"Why You Should Do It Anyway!" is part origin story, part hard-won lesson and part live demo. It starts in the 90s with a broke techno DJ who taught himself Flash because it was the closest thing to the music studio he had in his head. It moves through years of hacking audio out of a platform that was never designed for it. Generating samples from byte arrays, building Roland 909 emulations, sequencing tones in a browser years before the Web Audio API existed.

Then it becomes something else: 16 years at Audiotool, what it felt like to pour everything into something and then lose control of it, and how spite – yes, spite – can be a perfectly good fuel for starting over.

What I find most valuable in this talk is how honest André is about his own poor judgment. He doesn’t blame the people who terminated his contract. He blames himself for not seeing it coming. That kind of self-awareness is rare on stage and it makes everything he says about openDAW feel earned rather than promotional.

And openDAW is bloody impressive. No sign-ups. No cookie banners. No cloud lock-in. Half a megabyte, boots in 200 milliseconds, runs on any device including a school computer. André has been working with music teachers and professors to shape it and next semester it will be the software of choice at the Cologne University of Music and Dance. The live demo at the end with Bastian Allgeier playing guitar through openDAW’s effects chain at six milliseconds latency is a lovely way to end a talk about belief in what the browser can do.

There is a line in here I keep thinking about: "If everybody owns it, nobody can steal it." Simple. And true!

More information about André Michelle on his beyond tellerrand speaker profile page.

For Berlin he suggested to do something a little different. Not a talk about the future of technology, but a talk about what he does on the side. About his hobbies. About what drives him as a maker.

Sure enough, he came back with “Art in Dusty Places” – a talk about almost a decade of bringing large scale art projects to Burning Man.

Art in Dusty Places

Every year a city of 75.000 people is built in the middle of a dry lake bed which is in the middle of the Black Rock Desert which is in the middle of nowhere in Northern Nevada in the USA. Black Rock City exists ephemerally on a substrate of an ancient lake bed that is an unhealthy and caustic mix of alkaline salts and fine minerals laid out perfectly flat for miles in all directions. The smallest movement of air raises the dust, a breeze necessitates eye protection, a wind creates a whiteout so complete you can experience vertigo. The dust coats everything and everyone.

It is an environment naturally devoid of the influences of contour, contrast, color, liquid water, animal or plant life. In this setting humans arrive for a month of building and 10 days of existing. Then in effigy it is all burned to the ground. With no other natural influences the emergent culture is unique and decidedly humanistic. Life can become so amplified that the world outside is referred to as analog. Any day at This Thing in The Desert is a practice between survival and self-actualisation and like no other day lived. And it comes with two constants: Dust and Art.

What followed was a tour through augmented reality porta-potties, a 100 yard long trailing soul, a solar power library for artists, giant gramophone horns playing eight hours of Stephen Hawking lectures and a whole lot more. Jared took us through every project from idea to prototype to scale, from sketching gears in the garage to bolting things to the playa so they don’t blow away. The whole talk is full of stories about serendipity, about his twin brother “the dude”, his crew, his daughter, and the community that grows around any creative endeavour you take serious enough.

What I love about this talk is that underneath all the dust and burning man stories, it is really a talk about making. About iterating. About trusting your idea enough to commit to it for ten years. About building three iterations until you reach 80% of your vision and knowing when to stop chasing the last 20%. About leaving no trace. And about the fact that, as Jared says, you don’t build on the playa – you set up on the playa.

There is a sentence in there I keep thinking about: “The dust always comes and it settles equally on everyone.” I think that applies to a lot more than Burning Man.

More information about Jared Ficklin on his beyond tellerrand speaker profile page.

This year it is not the first time, he creates visuals and the design for beyond tellerrand. He first created the graphics and opening titles for beyond tellerrand in 2019 and seven years on I was lucky enough to have him do it all again for our fifteenth anniversary edition in Düsseldorf.

He started sharing his process on his blog in early April, beginning, as he always does, with pencil sketches before moving into software. “Scribbles without judgement”, as he puts it. Where in 2019 he had built everything in Houdini, this time he wanted to work in TouchDesigner with the goal of making the posters deterministic so each speaker poster came out unique, but with a reference code, so it could be re-produced when using the code in TouchDesigner.

Through April he was deep in the system: a series of posters (one for each speaker, plus separate ones for the event itself) and the animated opening titles. By mid-month the titles were close to done and he, once more, was working back and forth with Tobi Lessnow on the music.

Then on the Monday morning of the conference he and his wife Lisa flew over to Düsseldorf and the posters – generated by his system – got a small scramble at the end of Tuesday as people grabbed them to take home. ☺️

As he wrote afterwards:

There’s something quietly satisfying about watching an abstract system become an object people physically want to keep.

Well, what else can I add here. That, honestly, is one of the reasons, why I keep asking him back.

Thank you Brendan!

Final Posters

About Brendan Dawes

Brendan Dawes is a British artist and designer whose playful, code-driven work explores the relationship between data, technology, and the everyday. Rooted in remix culture, he blends code, found objects, and tactile interfaces to surface the poetry hidden in mundane moments and the structures hidden inside complex data.

His work has been exhibited internationally, including three shows at MoMA in New York, where his piece Cinema Redux became part of the permanent collection in 2008. He has also shown at ZKM, Somerset House, Disseny Hub Barcelona, and as part of Big Bang Data in thirteen cities around the world, with works auctioned at Sotheby’s and Christie’s.

In 2024 he collaborated with filmmaker Gary Hustwit on Eno, the world’s first generative film – a documentary about Brian Eno that is unique every time it is viewed, with 52 quintillion possible versions. The film premiered at Sundance and was later shortlisted for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. Oh and I had the honour of hosting the German premiere in Berlin.

A Lumen Prize and Aesthetica Art Prize alumnus, Brendan is Visiting Professor of Computational Art at Manchester Metropolitan University and is represented in the UK and Europe by Gazelli Art House, London. You can find more of his work on his website.

A few years ago, he swapped helping hands for a camera and ever since, he has been quietly documenting what makes beyond tellerrand special: the speakers, the crowd, the small moments in between, and the unmistakable atmosphere that brings everyone back.

This year in Düsseldorf, Martin captured all of that across over 200 photos. Beyond the talks, his series gives a feel for the foyer chats, the laughs, the focused faces in the audience, and the community spirit that defines the event.

A huge thank you to Martin for once again sharing his eye and his time with us. Go take a look. The full set is well worth a slow scroll.

If you were at the conference, you know what Niels does: he takes the browser somewhere it was never really designed to go. Stubborn clocks on Raspberry Pis with round touchscreens and Box2D gravity simulations. SVG shapes turned into audio waves to draw on a 1980s oscilloscope using Web Audio. DMX-controlled stage lights, smoke machines and – for obvious reasons not brought on stage – a flamethrower, all driven from the browser via WebUSB. A laser projector running Asteroids. And CSS Doom, a full playable version of Doom rendered almost entirely in HTML and CSS, which has already convinced the Ladybird browser team to fix a CSS anchor positioning bug.

The podcast goes much deeper than the talk could. Niels explains the actual code behind the oscilloscope, how the gravity simulation works, why Chrome struggles with 10.000 textured 3D divs, and how newer CSS features like trigonometric functions, custom properties and stepped animations make CSS Doom possible. Oh, and the level exit is not a div. It is a proper button. As it should be.

A genuinely fun listen. This tim in English. It’s for anyone who loves the web and wants to be reminded of what it can do when someone decides to ignore what it’s supposed to be for.

⇾ Listen to Working Draft Revision 712

You can watch the whole presentation on our YouTube channel, as well as here and on her beyond tellerrand speaker profile.

The Act of Pressing a Key: The Journey of a Letterform on to Your Screen

We live in a world where we encounter letterforms every day. We type on our phones, read books, glance at advertisements on the train, follow signage to reach our destinations. Letterforms don't just carry information – they are a means of expression, shaped by history, culture, and context.

These forms have evolved over centuries, across regions and writing systems. One such script is Devanagari, used to write languages like Hindi, Marathi, Nepali, and Sanskrit, and read by hundreds of millions of people.

Join Kimya on the journey of a letterform – from its conception as a drawn shape to its behaviour as digital text on your screen. Drawing from her own experience designing Devanagari typefaces, she reflects on what it means to work with a script that carries cultural memory while constantly being reshaped by new tools and contexts. What does it mean to design for a script you grew up with? And how can type design become a way of re-seeing and re-claiming what feels familiar?

More information about and photos of Kimya Gandhi on her beyond tellerrand speaker profile page.

Sascha has been coming to beyond tellerrand for 15 years. Fifteen! That alone is a thing worth pausing on for a second, because it means he’s been part of this little adventure of mine since the very beginning. After last year’s Düsseldorf event he posted something on Instagram — a small offshoot of his side project Artifactor, inspired by Gavin Strange’s talk that year. I saw it, and at some point I just sent him an email: "Hey, wouldn’t you like to do something for my event?”

Turns out he would.

What the Tellerrandomizer Actually Is

If you’ve been to beyond tellerrand before, you’ll know about the lovely Audio-Sketch-Notes that wonderful project where Tobi Lessnow sits on stage with his funky setup, records the speakers, and remixes his tracks live using speech samples from the talk that just happened. Tobi started this in 2013 for beyond tellerrand and it is part of it. A bit unusual, a bit unexpected and it adds to the overall energy that exists in the room.

The Tellerrandomizer is, in Sascha’s own words, the ”visual counterpart to that”.

During each talk, photos are taken and quotes are captured. Everything is then assembled in Kirby together with information about the speaker and the session. Afterwards, the result is shown as a presentation that is deliberately chaotic, visually loud, and full of personality. The drawn lines and the wild typography in the names are a nod to the outstanding 2026 CI by Brendan Dawes, or, as Sascha calls him, The Master of Generative Data Art. ;)

It’s called the Tellerrandomizer because almost everything in the presentation is driven by random values. Behind the scenes there’s a whole pool of textures, graphics, masks and fonts. Their styling is controlled, very simply, by php rand(). As Sascha says: as simple as it is effective.

I totally love that. It’s the kind of project that looks elaborate and feels custom-made, but is really just one person, an idea and the discipline to keep it simple.

A Small Note about Kirby

Sascha built the Tellerrandomizer in Kirby and as he himself puts it, the Kirby community and beyond tellerrand have been linked for years. Bastian and the Kirby crowd have been a part of btconf for almost as long as bt has existed and this website (as everything that I create in the web these days) runs on Kirby also. Which makes all of this even more “full circle”.

There’s also a very practical reason Kirby was the right choice for Sascha. He was capturing photos and quotes live, in the room, on his phone. The Kirby Panel works flawlessly on a smartphone, which made the whole live-collection workflow possible in the first place.

Why This Means a Lot to Me Personally

There’s a thing I keep saying to people, and I’ll say it again here: support the small events. Support the people who put themselves out there with side projects, with little Instagram posts about something they built on a weekend, with ideas that maybe aren’t fully formed yet. You never know what comes from it.

In Sascha’s case, a single Instagram post that I had seen after my event turned into a collaboration. That collaboration turned into the Tellerrandomizer. And the Tellerrandomizer turned into one of the details of this year’s event. Something attendees genuinely stopped to look at, smile about and tell me that they really liked it.

That’s exactly the kind of thing beyond tellerrand is built on. Not big budgets, not big agencies. People. Side projects. Trust.

So, thank you, Sascha. For 15 years of showing up. For building something beautiful out of an offhand email and a meeting over a coffee in Düsseldorf. For trusting that our small project would turn into something cool and meaningful.

And to everyone reading this: go check out Sascha’s write-up of the project on n2.studio and follow his work in general. He’s the kind of person who quietly makes things better and those are the people we should be paying attention to.

This year’s once more wonderful set is up. It contains 152 black-and-white photos from beyond tellerrand Düsseldorf 2026.

This time, I wanted to write a bit more in details about why these photos matter to me and why I think they’ll matter to anyone who was in the room with us.

A Different Kind of Event Photography

When you run an event like beyond tellerrand, you need different kinds of coverage for different purposes. There are the photos that document the event. Like the speakers, the stage, the partner, the venue and those are essential. They tell future attendees and partners what happened. I think Florian’s collection of photos is something else entirely every time. He documents the conference the way you’d remember it if you’d been there. Not as a programme of talks, but as a feeling of being among these people for two days and with a glimpse behind the curtain.

Look through the 2026 gallery and you’ll notice how few of the frames are the obvious shot. Yes, the speakers are there, but Florian seems much more interested in the audience than the stage. He photographs the room watching. Faces lit by laptop screens. A hand on a knee. The geometry of seat-backs receding into the dark. Hugs in the foyer. Someone laughing mid-sentence at the coffee machine. Someone alone for a second in a corridor, just thinking.

Some of his frames are more like paintings than reportage. He gets angles and views that are not typical. They provoke emotions and bring back memories I didn’t even know I was making at the time. ;)

How He Works and Florian’s Style

What I’ve always been impressed by and said this in the post I wrote for the 2024 photos is how unobtrusive he is. He’s been part of the beyond tellerrand family for so long that it genuinely feels like he’s always been there, even though my records say his first set is from 2018. I never see him taking the photos. I just get them later, and think: when on earth did he shoot all of these?

For people who don’t know Florian: by his own description, he’s “a dad of two daughters and husband, web designer and developer by trade and photographer at heart”. He runs a web agency called Haptiq with his friend Claudio. His photographic life, though, is the one he talks about most warmly. He posts almost daily on florian.photo, publishes zines and printed books each year, and documents conferences he actually wants to attend.

Almost everything he publishes is in black and white. It’s not a stylistic affectation it’s how he sees. He has written that colour is a distraction from the things monochrome forces you to look at: light, shape, gesture, the fall of shadow across a face. His selection process for a final gallery is “brutal”. He’s said that the last ten photos he cuts have to really hurt to delete; only then does he know he’s down to the keepers. You can feel that ruthlessness in the gallery, as there’s nothing here that’s just there to fill space.

What This Set Captures

A few things stand out to me when I look through the 2026 selection. The portraits are unposed and conversational, shot at the distance of a friend rather than a press photographer. This makes sense, because at this point Florian is a friend to most of the people in the frame and certainly to me. The wider shots use the venue’s architecture deliberately: dark balconies, bright stages, silhouettes of heads in rows. And there’s a move he keeps coming back to, where the subject is small in the frame and the surrounding space does most of the emotional work. It’s a generous way to photograph a conference, because it gives the event a body, not just its speakers.

If you’re looking for the bright, pin-sharp press shot of a speaker mid-gesture, this isn’t quite that gallery. It’s the slower, more atmospheric companion to the official record the version of the conference you’d remember if you’d been there. And that, for me and without devaluating what other photographers of an event do, is the highly valuable archive every single year.

Thank You!

Thank you, Florian. For this set and for all the ones before it. You’ve helped me – no, everybody – to remember beyond tellerrand for years now, and I hope you’ll keep doing it for many more.

Two days. One stage. A room full of people who showed up open, curious and kind. Fifteen years of beyond tellerrand. I am still letting that one sink in.

When I started this in 2010, I had no roadmap. I just wanted to bring people together for two days and see what would happen. Somehow, against the odds and across more than a few difficult years for community events, we are still here. Looking out from the back of the room this week, watching conversations spill from the seats into the lobby and out onto the street, I had the same feeling I have had every year since: this is exactly what I hoped it would be and what I wanted to do.

What Happened on Stage

The line-up this year was a wide one – on purpose. From Annie Atkins and the invisible craft of film props, to Marjan van Aubel asking why solar energy has to look like solar energy, to André Michelle reminding us why curiosity matters more than permission. Niels Leenheer brought CSS flamethrowers and oscilloscopes (and yes, we did check the fire extinguishers). Lauren Celenza asked how we stay human in the age of AI. Oliver Reichenstein did what he does best.

Different topics. Different worlds. But there was a thread running through all of them, and Sasha Maximova put her finger on it on LinkedIn:

Not speakers, makers. Not to teach how, but to show what they are making.

That, to me, is the thing. That has always been the thing. beyond tellerrand is not a conference about a topic. It is a gathering of people who make things and care deeply about what they make and who are willing to share that with the rest of us.

What I Have Been Reading

I have spent the morning reading what attendees have written online and I am not going to lie when I say, it got to me. A few moments stayed with me:

This year’s beyond tellerrand gave me exactly that glimpse of warmth at a time when everything around me felt a bit dark. – Kitty Huang

The room feels like a mix of design lab, class reunion and very well-curated creative loss of control. Nothing about it feels ironed flat. That is exactly why it feels so alive. – Frank Schmidt

It was never primarily about design or technology – it was always about people. – Simon Praetorius

They were more grounded, not hyped. I didn’t have a single second to realise what was happening between the talks. – Tomáš Hejč

That last one captures something I have been chasing for fifteen years: a programme paced so the breaks matter as much as the talks. A “playlist”, as Frank put it, rather than a schedule. Thanks to all of you who took the time to write about your experience. It means a lot to me.

Thank You

To every speaker who stood on that stage this week. Thank you for showing up the way you did. For being honest, for being human, for trusting us with your work in progress.

To the partners who made this possible in a time where partner support is anything but a given. mittwald, TYPO3, StickerApp, Kirby, Adobe and everyone else listed on the partners page – thank you. A traditional, independent event surviving and thriving in 2026 takes real conviction from the people backing it. I do not take that for granted.

To Holger at Illhill, printing t-shirts as he has done for years now. To the Tobi who turned every talk into a musical follow-up. To the Capitol Theater team and the cleaners who made the venue shine each morning. To the volunteers who make sure everything runs. To Lars and Friederike from KomKuK for that unforgettable cake. It is appreciated more than you know.

And to you, reading this. Whether you were there in the room or following along from afar: thank you. The atmosphere everyone keeps talking about is not something I make. It is something you bring. I just provide the space and time to let it happen.

What’s Next

Talks will go up on YouTube over the coming weeks. Photos, write-ups and podcast episodes will follow here on the blog. If you want to stay close to all of that, subscribe to the newsletter, join the Discord, or follow us on Bluesky and Mastodon.

For now, I am going to close my laptop, hug my family and probably sleep for about a week.

To the next fifteen years.

Stay curious.

Niels has been a beyond tellerrand attendee for more than ten years. We have crossed paths at many events over the years and I always enjoy seeing him. So when I announced him as a speaker, I was genuinely moved by what he wrote about it

beyond tellerrand is my favorite conference and I’ve been an attendee for more than 10 years. This year is the 15th edition and I am so honoured to be on the stage that inspired me so much all of these years.

That means a lot. It really does.

This is the 15th edition of beyond tellerrand, and having someone like Niels, someone who has been part of this community from early on, step up onto that stage feels like exactly the kind of moment worth celebrating.

A Browser Geek from the Start

Niels is based in Groningen, the Netherlands and a self-professed browser geek. That obsession started the moment someone showed him the original Nexus browser on a NeXT Cube, back when the internet was still very much finding its feet.

He is the creator of HTML5test.com, which became a go-to resource for understanding what browsers could actually do and he built WhichBrowser, a widely used browser detection library. He ran one of the largest Open Device Labs in the world, is a Google Developer Expert, and is an active member of the Fronteers Conference committee.

For his day job he is CTO of Salonhub, where he builds web applications for hair salons. It is, by some margin, the most sensible thing on his CV. ;)

Where the Web Gets Weird

What really sets Niels apart in my opinion is what he gets up to outside of “work”. He is currently deep in an obsession with connecting the web to physical devices and that has led to some wonderfully unhinged results.

He has used the Web Audio API to draw SVG images on a vintage 1980s oscilloscope. He blew up that same oscilloscope during one experiment. He built a CSS-controlled flamethrower. He ported the offline Chrome dinosaur game to a laser projector. None of these were accidents. All of them were pretty much on purpose.

What is remarkable is that none of this requires exotic tools or obscure hacks. It is all modern web standards, pushed into places they were probably never intended to go.

He says, he has been working on this talk for at least a year. He promises chaotic energy and lots of weird and wonderful web experiments. I believe him entirely. 😁

His talk: The Web Beyond the Edges of the Browser Window

Join Niels on a journey to the weird and wonderful fringes of the web. Way beyond anything that fits inside a browser window. From using audio to draw SVG images on 1980s oscilloscopes to a CSS-controlled flamethrower (well maybe not on stage this time …): this is a tour of the web like you have never seen it before. Ever seen a JavaScript clock that stubbornly refuses to tell the right time for example? Chrome's offline dinosaur game, beamed onto a laser projector. What does all this have in common? They are all gloriously out there, they all run on modern web standards, and Niels had an an absolute blast building them.

I cannot wait to finally see Niels on the beyond tellerrand stage. We should probably check the fire extinguishers beforehand.

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