This Website Is under Construction – a Love Letter to the Personal Website

Remember Geocities? The unbridled creativity and questionable colour schemes of a bygone era. There was a time when websites existed as reflections of your personality or a shrine to your favourite band rather than carbon copies of a Facebook page or Twitter feed. Content wasn’t algorithmically curated, but shared through links pages and webrings.

With modern browsers, we have at our fingertips so many powerful APIs and tools to build the most incredible, beautiful and wonderfully pointless websites that have ever existed, in ways that are accessible and performant like never before. So why aren’t we? Why do all the websites today look the same?

This is a manifesto for building something just for the fun of it, and a rallying cry to tell your story on a platform that’s entirely yours.

Mapping Typography

The websites we make are nothing less than multi-dimensional objects: the size and shape of them change with every device and browser they are viewed on. We have lots of new tooling to develop layouts for this multi-dimensional landscape, but one crucial element seems to have resisted our attempts at tooling: our typography. How does our typography both maintain meaningful structure while flexing across our dynamic website space? In this talk, we’ll explore that problem. We will make a map of how text and typography behave in our website landscape, and then take these maps and apply them using CSS animations. In this way, we’ll drive dynamic interpolations across our websites' multiple dimensions.

ET TU, AI?

Mario Klingemann has been experimenting with AI in his art practice for almost a decade. After some rather humble beginnings, the fast-paced advancements in the field of AI have now become a challenge and opportunity for all of us. In his talk Mario will share his journey and reflect on the evolution of AI in the arts. He will discuss the challenges and opportunities that come with working in a rapidly changing field and provide insights into how artists can adapt and thrive in this new landscape.

Mario will showcase the impact that AI is having on the creative process and the ways in which it is shaping the future of art and other creative professions. He will provide examples of how he is using AI attempting to create unique and innovative works of art, and explore the potential for AI to unlock new forms of artistic expression. For artists, designers, and creatives, this talk offers a valuable opportunity to gain insights and perspectives on the role of AI in the arts. By hearing Mario's experiences and ideas, attendees will have a better understanding of the potential and limitations of AI in their own creative practice.

瞑想と書：Meditation with Calligraphy

Probing the Depth of the Mind with Ink and Brush

From ancient times in Eastern countries, calligraphy has been described as “the reflection of the Mind”. Introduced from China in the 6th Century, calligraphy is a highly regarded form of art that combines the literary components of the language and visual elements in Japanese culture. The practice has become a discipline, way of thought and study, one’s spiritual pursuit, and is a life-long journey to find one’s own “strokes”. Master calligrapher and artist Aoi Yamaguchi goes deeper into the relationship between meditation and Japanese calligraphy. She explores how the two are intertwined as the art of mental and physical practice, leaving a visual trace of time, movement and emotion through the ink. How does a symbol, or a stroke, embody feelings, stories, and music? Exploring some examples, she will talk about what goes on inside her mind during her own calligraphy process – from daily practice in her atelier, for client projects, or in front of an audience for a live calligraphy performance.

How to be an Ultra Artist

After a decade working in the field of graphic design, lettering and illustration, Gemma O’Brien became intrigued with the idea that ultra running might hold the secrets of how to endure a long life as an artist. Join her at beyond tellerrand as she shares the early stories of her career, the hands-on processes behind her largest wall installations and explains what she thinks it means to be an ultra artist!

Goats and cars: beyond failure

Over the past decade Thomas Thwaites has created an eclectic range of projects, always skirting the edge of the technologically possible. He’ll talk about some of his other work, his narrative design process, his adventures as a goat, and his current project to create a completely Harmless Car, to explore the landscape of guilt.