially this has massively changed. The formats got shorter. The content has to be a lot more catchy, and just like pulling people in. And it's not so much about a concept or narrative anymore, much rather of like visual eye candy that is just popping up on your feet. So that platform had a massive impact on what kind of work is created as well, not just for what kind of platform it is created, but it really mirrors back into the kind of work designers are creating today. And TikTok is not really the new big thing yet for motion design, but it's coming more and more. And it just shows me that the medium will not stop evolving here, it will always like, try to adapt to the new platform to the needs that clients have in a way. Generally, you can say the average duration of animated design pieces has been constantly decreasing over the last years, from like several minutes on MTV or Vimeo, to just like maybe 10-20 seconds on Instagram, because these are the durations that work a lot better on that platform. And equally, it also addresses a similar phenomenon that I believe the attention span of the audience has been decreasing at the same time. People are not necessarily willing anymore to sit down and watch a long film over several minutes, but rather stop briefly while scrolling down their feet. And if it interests them, they might stick with it. And if not, they just continue scrolling downwards. And becoming aware of that development has made me start questioning the impact that social media has on the work that we do. Not even social media as such, but the platforms within social media, how they influence the work we do and how they influence what kind of creative decisions we make along the way. On one hand, social media is extremely important for any kind of creative decisions we make along the way. On one hand, social media is extremely important for any kind of creative work because it's a very fast way of sharing your work. And especially in the commercial design industry, social media is like the main platform right now that most people work towards. But then at the same time, that format has started to have such an impact on what kind of creative decisions we make as designers and artists that I'm sometimes wondering if that impact is not way too big and doesn't like diminish the creative quality of our work. Quoting a German philosopher named Georg Frank on the topic of the economy of attention he already quite a while ago stated that mass media exchanges information and entertainment for attention, which is in turn monetized by advertising. And that sounds fairly obvious nowadays when you scroll down your feed and in between you have sponsored advertising, but it's something that we've grown so accustomed to that we are not necessarily questioning it anymore. And I actually believe that that structure of social media at the same time has started to have quite a significant impact on the media itself. He also said, overall, I argue that we are living in an era of mental capitalism, in which the relations of production themselves have inverted the relationship between the material and mental worlds, so that the realm of ideas is now the driving economic force. The realm of ideas can widely be described as the creative industry or the artistic expression of people, and he claims this is now the driving economic force. But at the same time, the driving economic force also means it has an impact back on the realm of ideas. Artists and creatives want to make a living. So in order to make a living, they subconsciously cater to the economic force. Because as Google says, social media is important because it allows you to reach, nurture, and engage with your target audience. Social media can be used to generate brand awareness, leads, sales, and revenues. And companies and marketing experts all over the world have realized that long time ago that they can use social media influencers to generate brand awareness and sales. So while as creatives you think the likes you get on the platform or the followers you have, have anything to do with the creative work, you think that's a recognition of your creative work. Ultimately, it just means that you played the algorithm of Instagram or the social media platforms correctly. And that's why you're gaining followers. Basically, you are kind of growing your capital of attention. And it's basically becoming a significant number within the economy of attention that could then be monetized by brands. So to believe that social media is a very neutral platform, and the recognition you get on it is actually genuinely related to the quality, the artistic quality of your work, is in my opinion, a bit of a disbelief, because ultimately, it just means the day your social media profile, the followers you have is not necessarily a recognition of the quality of the artistic work. It's much more like a publicly visible bank statement showcasing your capital of attention. My personal success on Instagram is limited. I have around 4,000 followers, I think, but I also only have around 25 posts on there. I've always been kind of skeptical of the platform because I felt the shortness of the pieces and the way of consumption doesn't really allow to really go deep into projects or concepts or artistic works or ideas. If I look at the commercial work I did and I add it together on like other accounts from the brands I worked for, then it's probably in the millions, the capital of attention, but it doesn't reflect down on me as an individual who created it. But nevertheless, I was always curious about the topic because a lot of the work I do these days for clients is for social media and it's also specifically for Instagram. And I was wondering what does it require to become an Instagram influencer? Like what are actually the specific needs of the algorithm that you need to trigger so that you gain more followers? So I started Googling and looking up what do people say you need to do. And these are directly taken from the internet, these tips I'm showing you now. So tip number one is identify your niche and content pillars. You want to do a niche because you want to be known for something specific. You don't want to just post random pictures from your every day. You sort of want to have your own thing that people might be attracted to. And then at the same time, you need to be very frequently uploading stuff. So you need to ask yourself, what could I happily create consistently for a year without making any money? And as you can see, even this first tip is already tailored to potentially make money with it at some point. Tip number two, stay consistent. Consistency has on one hand to do with frequent posting. So ideally on a daily basis, or at least like on a very specific days per week, so that your audience knows when they will see the next post. And also consistency has a lot to do with the random aspect that I mentioned before. If somebody comes to an Instagram profile, they sort of want to know what they would get if they follow. They don't want to like just follow a profile and then get something completely different a few days down the line. So the consistency also has to do with predictability. The audience wants to be able to roughly predict what they will see. Tip number three is write meaningful captions because still Instagram is a meaningful platform. So whenever you post something, you need to have a meaningful caption underneath that really communicates the depth that can be taken in while scrolling upwards on your social media feed. And focus on building a community, which obviously has to do with Instagram is still a platform for people to interact with each other. But at the same time, the algorithm rewards you if you just not post on a regular basis, but also comment on others people posts, post stories from time to time, reels, all these other features. The algorithm will recognize that you're active on the platform and therefore the potential of the algorithm suggesting your profile to other people is increasing. So basically all of these rules not necessarily tailored to what people want to see, they much more tailored to what the Instagram algorithm expects from a content creator to engage with the platform and be successful on it. And then all of that research ultimately led me to the birth of Rachel Leary. In order to understand the algorithms of Instagram, I decided to create another algorithm. Rachel is an automated algorithm that uploads images to Instagram automatically. So technically speaking, she is a bot. so rachel is the world's first fully automated autonomous 3D design influencer on Instagram. She started posting in May 2020 to the Instagram account at Ray Chalik and she's posting one new image per day. She will basically continue posting without any human intervention as long as the computer she's running on is online. posting without any human intervention as long as the computer she's running on is online. That means Rachel, as I mentioned before, is a software, an algorithm that automatically creates images, visually pleasing images, and uploads them to Instagram with meaningful captions and everything that is needed to please the algorithm of Instagram. How this looks like is something like this video shows here. So once per day Rachel fires up a machine that she's running on. She starts creating a new image that is based on very simple design techniques. She has a variety of shapes and colors to choose from. Then she basically generates a meaningful name to the image that was just created and then uses a custom Python script to upload the image to Instagram automatically. so the question i asked before was how to become an instagram influencer but that quickly evolved for me to how to create an Instagram influencer. So coming back to the tips we looked at before, tip number one, identify your niche and content pillars. What could I happily create consistently for a year without making a dime? I struggled with that question because I didn't feel the gain from becoming a Instagram influencer big enough for making me sit down and do the same thing every day consistently. But an algorithm can do that for you. You feed the algorithm with a certain amount of parameters and it can create a huge variety of images automatically. And they are still different enough from each other so that they work on this daily posting routine. But they also similar enough to create a feeling of consistency that people see it and they will enjoy what they see potentially, hopefully, and then they will decide to follow because they know they will see the same thing tomorrow again, just a little bit different. So Rachel automatically creates images that are based on different color palettes that are generally assumed to be visually pleasing in modern design language. She uses abstract objects, renders them in a photorealistic environment because that's my niche. So to say it's something you don't see every day. If you walk on the street, you won't see an abstract object lying around there. But it's something that works really well in 3D and is generally kind of liked by people. And it has some sort of artistic notion to it by the color scheme sometimes, but it doesn't say enough to be offending in any sort of way or to actually need a bigger amount of attention that you kind of, you know, need to stop your feet and actually look at an image it's it's the perfect two seconds like image and then you continue your feet the consistency of rachel is very much based on the algorithm that i designed on one hand she's posting on a daily basis which means people can expect when to see the next post. On the other hand, Rachel uses certain design techniques that allow for a very reliable image generation. Such design techniques are for example, the most obvious one is a grid system in 3d that allows for the placement of objects in a very orderly fashion, but also gives you an a certain amount of flexibility on how to create compositions. Tip number three, write meaningful captions. Now, meaningful is a very debatable term on a social media platform like Instagram. If you only spend a few seconds with each post, then meaningful, I don't know if meaningful can be perceived as such. And also, it's questionable how much is actually necessary. I think ultimately this tip refers to that it needs to look like there's a real person behind this post. And especially if the captions are a little bit more artistic or inspirational, that's perfect. So Rachel actually generates those captions independently as well. She often uses words such as nature or natural or speed when the color green is used, or she uses words like silent when she doesn't use too many objects in an image. Terms such as architectural usually refer to that certain set of shapes. Joy is in the context of yellow, circular in the context of circular shapes, and so on. Tip number four, focus on building a community. Now, I don't really believe in that term too much, because building a community does mean you have real interaction with people. And while yes, we have a community on Instagram, because we follow our friends, that community is from outside of Instagram, and it just basically is reflected on the platform. So building community is just sort of the term in front of it. But ultimately, it this tip tells you what the algorithm is looking for. So first, and that is more on the human side of things. I intended to make the account look real. So I gave it a real name. And in the first months of posting, I intended to make the account look real, so I gave it a real name. And in the first months of posting, I also didn't tell anyone that this is an algorithm posting here. So I named her Rachel Leary after the original Blade Runner movie, and Rachel in that movie is an AI, but she's not aware of her being a machine. And then engaging with the community was one of the few things that I did manually. It's something that could easily be automated, but at the time I'm not a programmer, so I just wanted to kick off the profile. So I actually started to just randomly go to posts all over Instagram and put hearts underneath. And that's enough for the engagement to make the algorithm trigger and potentially suggest your profile to others. Now, while Rachel has not yet become the crazy Instagram influencer I would like her to be with hundreds of thousands of Instagram followers, she nevertheless has reached almost 7000 and gets new followers on a daily basis as she's posting every day. On one hand, obviously, I'd like her to have more. But on the other hand, it kind of made me sort of gain belief in the platform again because people seem to unfollow her as well. So it seems people do start to get tired of the same content every day. But one phenomenon that I really enjoyed that started happening a few weeks ago is that the bots of Instagram discovered Rachel. So now whenever she posts, there's a good chance that one of the bots picks up the posts and automatically posts a comment on it. So in a way, she really succeeded in building the community within her niche, because she's a bot posting and bots talking to her. And then last but not least, to conceptually make the piece whole, as I quoted Georg Frank before, he was talking about the economy of attention kind of uses attention to create money. I decided to mint an NFT of some of the images that Rachel has created. And it was actually sold. So the machine has created an artwork that somebody has deemed to have monetary value. And it was an image that consisted of 5000 image that Rachel has created, obviously being inspired by peopleeple's collage. But in this case, it just took her one night and not 15 years. I don't know how long exactly he needed for all of his dailies. Now to conclude this talk, whenever we talk about AI, automated algorithms, people are really concerned of the idea that in the future, AI will steal our jobs and we will be worthless as humans or something like that. But ultimately, looking at how creative work evolved in the last years, and especially the one which caters to social media platforms, I don't even think we need to wait for the AI if we are reducing the platforms we are using to very quick social media feeds and the content we are producing is satisfactory if it's just like a mesmerizing loop of balls falling through I don't know what abstract geometry then we are already diminishing our input as creatives, as artists, as humans to a simplistic version of creative expression that can easily be automated today. We don't need to wait for AI. Technically speaking, Rachel is not necessarily an AI, it's an automated algorithm. And it can already create a lot of those images and content that is successful on those platforms. So I think AI in the future will not steal our jobs as long as we keep evolving as humans and use creative expression at the utmost highest level of human expression and not start to change how we express ourselves artistically simply to cater to algorithms that are controlled by machines. simply to cater to algorithms that are controlled by machines. And to end on a positive note, I still think every algorithm will need a human to design it in the first place. These algorithms don't exist yet, so somebody needs to design them to create those images. So as creative professionals, maybe our role will change more from actually creating the images or the videos, will maybe change more into creating algorithms that generate those images. And that basically is the end of my talk. Thank you so much for listening. I think there's a Q&A afterwards. So if you have any questions, I'll be very curious to hear them. Thank you. curious to hear them thank you thank you Matthias for this great insight into your current project fantastic remarks here comments on what is maybe going on in the future and it's great to have you here at the campus Hagenberg and we can talk about this quite interesting project as we have this overarching topic tectonic shift this automatic bot 3d designer is this something that will totally change the production of image and animation in the future? What do you think? First of all, thank you for having me. I don't know if it... I mean I'm pretty sure it will change it, but I think it's also part of what technology has always been for the 3D community especially and it's always been a substantial part that we are using certain tools that make our work easier. And I think these tools are just becoming more and more intelligent so that we can potentially automate more and more things further down the line. As I mentioned in the end of the presentation, I don't think it's going to replace the designer because even these tools have to be designed by someone, I think it will just potentially change the role of designers from crafting singular images, rather like craft design systems that are then automated and craft those images for you in a way. This is obvious. I think that in the last 40, 30 years, there has been a lot of effort to design new tools and make these tools smarter. But on the other hand, is the human getting smarter as well? So as you mentioned, it needs a human that is in touch with these artificial intelligence tools or automated designers. Yeah, I mean, obviously obviously the humans are getting smarter because they're able to build such things like like AI or like all these crazy technologies which is based on a lot of knowledge and research over the years I'm not sure if in the creative fields we're necessarily getting smarter because of what I mentioned in the presentation but you know the platforms are sort of encouraging really fast output of images that are just like almost speaking to rudimental instincts of people rather than spending a year thinking about a painting that will be shown in the exhibition next year then but I see this observation in your piece so that it's creating meaningful sentences and meaningful images for an audience that is responding to this image as well so is it of course a critical examination of how we yeah see see these images and command on that and how these will be, so to speak, part of the structure of the platform actually. Yeah, I mean, I think my research in that context is also to question how much does a platform like Instagram give the opportunity to creatives to show something meaningful? Because of the extremely short periods of time that people spend on posts and the format that, you know, it's not even a slideshow where you click and then you see the next piece. It's a long stream. So you're just becoming a part of a list that rushes by really fast. So the meaningful aspect is something I'm still not sure about it like is it meaningful if it's just like looks pretty and has a nice caption or is does meaningful need more time from an audience to actually understand the point to work so along a duration so you mentioned everything is getting shorter and shorter music videos and also music itself is also connected to the structure of Spotify is actually tracking and generating money so this is changing the medium itself but at the end if if you think about storytelling is this something that is still important if you use Instagram as a platform to generate images? Yeah, I'm not sure if that's important because it doesn't work like that. A story needs a certain amount of time to actually be understood as a story. It more like captures moments or images as snapshots. I think I read in a kind of funny research, which I'm not sure if it's scientifically true, but it was saying that our attention span as humans is constantly decreasing and it's now lower than a goldfish, which like apparently they started comparing that. So, you know, and it's in platforms like Instagram encourage that because of how they are structured and how they're built, they don't want you to spend a lot of time on things. They want you to go through a lot of things quickly so that they can put advertisement in between. We have a question from Houston, Rodriguez. Question to Matthias. What language did you use to build Rachel? Can you give more details about the construction or is it a secret? So Rachel is built in Unreal Engine predominantly, Unreal Engine 4. Besides the automation, there's some Python scripts which do the automation part, but the software itself is fully Unreal Engine 4 and the functions inside Unreal are using the native Blueprint system, which is like a visual scripting system. I'm not a programmer, but I love the Node system in Unreal. It's pretty powerful actually. There is another question tackling these design aesthetic rules. To what extent can the automatic creation of images, even if they obey aesthetic rules and contain graphic elements, except as aesthetically correct, be considered art? Yeah, that's a good question. Because I also don't know. That was my question to myself with this project. Is something art just because it looks pretty? Because I've worked in the design field for a while now and we always use certain techniques because we know they create visually pleasing images, as I described in my project. And they trigger a certain kind of attractiveness in the audience in a way. I don't know how to put it. So is that art? I don't know. I can't answer that question. That's a much bigger question that we are all conversing about. But my question is more like, does the platform even give the creators the possibility to show art? In this direction, I was thinking about, you started with Rachel a year ago, and you already got at the beginning requests for design job, as you mentioned. That's quite interesting. Of course, it's a limited rule of sets, of design sets for creating these images. But I was wondering if there is a dialogue in the comments. Is this something that could be in the future influence the aesthetic rules for Rachel, so that this is an evolving system? Yeah, I mean, ultimately it would be totally possible. I think I mean, in my head, there are so many more possibilities of what Rachel could be. Originally, I also planned that she will post animations one day. She might still dive into different kind of styles or maybe there's another Rachel at some point. So I'm still exploring that. I mean, the possibilities are endless. But ultimately for me, the more important part than having like a tech demo was to actually bring the concept to completion and actually do the thing of like creating an Instagram account with a real name that posts images. And without anybody knowing at first, this is an automated software doing it. And without anybody knowing at first, this is an automated software doing it. And for that, I felt like I was at a point when I started releasing her that it's kind of enough for that concept. She's currently not using any machine learning or anything like that. I mean, ultimately that would be an interesting experiment because she's creating her own library. So at some point she could potentially look at the likes on the images and then start with machine learning to adapt her own algorithm more towards those which have more likes. But that's a bigger project. What is quite interesting is there is a coincidence because there is a people with a similar name winkelmann and he's doing this every day since since years and there is also a connection with rachel because you reflected with this 5000 image images as a collage and you also sold it as an nft so can you give us an insight into this conversation between these artworks and i'm also very interested what you think about the nft because at the beginning of this the year when people sold his collage first 5000 images, this was really a kind of a tectonic shift in the art world because everybody thought, okay, this is the future for media art. Is this something that you see as a challenge or do you see, is it more a hype, more something that is for nerds? Oh yes, for nerds for sure. That's no question. I think that's the beauty of it. Actually, I love what's going on there. I'm still not sure what's my exact opinion on it. But I love that it's, I mean, nerds is a strange word, but it really feels like the digital art scene, which has always been a little bit overlooked by the traditional art scene kind of suddenly met those like crypto bank roller guys who probably can't really well never really dared before to just walk into a normal traditional commercial gallery and buy work it feels like they both kind of met and realized hey we can build our own art scene completely independent from the other thing and i i love that part of it it's such an internet thing in a way um but yeah coming back to people i mean first of all people i have so much respect for him and i love his work and he's he's literally the grandmaster of dailies i mean i don't know if he's he invented it but like he really pushed it and i think he made it a um become a an institution in the 3D community. But the huge difference for me in Bipol's work is that, and I love the fact that he still has all of the images on his website, because anyone who doesn't know Bipol, I really encourage them to go to the website and look at the work because you can see how he evolved. He always, in my understanding, he always saw dailies as a way for him to learn more and for him to explore his own artistic language. Because back then when he started, I don't think there was Instagram yet. It was a while ago. Not really. I think it's five, six years ago. So with the five house house, yeah. I mean, he's posting for like 15 years or something. And you can really see how he evolved through doing that. So for me, it was very much like in dialogue with himself. And he happened to post it online because it made, I think I heard that once in a talk, because it made him have to do things. If you post it, you have to finish it in a way. And I think that's great i think it's just it's an incredibly great tool to evolve your own technical skill but also an artistic language and he's a perfect example for that i think my comment on the dailies is more that especially with the advent of instagram and the algorithm of algorithms of instagram the algorithm of algorithms of instagram the platform encourages that you post images on a daily basis like with a certain consistency and because that will give you more followers so people started to just post images on a very regular basis to get more followers so it it feels a bit like it started to miss that internal like the dialogue with yourself on your work it became like you just you know you up MoGraph or whatever tool it is and you render a few things and post it and that's it. And I think that's the difficulty if your creation then is only there to please certain algorithms of a platform. It's a weird connection to see that people are doing it over 15 years almost. And Rachel can do this immediately and can create thousands of images. So this is something that is, of course, in this discussion with NFT quite interesting. with NFT quite interesting. So for the audience if you have any questions just leave your question in the chat and I can address it to Matthias. What I was also wondering is you introduced yourself as a motion designer as a 3d artist in the field of advertising and also in the art world you did some commissioned pieces also as an art piece so you introduced your fantastic short i think five years ago here at the expanded animationed Animation Symposium, a very fantastic one-minute piece, I guess, so it was like this duration. So how do you handle this gap between, or these blurring boundaries between doing commission for Microsoft and doing your own artistic work? How does this influence your artistic work? Yeah, I think for me there's not such a huge difference between them because whenever I work with clients, I also try to find new ways and new designs and new visual languages and new expressions in a way. It's just that i'm reflecting on what the client is asking for on the brief of the client i actually barely work like i don't work in advertising that much it's like like especially not traditional one um quite a lot of it is more like branding related and branding is just basically a reflection on what the client thinks their company is or their product is or whatever it is and my work my personal work is quite often also a reflection it's it's very much a reflection i mean rachel is a reflection on the circumstances of of where creative work is shown these days and also where the platform i work for quite often for clients so it's very much connected to that. So yeah, I think 3D artists or digital artists quite often, especially in motion design, have been sort of in between seats a lot because motion design, there's a lot of exploration involved that is quite artistic and quite free. And then ultimately you just put a logo in the end and suddenly it's a product advertisement. So I never really found myself very clearly labeled as one or the other in a way. I'll come back to our starting question. Is there a kind of a tectonic shift? Of course, these tools, Instagram, TikTok are changing a lot. But on the other hand, we are facing or we have new tools is it a kind of a shift now or is it more a transition that we are facing new platforms new tools in the next year and it will always evolve and change. We talked about the duration, so there is not really a lot of space to change because we are almost at a couple of seconds. Yeah, I mean I mentioned in my presentation that I actually kind of see it more as a transition, like an ongoing process into something else. Because I think there's not, the medium in itself, like especially motion design, which is where I come from, that's my background, I think has such a wide definition that it constantly tries to adapt to new platforms and new sort of arrangements. But quite often people are not aware of that it has like a 100 year old history already like there's actually a you can kind of follow up where it comes from and how it developed but it has never really been recognized as in my opinion as like this entity of this is it you know and I feel that's also why the community and besides the fact that most people are very tech savvy and very into new things but I think that's also why it's always so flexible and constantly evolves, because on one hand, there are new platforms and new technologies. On the other hand, clients always want the latest stuff and they want to be on the newest platforms because they think that's where they need to be. And then the creatives behind it just adapt to that situation. And the pandemic has an impact on that on your work as well oh yeah it was like i think for pretty much everyone i know it was like one of the busiest year ever because i mean on one hand the film sector um couldn't shoot as easy as they could before so i think um budgets from that end actually started to triple over into the more animation sector because it feels like and games as well yeah but in the animation sector it feels like agencies suddenly discovered hey there are these these nerds they're sitting at home anyway all day so for them nothing really changes yeah and it was already established in in already established in production that all these companies work together in virtual space so to speak and have shared folders and doing everything before the pandemic actually so this was something that is was not new for the people that are working in the industry yeah i think a lot of studios or like a lot of people actually considered remote work before the pandemic because it was just practical in the context of how we work. Like good friends of mine at Panoply in London, they talked with Mark and he also said like even before the pandemic, they were actually looking into moving all of their computers into a data center and close the studio and just work from wherever they are. And they've done that and they've been doing that and they're not planning to come back because it's not necessary. Although it's kind of nice sometimes to actually have people around you. It's so nice to have you here actually, to talk with you here and have a coffee afterwards and go to the gala at the Ars Electronica festival. So this is really something that we would love to do next year to have the audience here again. And as we are running out of time, thank you so much for your presentation and for for this very nice talk. Thanks for the questions. We will continue after a 30-minute break. Yes, 6.15 p.m. European time, Central European time. So on the website, you have the possibility, very fancy, to switch to your time zone and then you see the program in your time zone. So we will continue in 30 minutes with uh two great uh another great presentations from artists so to speak non-yetel de la pena and peter burr both have been awarded already at prius electronica and it's uh yeah you're cordially invited to join this discussion thank you so much thank you matthias thank you Diolch yn fawr. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Diolch yn fawr. Thank you. Diolch yn fawr iawn am wylio'r fideo. Thank you. Thank you. you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you Thank you. Diolch yn fawr iawn am wylio'r fideo.