Tech

Stephanie Meisl and Gerald Geier emerged as winners in the "Spotlight your Idea" Open Call, a collaboration between the Vienna Business Agency and the Forward Festival. Their creative ideas dazzled an international audience. Gerald Geier presented "Remember the Future," a visionary concept addressing climate change and the world's potential state in 2073. Stephanie Meisl captivated with her fusion of art and AI, showcasing the thrilling blend of fear and excitement and the endless opportunities this creative marriage offers.

The independent German publishing house Slanted focuses on publications on contemporary art, illustration, design, photography and typography. With their own Slanted magazine, they aim to cover a broad spectrum of the creative industry and its designers and artists. Get to know Slanted, its publications, (maybe upcoming) projects and thoughts about the creative industry and its constant change and development. We talked to Julia Kahl a Partner, Editor and Graphic Designer at Slanted Publishers.

With “A Thousand Breaths,” the Logische Phantasie Lab (LoPh) is developing an innovative NFT project that creates an artistic registry for breathing injustices, questions how breathing is valued, and develops funding tools for advancing a Right to Breathe. “A Thousand Breaths” is one of the winning projects of the Vienna Business Agency’s 2022 Content Vienna Competition.  We talked to co-director and head of research Daniela Gandorfer about LoPh’s work and approaches.

With the project “Big Data und das Gebaute Erbe Wiens" (Big Data and Vienna's Built Heritage), artist and architect Alunovic Oliver presents an artificial intelligence that independently designs architectural projects. The project uses the city of Vienna's open data on all realised projects of the so-called Wiener Gemeindebau (Viennese communal housing), on which the neural networks used are trained. The aim is to make the Wiener Gemeindebau sustainable as a digital content creation tool, to pass on the cultural heritage of the Wiener Gemeindebau and to offer architects a tool for creating high-quality communal housing.

When Swiss athletic shoe company, On, recently upgraded their classic Cloud 5 shoe, they reached out to FutureDeluxe to create four films to showcase the brand’s craft, comfort and engineered detail. 3D artist Jordi Cerdà Gaya was called on to model and texture the features of On’s updated Cloud 5 running shoe using ZBrush and Cinema 4D. Maxon talked with Cerdà Gaya about the project workflow, Gaya’s self-taught career as a 3D artist and his plans for the future.

HBO Max’s true crime miniseries “The Staircase” explores the story of Michael Peterson and the suspicious death of his wife Kathleen, who was found dead at the bottom of the stairs in their palatial North Carolina home in 2004. Chicago-based Sarofsky was called on to create an elegant title sequence that spoke to the story’s labyrinthine plot, utilizing reflections, distortions, layers and perspectives to kaleidoscopic effect. The team spoke to Maxon about their work that foreshadows the true crime drama’s themes and a family divided. Created with Cinema 4D, After Effects, Photoshop, Flame and Octane the title sequence is based on a multi-layered, transparent three-dimensional house.

With her face filter Beauty 3000, she broke the internet: Johanna Jaskowska’s futuristic, hyper-shiny, highlight-perfect filter adorned over 500 million faces all over Instagram, including the ones of Lady Gaga, Kendall Jenner, or Billie Eilish. The artist seems to have a sixth sense when it comes to setting trends and creating hypes in the field of AR. Her creations stretch our perceptions of reality and show us how it can be changed and enhanced. Drawing on cutting-edge tech, Johanna Jaskowska has established herself as a creative at the forefront in the field of extended reality, creating viral face filters, the first-ever digital haute couture, or avantgardist NFTs. In our interview, she speaks about her passion projects, the hybrid reality we live in, and where AR can take us.

NEWFORMAT is a team of design experts of various fields based in Berlin. With their focus on interdisciplinary exchange within different artistic, cultural and technological forces in the context of contemporary disruption, they create one of a kind animations, videos and creative concepts for their partners. In the past years, they’ve released various projects and campaigns for clients like Ottolinger, Beats by Dre, Adidas, and Highsnobiety x FARFETCH.

Mix up the digital with the analogue and you get a hybrid. The two counterparts don’t just coexist but bring out the best in each other. Mixed reality studio Artefact makes our analogue reality more exciting by adding digital details. The Vienna-based creatives are the ones behind the Forward App, which gives the festival the augmented experience.

Found Studio did a rebrand and it’s more than just a facelift: Behind the shiny new logo and a whole new visual presence, there is the culmination of a year spent evolving as far as creative processes, studio direction and collaborations go.

Bradley G. Munkowitz aka GMUNK is no one less than an industry legend. With 20 years of creative experience, the visual design director has always been at the forefront of innovative digital design and pushing the boundaries of multidisciplinary art.

These shoes are (not) made for walking! Gucci created a flashy pair of sneakers and for only 12,99€. The special thing about it? They are completely digital and can only be worn using AR. The future of fashion really is now!

What media artist Refik Anadol does, can only be described as magic. By using complex AI algorithms he creates hybrid realities of physical and digital entities. Pilevneli Gallery in his hometown Istanbul is the scene for Refik Anadol´s newest exhibition: Machine Memoirs.

Process is a Vienna-based design studio specializing in generative and interactive design and working in the fields of branding, web, installation and print. As well as traditional graphic design solutions, Process designs and develops highly specialized software that is used as tools for and by clients.

The Centre for Impossible Media shows that pretty much everything is possible with virtual art. The project is a collaboration between Universal Everything and Human Studio and is a VR exhibition platform for visionary artists.

Digital Design Studio TeYosh teamed up with web developer Rifke Sadleir to create their newest project for Cinekid Festival - an interactive web experience about consumerism, climate change, and sustainability.

It's 2020, it´s corona and art becomes silent. How to make it loud again? The Area for Virtual Art knows just the way: By presenting digital and AI-based art, using the internet and its hyperlink-based nature as a new environment for exhibition and communication. The newest digital art space launches tomorrow, 9th September, within the frame of Ars Electronica!

A couple of months ago, Artefact created an AR app for our festival. One of the functions of this app was to augment artworks you can find in our Print Magazine. Now that there's no festival, you might not have our Print Magazine (you can order it here). Here's the good news: These artworks are online in our Moon Exhibition, so you can discover them from home. Find out how to do it. 

New festival topics always open up new possibilities for us at Forward. For this year's DIGITAL EYES, we aim to extend your reality with our AR App and now also our with our Instagram face filters. A few days before the first festival, we do not have one but three face filters created by Allan Berger (@ultrakawaii4000) and Maximilian Prag (@maximilianprag). Have a look at them and try them out on our Instagram.

We have met with Artefact, an up-and-coming mixed reality company from Vienna to talk about this new medium, their work and approach to projects, and the recent collaboration with Forward Festival.

At this year's Forward Festival in Zurich, two unlikely things were brought together a little bit closer, namely healthcare and design. Elina Koletou, who filled in for Marianna Rapsomaniki last minute, and Maria Gabrani from the IBM Research Lab held an AI science slam about the usage of artificial intelligence in healthcare. Both of them are doing research in the field of health-related AI and work at the IBM Research Lab in Zurich.

One of Apple's commonly mentioned USPs is its unique product design. It was strongly influenced by Hartmut Esslinger, a German product designer, who got discovered by Steve Jobs in his Thirties.

Snapchat is bringing Pop Art to its platform. On Tuesday, Snapchat announced a new partnership with the iconic American artist Jeff Koons, known for his stainless steel sculptures of balloon animals.