The Ideenwerkstatt Neue Medien at BMW strikes again (press release, teilweise schmerzhaft), this time with some sort of Ich-AG Holding called avience, strongly associated with Visomat Inc.. Their self-conception says: "Analogue was yesterday, linear was yesterday. The acceleration has catapulted us to a motorway where electronic music and animated images speak a new language. The audiovisual lingua franca of the metropolises, laptops and clubs. It infracts with stringent narratives and cognitive routines." Obviously asking questions like "What do images sound like?" or "What color has music?" must bring together music from usual clicks & cuts suspects like Kit Clayton, Jan Jelinek and others for the sounds-like side, while Meso, D-Fuse and minuszero are some of the looks-like contributers. Nicely executed, mostly Max MSP works that hugely benefit from the high quality raw BMW X3 images. Download one of Minuszero's sequences in zipped Quicktime.

Staying oh so avantgarde: "Mediamatic Foundation was established in 1985 and was originally founded to act as a meeting place and forum for video artists and TV dissidents. The Foundation published Mediamatic Magazine, an international bilingual journal in Dutch and English about the cultural and artistic implications of new media. Mediamatic has been available on the WWW since 1993." Current site smartly applies low level semantics.

Designed in 1962 by Dieter Rams, the �Audio 1 Kompaktanlage� is a milestone of german post-war design. It embodies, even more than its predecessor, the famous �snow-white�s coffin�, the design ideals of the rationalist �Ulm School�. These sober paradigms of utility and matter-of-factness are playfully remodelled in the �ReBraun�: Two TFT-Displays take the place of the radio scales, the lettering on the anodised front plate ironically quotes the lingo of the radio era. A randomly positioned button, labelled �Zufall� (Randomness) stands for the freedom from mechanical constraints. The antenna does not receive any FM radio, but is used to connect the system to the internet via Wireless LAN. The case and acrylic hood were lowered by several centimetres for sporty reasons (think: hot rod!), and the window that formerly contained a signal strength readout now becomes a tabernacle for the old Braun nameplate." Bootleg Objects. Gadget-wise it can't get much better than a 1973 Beocenter with buttons like Anything, P2P, MP3 DVD and a multi-format card reader.