Click here to view the embedded video.

Timeless
a video essay / design fiction by KS12

Directed and Edited by Gabriel Shalom
Designed by Patrizia Kommerell
Produced by KS12
Producer: Karen Cifarelli
Commissioned by MU, Eindhoven
Curated by Angelique Spaninks
Production Assistant: Rob Versteeg

Interviews
(in order of appearance)

Bernhard Herrmann
Rafaël Rozendaal
Bruce Sterling
Peter Kirn
Jorien Kemerink
Markus Kayser
Elske van der Putten
Vivian van Gaal
Toby Barnes
Mary Flanagan

Ghost Box

Concept and Design: KS12
Electronics: Philip Steffan
Manufacture: Günter Herrmann Lehrmittelfabrik
3D Prototype Modeling: Mendel Heit
Fabrication Consultant: Fons Schiedon

STRP Artworks

E‪dwin van der Heide‬ DSLE -2- (2011)
Marnix de Nijs Exploded Views 2.0 (2011)
Telcosystems 12_series (2010)
Digitale Werkplaats Bristlebots (2011)
Bart Hess Liquified (2011)
Fourcelabs Dance Engine (2011)

Music

Excerpt from “sketch_111229” by stra.
© 2011 Shingo Inao

“Anaxagoras” and “MeeBlip Landscape” by Peter Kirn
© 2011 Peter Kirn

“Melted Rubber Soul” by Campfires
© 2011 Jeff Walls

Special Thanks
Bernhard Herrmann
Helmut Seefeld

Shot on location in Eindhoven, NL during the STRP Festival 2011 and in Hofgeismar, Germany at the Günter Herrmann Lehrmittelfabrik

#timeless
© 2012 KS12

Premiere: Friday 13 January 2012 – 8 pm – MU Artspace, Eindhoven, Netherlands
On view from 13 January – 4 March 2012

We are happy to announce the premiere of Timeless, our new video essay / design fiction. This work was commissioned by MU and was shot on location during STRP Festival 2011 and the Playful Post Digital Culture symposium at the Klokgebouw at Strijp-S. Timeless focuses on questions of identity and experience, time and place in a post-digital era. We are looking forward to see you at MU, Eindoven!

In case you cannot make it to the premiere, be sure to check back with us in mid-January so you can see the video when we put it online.

January 13 will also mark the opening of The Tosso Variations, a videomusical suite in five movements by Gabriel Shalom. We are very excited as this will be Gabriel’s first solo show!

We are currently in preproduction for our new video essay / design fiction piece, titled Timeless. To be shot on location during the 2011 edition of the STRP festival in Eindhoven, Netherlands.

The digital settles in as background. We remember less and query more. Our identity play would be considered schizophrenic in the last century. We have more friends than ever before yet know new frontiers of isolation. The quantification of our experience haunts us in the form of a persistent history. And we are distracted more than we ever knew possible. These circumstances are paradoxically a description of the near future and a diagnosis of the current state of affairs. The truly timeless is redefined – it has transcended that which is classic; it has become that which is never finished.

The première of Timeless is scheduled for Friday January 13, 2012 at 8.30 pm in MU.

Directed and Edited by Gabriel Shalom
Designed by Patrizia Kommerell
Produced by KS12
Producer: Karen Cifarelli
Commissioned by MU
Curated by Angelique Spaninks

Click here to view the embedded video.

“It Becomes Public” is a round robin video discussion on these and other issues, generated from a single evening’s workshop facilitated by KS12 at the British Council Berlin. The workshop was held during Social Media Week Berlin 2011.

Produced by KS12 in collaboration with British Council Berlin
Directed & Edited by Gabriel Shalom
Executive Producer Patrizia Kommerell

1st Camera Gabriel Shalom
2nd Camera Mates Al-Fakhri
3rd Camera Sven Stegemann
4th Camera Pippin Wigglesworth

FEATURING
Pippin Wigglesworth
Hamze Bytyci
Rana Deep Islam
Anna Rojahn
Thilo Lenz
Ben Hammersley
Jón Þór Ólafsson
Philip L. McKenzie
Joerg Wolf
David Sorrentino
Karen Cifarelli
Isabelle Beaulieu

MUSIC
Rho – Day Into Morning
myspace.com/​rhotunes
Revolution Void – Obscure Terrain
revolutionvoid.com
Custodian of Records – Five Years
thecustodianofrecords.blogspot.com
Discount Fireworks – Dots #4
discountfireworksband.co.uk

SPECIAL THANKS
Julia Rawlins, British Council Berlin
U.S. Embassy Berlin
Embassy of Canada Berlin
Joel Dullroy, Social Media Week Berlin
All the Workshop Participants
Willi Schroll

Continue the Conversation!
twitter: #smwberlin #influence #TN2020
quora: quora.com/​Transatlantic-Network
flickr: flickr.com/groups/transatlantic-influence/

CC 2011 KS12 BY-NC-SA

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Tonight’s workshop at the British Council resulted in a lively discussion, in no small part thanks to the telepresent participation of Ben Hammersley, Philip L. McKenzie and Jón Þór Ólafsson. We hope you enjoy these Skype interviews as they whet your appetite for the results of our video sprint (coming soon).

We’ll be tweeting some updates along the way during the editing process under the #influence #TN2020 and #smwberlin hashtags if you want to follow along. If the interviews inspire you, think about contributing any photos that you think relate to the issues discussed to our Flickr group. Over the next days we’ll also be adding a number of questions to Quora which came up spontaneously during the workshop.

One of the new key topics which was raised: privacy on social networks.

We are back in Berlin after some wonderful and inspiring weeks in Washington D.C., Portland and San Francisco. We are getting ready for our new video sprint with the British Council at Social Media Week Berlin about transatlantic influence.

Yesterday on our way to dinner we discovered the posters for Social Media Week Berlin. We’re looking forward to our workshop at the British Council offices next Wednesday. While the workshop is fully booked up you can still participate on Quora (give your own answers to the questions we’re asking our interviewees) and Flickr (upload photos which you think relate to the themes we’re addressing).

Stay tuned for the Skype interviews with Ben Hammersley, Philip L. McKenzie and Jón Þór Ólafsson to be released online next week! Spread the word about the project and join the conversation on twitter #influence #tn2020 #smwberlin! To start things off, let’s pick on the question at the heart of the discussion so far:

How is transatlantic influence changing?

For the last two centuries Europe and North America have dominated global economics, culture and politics. How is this influence changing?

From left to right: Ben Hammersley, Philip L. McKenzie, Jón Þór Ólafsson

In the coming weeks we’ll be ramping up our preparations for our first video sprint with the British Council during Social Media Week Berlin. We’ve had the pleasure of interviewing Ben, Phil and Jón Þór via Skype in order to seed the conversation we’d like to have about transatlantic influence. Their Skype interviews will be available online soon. If you’d like to attend the workshop, please contact us and we’ll be happy to give you instructions on how to apply for one of two open seats at the workshop in Berlin.

Ben Hammersley

is Editor at Large of WIRED magazine, is a journalist, broadcaster, photographer, and technologist. Ben is also Head of Digital for SIX Creative. He is a freelance reporter for the BBC and previously worked as the first internet reporter for The Times, where he was shortlisted for one of the British Press Awards. He has also worked as a reporter for the Guardian and UK arm of MSN. In 2006, Hammersley was embedded with both British and American troops in Afghanistan, shooting video for The Guardian as a multimedia reporter for Guardian Unlimited.

Philip L. McKenzie

is Managing Partner of FREE DMC, an influencer marketing agency that specializes in integrated marketing strategy, digital content creation, and experiential events. He is also the Founder of Influencer Conference, a global conference bringing together tastemakers in the arts, entrepreneurship, philanthropy and technology to discuss the current and future state of influencer culture. After completing his MBA at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, Philip joined Goldman, Sachs & Co where he worked in Domestic Equity Trading. Philip is a passionate supporter of the arts. He has been a Supporting Partner of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre since 1999. He is formerly a Junior Associate of the Museum of Modern Art and a member of the Apollo Circle of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He is a rabid music fan and spends his summers attending as many Dave Matthews Band concerts as humanly possible. He is working on a book called Smashing Silos: How to identify talent & create value.

Jón Þór Ólafsson

is a lover of wisdom and a lazy person. He studied the wisdom teaching of east and west until in his early adulthood was moved to political activism by the civilian devastation of depleted uranium bullets used by the US and UK during the Gulf War. He found his second love around that same time after a short introduction to Peter F. Drucker, the father of modern management. The love affair with management is ongoing; he has produced a political game manual for strategically inclined activists, The Game of Politics – Game Manual, and helped secure four Icelandic parliamentary seats as the executive manager of The Citizens Movement in Iceland (now The Movement) a grassroots political party that had 9 weeks from inception until the elections in the spring of 2009. His love for wisdom is still in bloom but has yet to bear fruit.

Theme: Transatlantic Influence

We live in a world where influence – both its definition and who has it – is shifting. From movements in the global economy, to innovations in online metrics, to trends in social media, the manner in which countries, companies and individuals can affect change in the world is evolving at a rapid pace.

We’re excited to engage with the British Council’s Transatlantic Network and other partner organizations across the generations to compare and contrast how influence on a political, economic and cultural level across the Atlantic is changing and how this is playing out on a global stage.

Get Ready to Sprint!

On the 21st of September 2011 we will be conducting a social media workshop and video sprint during Berlin’s Social Media Week at the British Council. Social Media Week – a global conference on social media which happens simultaneously in a dozen cities all over the world – is a perfect context for this discourse. While our workshop will be an intimate gathering, it is our intention to make our process open to enable Social Media Week participants all over the world to feel invited to engage.

Previously at Social Media Week in February 2010 we prototyped our video sprint process when we created Delivered in Beta at an open design workshop at the betahaus.

Ask/Answer a Question

To kick things off we have posted some of the questions we intend to ask our interview subjects to Quora, to enable the larger audience both at Social Media Week and beyond to participate. We will be monitoring Quora for interesting questions to spark our interviews – so feel free to get involved and post your curious questions. If you post a question, make sure to let us know!

Here’s just a couple of the questions we’re thinking about:

How is influence different from fame, celebrity or notoriety?
How is social media affecting the transatlantic relationship?
How has the internet changed what it means to have influence?

Stay tuned! More updates coming soon!

Over the past several months we’ve enjoyed watching my mom’s project Studio Neptune grow. My mom’s an artist and children’s art educator. I grew up both participating in her art classes and eventually teaching some cartooning classes myself. On her website Studio Neptune she is meticulously documenting and making available step-by-step instructions on various art projects that she’s created over the course of more than two decades teaching children. I am honored that last month’s project – the “Gabe Chair” – was one in which I had a part to play.

As a child some of my passions were Legos and origami. I was fascinated by the seemingly infinite combinations that were possible within the limited systems of bricks and square origami papers. I can see the influence of these hobbies in my design of what my mom called the “Gabe Chair”. My design was simple: starting with a square piece of rigid material, two cuts – an initial bisection and then a bisection of one of the newly formed pieces – created three fundamental pieces which could be combined to form the chair. This construction would then serve as the base for limitless customizations and variations. I am very happy to have this design archived now on my mom’s site, and I’m looking forward to see what other childhood art memories resurface as she continues to populate the site with projects.

Speaking of childhood memories, be sure to check out her fascinating interview series When They Were Kids: Artists Talk About Their Childhoods in which she interviews adult artists about their childhood art experiences. What are your childhood memories about art and design?