submono's sublog » exhibitions

augmented reality in unity 3d

submono — Sat, 05 May 2012 14:57:00 +0000

made a small augmented reality demo in unity 3d for a chinese client. the scene runs in real-time with lights, shadows and wind force at a steady 45 fps @ 1980x 1080 px on my (okay, very fast) notebook.
the “stars” of the whole scene are actually the beach sun umbrellas. they are covered in invisible solar cells that store energy during the day. this energy can then be used to power build-in led lights at night.

kinda nifty

from dull to bright

submono — Wed, 21 Mar 2012 09:03:11 +0000

it took one hour of work and a little love from my friends adobe and wacom to turn a dull grey day into an exciting exhibition night.

back from kuwait

submono — Sat, 25 Feb 2012 07:03:03 +0000

back from warm and sunny kuwait and right into shanghai’s cold rain. i can’t wait for summer to arrive. the project in kuwait is finally progressing well and we have a great team together. i’ve always been a big fan of the middle east and over the last visits also kuwait city has really grown on me. and i have even started throwing my rusty arabic at innocent bystanders.

Damascus

submono — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 10:49:43 +0000

Me and two colleagues went to Damascus for a couple of days to sign the contracts for the Syrian pavilion on the Expo 2010 in Shanghai. My last visit to Syria was over fifteen years ago and many things have changed and evolved for the better and we had a great and very successful time, thanks to the unbelievable hospitality of our hosts. Friendly, proud and optimistic people all the way.

Syria is definitely on its way towards a modern and open Arab nation without losing its cultural roots in the process.

Time is flying

submono — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 03:56:30 +0000

Wow, almost one month since the last blog entry. But there is simply no time to update more regularly. We are working on three major exhibitions at the moment and on top of that have just won the competition for the pavilion of Syria on the Expo 2010. While these are all very good news (popping a bottle of Champagne) it means an extraordinarily high workload and less time for other creative things.

Rendering of the Syrian pavillion

To keep myself fit and healthy I’m back to swimming (which also burns more calories than running : ). We have some really nice outdoor pools in the compound and I enjoy it very much.

Topping Out

submono — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 12:32:22 +0000

Today I was invited to attend the topping out ceremony of the German Pavilion for the Expo 2010. The topping out ceremony is a German tradition that celebrates the completion of the basic structure of a building.

Well, it’s really like this, when you’re suddenly surrounded by (other) two meters tall Europeans they are either Dutch or German. Well, in this case mostly German and so there was a nice and surprisingly big crowd present to marvel at the huge steel skeleton that is to be the German Pavilion and to enjoy German beer (of course) and food.

The only real drawback was the weather. A super hot and sticky, overly humid summer day in Shanghai that kept people flocking near the aircons in the food tents. I still don’t know how they want to handle this when the real Expo is up and people will have to queue for hours outside the main attractions.

Guess we’ll all find out soon enough

Graduation Time II

submono — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 03:28:07 +0000

Yesterday was the big day, a bunch of teachers, 24 grad students, and their final grad project presentations. A whole day of critique, evaluation and finally summarizing it all in a score going from 0% to 100%. Not an easy task, believe me. The students got divided into two separate groups to make sure that teachers don’t pour points over their own students (we all know how easy it is to give in to this temptation).

My students came out top of the class, all in the 90% range. You might imagine how happy and proud this makes me, that the work we did together made this possible. I’m humbled and thankful that I had the chance to accompany them, sometimes nudge them a little, sometimes push them into the right direction and also kick their asses when needed

Yay!

Graduation Time

submono — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 02:29:44 +0000

Yesterday one of my grad students got awarded the title “Outstanding Graduate of Shanghai”! Now that makes her prof very proud

long time no see

submono — Tue, 28 Aug 2007 03:18:21 +0000

no entries for almost a month. i’m still here though. it’s not that there haven’t been events worth mentioning but things got very busy around here. we won some competitions and i’m also very much into photography now. to me all my work always was (and is) about creating new worlds of one kind or another and up till now i have spend a lot of time in front of the computer shaping and rendering my visions, creating artificial realities.

photography gives me the opportunity to explore and interpret the reality around me, to see things in a new light and maybe even to tell a story. and it just makes me happy

artificial architecture | the natural and the manmade

submono — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 07:01:13 +0000

“human beings fashion an environment for themselves, a space to live in, suggested by their patterns of life and constructed around whatever symbols of reality seem important to them. most of all, that environment and those structures invest the vast indifference of nature with meanings intelligible to, indeed imagined by, mankind.” vincent scully

i came across this quote by scully while doing some research on artificial architecture.