Who / Simon Repp

What / Art, Code, Design, DIY, Music, Research

Where / Vienna

Mail / Write to simon@openideas.at

Jabber / Add switchstance@jabber.org

Twitter / Follow @simonrepp

Studies / Digital Arts at Die Angewandte

FILMAKADEMIE / My new band project - demo coming soon. filmakademie.cc

Bicycle Bell Instrument / As the title says! I'm still collecting bells though ... got some?

The Butterfly Thingy / Game-ish environment with ridiculously slow speed of light - release 2011/q4

Fast Food / a meaty experimental short - release 2011/q4ish? probably not.

Metalab / Inconspicuous; Subtly beautiful on the inside in a million ways; Place to be in Vienna! metalab.at

Self-Haircutting / A relieving act of emancipation and empowerment; try for yourself!

Poi / Playing Poi is cheap, fun, super relaxing and out in public everyone thinks you're a hippie - awesome!

Old piano piece

If your browser/device supports it, you can listen to a song here as soon as it loads!

Even older piano piece

If your browser/device supports it, you can listen to a song here as soon as it loads!

Thanks to the following projects and their respective creators and contributors for making making this site a breeze!
Fancybox / Google Font API / jQuery / Wordpress Audio Player

15 minutes of fame (2009)

15 minutes of fame was a visual performance interacting with the people surrounding the ARS Electronica Center building. The concept for this project was developed in the course of the "from dusk till dawn" media facade workshop. The work was performed September, 5th 2009 at the ARS Electronica Festival!

» ARS Electronica Center

audio slitscan (2010)

This has been some research on transferring techniques from film and video which are probably best known under the term "slitscan" (one other common term would be "time displacement") into the audio world. I worked on this mostly at the 26C3 in Berlin but discontinued work later due to a lack of free time and (probably closer to the truth) due to the fact that i'm not the brightest kid on the block when it comes to math. Get in touch if you're interested in continuing/helping with this!

botparty (2010)

One human, one chatbot? boring.
Two chatbots, one closed circuit? botparty!

This work is somewhat constantly broken (it's bound to happen if you mash up 10+ webservices that are not even proper official APIs ...); You can play around with it though if you want (some ruby and programming knowledge required)

Here are the files - use at your own risk, and please drop me a line if you plan to republish (thx!):
botparty.zip (0.7MB)

creation in the open (2009)

The plan was to meet out in the green; to make, learn and discuss things; and to have fun! Think of a hackathon, just less techy and out in the open! We gave it a shot summer 2009 ... Clearly it was all a bit too lax and casual - but all the more reason to try it again and do it better next time! There's plenty of summer every year so chances are we meet again, out in the open, next time with a bit more discipline. =) (Photos by Benjamin Eizinger)

experimental skateboarding (on hold)

how can skateboarding be reinterpreted as sound art? ... i'm experimenting to find out! (but work on this has been delayed for the moment)

incarnate/eradicate (2008)

This is an interface i developed at university in 2008. The hardware setup consists of a projector, camera and a translucent projection screen. Visually the interface features rectangular cells that can be incarnated or eradicated, hence the name. The interface works by either illuminating the projection screen (e.g. with a lamp or cellphone), which creates new cells, or preventing the projector rays from reaching certain parts of the projection screen (e.g. by standing in front of it or moving your hands over it), which in turn "kills" the cells present in that area. The program that handles the camera tracking and projection was written in Processing.

» Department of digital arts
» University of applied arts vienna

klangkoerper (2007)

klangkoerper was an experiment on creating a virtual sculpture that evolves in time, based on sonic input. Starting off with a sphere, I would then analyse the spectrum of a soundfile and use frequency, amplitude and phase information to calculate vectors that would deform the sphere outwards, gently sculpting out a new form out of the primitive shape from the start.

Technically, I used CLAM to get the spectral data from the soundfile and a modified version of my self-written 3D engine "expose" (based on C and OpenGL) to create and modify the virtual sculpture.

For the demonstration video i used the sound of a dial-up modem, take a look:
klangkoerper.mov (5MB)

» CLAM

six tin jonesy (2005-2011)

Skapunk band i co-founded and was part of 2005-2011, playing guitar and piano, singing background vocals, writing and co-writing songs and pre-producing some material. I also created all the graphic design for the band in that period (lastly the "the very best off" album design).

Below is one of the better known tracks from the first album: "New ways"

If your browser/device supports it, you can listen to a song here as soon as it loads!

» Website
» Myspace

synthiebike wien (2009)

If your browser/device supports it, you can listen to something here as soon as it loads!

If your browser/device supports it, you can listen to something here as soon as it loads!

If your browser/device supports it, you can listen to something here as soon as it loads!

synthiebike wien is a sophisticated sonification toolchain that uses the data of the viennese Citybike system (a public bike rental service with over 80 stations in vienna) to generate sound. The toolchain consists of a Ruby program that fetches the bike data from the citybike website perodically, a Processing application that serves as the main interface for translating the abstract bike service data into sound terms and a rather complex Supercollider Synthdef that is controlled via OSC from Processing.

This project was shown as an installative 8 channel version at the Alias in Wonderland exhibition at Freiraum, Museumsquartier in vienna in July 2009.

» Citybike Wien (german)
» Alias in Wonderland exhibition
» Media coverage by artmagazine.cc (german)

vinyl (2010)

"Vinyl - Tales from the Vienna Underground" is a documentary film about the viennese (underground) music scene by Andrew C. Standen-Raz. All the posters and flyers for the movie are the fine blend of Claire Morgan's excellent title shot (showing artist Bobby Velvet in the Sing-Sing records store in vienna), Andrew's unbelievable treasure-chest of ideas and last but not least: my very own fresh graphics work! ;) Go see the movie - it rocks!

» Vinyl page at lushfilms

wave exchange (2007)

This is a research project i did in the summer of 2007, exploring ways to convert video data in sound. I used ImageMagick and a self-written C++ application to split a video into it's frames and then for every pixel of a frame i used brightness as amplitude, hue as frequency and the position on the x-axis for the position in the stereo-spectrum (intensity stereophony) to synthesize audio from the video source material.

I've tested the process on a short clip featuring footage from Las Vegas (simply because it's colorful and contrasty) and you can take a look at it here:

wave_exchange.mov (53.4MB)

(Please mind that the video is licensed under the CC-by-sa 2.0 license and that the original file can be found here: http://blip.tv/file/12822 - A big thankyou to ViVlog Las Vegas for posting it there!)

» ImageMagick