Me
Interests
I am interested in self organizing systems, generative structures, interaction, artificial emotion/intelligence/life and things that seem to be alive, mainly because we interprete them to be.
The material I am working with most of the time is code and its acoustic, visual and spatial representation.
I am studying media art in the 2nd bachelor semester, after four years of studying mathematics, physics and a bit of economics.
I have knowledge of different programming languages (Pure Data, Processing, C/C++, Java etc.), network architecture, web techniques, and mathematics (analysis, basic pde, numerical stuff), which I am used to apply on image and sound synthesis, analysis and processing and for interaction design.
This is the result of a course, dealing with generative web art, I attended in the last semester: http://jonaskoehler.de/generativeBauhaus/index.html
Project Idea
Currently I am looking for ways to grow acoustic genomes which evolve depending on biometric data provided by the listener (for example heart rate, skin resistance etc.). One Idea: the measured stress levels of one participant in Weimar and one participant in San Diego are summed. This builds the environment (fitness-function) in which a sound has to evolve to minimize the stress-level of both listeners.
WIKI on genetic algorithms measure skin resistance with an arduino
Another idea would be an audio-visual web-installation, which I would give the working title "digital data incinerator". I developed the idea one year ago and I think it could fit well in this project:
Mankind produces and collects more (digital) data than being able to process. The major amount of stored data consists of waste. So the global network of computers is becoming the biggest garbage dump of history.The garbage consists of: blog comments, email archives, dead forums, tons of terabytes of cracked software, bad encoded media, picture graveyards ... Add to this consumer tracking data, digitalized public archives and loads of other data gathered by data mining and mix it with millions of redundancies of videos, pictures and songs uploaded to the new web 2.0 portals alá youtube or myspace. We are drowning in this flood - why not tidy up a little bit? The digital data incinerator will be an (web-)interface where you can upload unneeded data (old bachelor thesis, the 10th ripped copy of adobe cs6, your 20 GB of unheard MP3 music you have taken from different USB sticks etc.) and let them be burned into a digital "fire", which will have an audiovisual stream as emission. This fire will be feed by data from people all around the world. So you never know which impact your data will have - but it will have one at all! So now you can meet with good friends, bring your laptops/handhelds/tabloids, some speakers and a beamer with you and celebrate an audiovisual experience while tidying up your data waste :-)
contact: skype (jonas.koehler) mail (name.surname@uni-weimar.de | replace name, surname with my name)
Platforms
My main platform are currently OSX and Windows and I have also some experience with OpenSuse, Ubuntu and Debian.