We were excited to present Slitscan at Rendr Festival in Belfast as part of the New Media Gallery.

Somewhere between the fog-kissed pines and the vibrating basslines of Garbicz 2025, das Shining set up camp. Not just to dance (though of course we did), but to open a temporal rift. We brought Slitscan – our immersive installation – and offered it to the swarm.

Imagine this: time bending into stripes, faces melting into liquid echoes, laughter stretched into ghostly geometry. Slitscan doesn’t capture a moment; it stretches it, twists it, lets it breathe. It’s not a photo – it’s a ripple through time.

Hidden in a shadowy corner of the woods, near enough to hear the call of distant kickdrums, far enough to feel like stepping into another layer of the dream – that’s where Slitscan lived. They stepped into the light, and we split them into time.

We’re back now. Forest dust still clinging to our gear. Hearts full. Minds buzzing. Slitscan lives on – not just in frames and files, but in those fleeting glances it revealed. And Garbicz? It’s not a festival. It’s a memory machine. A lucid dream. A collective hallucination we’re lucky to have joined!

Thank you, Garbicz!

In February, Berlin hosted one of these unique gatherings, and das Shining took part in shaping the night. Jens Schindel and Timo Dufner — brought their distinctive approach to audiovisual performance, merging algorithmic visuals with immersive sound.

The AV Jam in Berlin highlighted what makes this format so powerful: it is not about perfection, but about exploration. By contributing their practice to this shared environment, das Shining added their voice to a growing community of artists who see technology not only as a tool, but as a medium for collective creation.

Robin Rabauke (modular) & Jens Schindel aka tschnz (visuals)

Timo Dufner (modular) & Katia Vonna (visuals)

Painting with machines – Exhibition & Vernissage – „Malen mit Maschinen“ – Four artists from Tübingen exhibit in the Kulturhalle.

From January 20 to February 18, 2023, Joachim Wedekind & the Shining (Timo Dufner, Mathias Schlenker, Jens Schindel) will present paintings and installations that address the role of digital media in the artistic process. All interested parties are cordially invited to the exhibition opening on

Thursday, January 19, 2023, 7 pm, in the Kulturhalle, Nonnengasse 19.

Dagmar Waizenegger, Head of the Department of Art and Culture, will welcome you. Prof. Stephan Schwan, head of the Realistic Representations Working Group at the Tübingen Institute for Knowledge Media, will introduce the exhibition.

The exhibits in this exhibition are based on algorithms and their implementation and representation is tied to technical devices. On this basis, they (almost all) foresee a participation of the recipients in the creation and output of the media elements. There are differences in active or passive participation. The exhibition „Painting with Machines“ thus aims to stimulate reflection on the role of technical tools as well as recipients in the process of creating artistic artifacts.

The collective „das Shining“ is a group of interdisciplinary media and computer experts who studied media informatics together in Tübingen before expanding their expertise in other academic fields. Joachim Wedekind was an instructional technologist and media didactic. As a latecomer and lateral entrant, he now explores – with close reference to early computer art – the role of painting machines.

Event information (German):

Joachim Wedekind & das Shining (Timo Dufner, Mathias Schlenker, Jens Schindel): Malen mit Maschinen
20. Januar bis zum 18. Februar 2023
Mittwoch bis Freitag 16 bis 19 Uhr, Samstag 11 bis 15 Uhr
Weitere Veranstaltung: Donnerstag, den 02.02.2023, 18 Uhr: Livedemo „Malen mit dem Roboter“
Kulturhalle Tübingen, Nonnengasse 19
Eintritt frei

Since the start of the Covid-19-related restrictions on the arts and culture scene, we have been hosting weekly streams from the Schlachthaus Tübingen. Here you can find the results in full length and with all the breakdowns. We have also hosted the complete programme as a podcast on iTunes or Hearthis.

The area of the former slaughterhouse in Villingen-Schwenningen has been abandoned for 20 years, but now the site is being transformed for two days into a special field of experimentation: Students from the University of Liechtenstein as well as artists from the surroundings of the State University of Music Trossingen, the Furtwangen University of Applied Sciences and the „Global Forest“ association will literally show parts of the site in a new light under the title „Restoration!“ as part of a Lost Place & Media Art Festival.
Various sound and light installations are planned along a course, some of which will involve visitors interactively – the light projections onto the striking water tower will be real highlights. Hess Licht + Form provides the luminaires for the artistic illumination of the buildings. The building materials specialist Sto is supporting the artistic realisation of a large colour cloud, as is the Rombach Merkt craftsman’s workshop.

We will show our installation clone door as part of the course on the site.
Tickets and reservations are available here!

In functional programming, fold refers to a family of higher-order functions that analyze a recursive structure through use of a given combining operation, recombine the results of recursively processing its constituent parts, building up a return value. Map represents an associative abstract data type composed of a collection of key, value pairs. 
This is exactly what is happening with the cultural scene at the very moment. We systematically and methodically change concepts, mix online and offline life and try to offer an optimal solution for events and cultural enjoyment for all participants. We present interactive art, music & design – for visitors and online guests with artists* on site and around the world. This project receives state funding from the „Culture Summer 2020“ program.
Monica Vlad (AV live)
Alexandra Cárdenas (live coding)
Tatsuru Arai (AV live)
Nick Rothwell & Shama Rahman (live coding, sitar)
Atsushi Tadokoro (AV live coding)
Zacharias Fasshauer (Double Bass)
Jaume Darbra Fa & Marçal Xirau (flute & guitar with electronics)
Mári Mákó (live electronics) Scott Wilson, Konstantinos Vasilakos, Erik Nyström and Tsun Winston Yeung (live electronics)

more infos

Over several weeks, XSICHT has been trained to match faces and audio. With a training batch of tens of thousands of frames, the AI has learned to construct a human face from any given audio input. What happens when we abstract the input? This is the question, XSICHT tries to answer.
Since it is nothing more than a complex concatenation of intertwined non- linear functions that get amplified or dampened, its complexity is often hard to understand, which is why the intrinsic of an AI is called Hidden Layers or a Blackbox.
XSICHT doubles the unpredictability by feeding it not the voices it was trained on, but music, leading to unexpected results when confronted with various genres or instruments. Harmonic piano music, for example, more often leads to the recreation of female faces, while bassline-driven techno mostly resembles male speakers.

Insight

A brief technical overview can be split into data and network architecture.
The former is given to XSICHT in form of a 0.2-second-long spectrogram, calculated using the Short Time Fourier Transformation. To enhance the spatial representation of lower frequencies, the spectrogram is logarithmically recalculated to resemble the human sound perception, called a MEL spectrogram.

The latter takes this input and convolutes it down to a 1×1 pixel sized latent space from where the information is used to deconvolute the compressed information. This is called a U-shaped architecture or more common an Image- to-Image GAN network, but here it is used without skip connections between the de- and convolution pipe. During learning, the counterpart of this generator, the discriminator, works in a patch-based manner.
XSICHT gets input from a live dialog between Synthesizers and acoustic instruments produced by Timo Dufner, a voice or prerecorded sounds that harmonize with the visualization.

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