echoes of grief

In her diploma project film, Verena Repar guides the narrative through the stigmatized realms of shock, isolation, despair, and ultimately, acceptance of the inevitable. Partially in co-creation with Stable Diffusion AI this new medium proved to be a brilliant method, allowing the relinquishing of control to become a shaping force in the artistic process.

MOTHER ARKAH

‘Mother Arkah’ is an 18-minute animated short film exploring a specuative climate-apocalypse scenario and the hypothesis of the posthumanist ideology ‘Bio-Technoism’. The film tells a story set far in the future. To save life on earth after the environmental collapse, a secret research program creates giant living biotopes, a so-called ‘megastructure’, to preserve life until planet earth is habitable again.

troost

troost is a living urn that can transform the ashes inside it into life. It does this by having a living core itself. The mycelium of an oyster mushroom transforms the ashes into edible mushrooms, and thus enables the dissolution of the ego after death into nature. The deceased person remains part of the circle of life and transforms into life, can become part of friends, family and loved ones again.

Ms.Muz - A HipHop EP

For her diploma Hilal Avci created a HipHop rapper persona called Ms.Muz. Together with producers Guilty Pressure and LiquidLuko she wrote and composed many tracks and distilled them into a 4 track EP. As a child of turkish parents she grew up in Germany. This mix of cultures, the East and the West, is at the core of her lyrics and music, where she mixes german with turkish.

GILBERT - A Companion for Blind People

Joohyun Lees diploma GILBERT is an AI-powered mobile app for blind people that audibly describes the surroundings adapting the most recent smartphone technology. GILBERT also includes the participation of sighted people to compensate for the imperfection of AI image recognition, which as a result offers a connection between the blind and the sighted, enhancing our society’s inclusivity.

AIEL - Instagram campaign on women´s rights in Kazakhstan

AIEL is a social media campaign in the format of Instagram videos, the goal of which is to create new conversations about women’s lives and rights in Kazakhstan. As a young Kazakh woman herself, Aya Shalkarkyzy relates to issues that are still present in the patriarchal reality of her country. By using a metaphorical visual language, she is connecting serious topics of women’s oppression in Kazakhstan to familiar-to-the-eye traditional and folk imagery in a form of CGI.

NAKE - a Crossmedia Youth Magazine

Nake is a crossmedia youth magazine dealing with everday topics whilst breaking stereotypes. As part of her diploma, Carina Stella was editor in chief, art director and designer of the print issue and the online channels.

Okey – The One Hand Keyboard

When working on your computer, have you ever noticed that you basically need three hands to fully operate your keyboard and mouse at the same time? The reason for that is that about 130 years the QWERTY keyboard was designed for writing long texts with two hands on the typewriter. Okey – the one hand keyboard – steps in to solve this problem. It is a completely redesigned keyboard designed to make working and typing on your computer faster and easier.

Meanwhile - AWARDED ONE OF THE MOST BEAUTIFUL BOOKS OF AUSTRIA

In 2015, Microsoft Canada studied the effects of smartphones on our attention span. According to the study, back in the year 2000, the average attention span of humans lasted 12 seconds. In 2016, it reduced to only eight seconds. This study serves as the grounds for this diploma by Bernhard ´Burnbjoern´ Fuchs, which fits into this decreasing attention span range.

EGYPTIAN MANGOS - a web series about life between two cultures

As daughters of an Egyptian father and an Austrian mother, Shirin and her two sisters grew up in a culturally mixed family. For her diploma Shirin wrote and directed a 4-part web series adressing themes like faith, sexual orientation, gender images and family relationships. The five family members play a version of themselves.

LIGATURA - A Typographic Sound Generator

“I always wanted to be a musician, but I was too lazy to learn how to play an instrument.” Ligatura is an online typographic sound generator that enables users to design posters and generate original sound compositions. Every glyph has its own basic sound, attuned to its visual appearance, which can be modified through design and usage.

WriteSpace – Concept for an AR App

The AR App WriteSpace turns your phone into a pen. Find a special place and leave your trace in space. Write or draw in augmented reality and create location-based messages, words of love, signs of protest, reminders, doodles, or anything you want to express. WriteSpace was created as a reaction to the loss of handwriting in our daily lives. My intention is to make the physical act of handwriting attractive to a young generation.

OXLOS - THE FIRST TRULY DEMOCRATIC CROWDFONT

Crowds do many things these days: they share apartments, finance start-ups, unleash shitstorms and influence politics. The primary factor in these activities is quantity. But what would happen if a crowd were to control a qualitative design process? What if a crowd designed a font? In his diploma project, Maximilian Mauracher launched this experiment: LET’S DEMOCRATIZE TYPE DESIGN.

My Father Never Cut His Hair

An illustrated essay on 84 pages that combines handwritten text with digitally colored pencil drawings. Peter Phobia attempts to reconstruct the life story and personality of his father he hardly knew, using personal notes composed by his father as a young adult and letters from people in his father’s personal environment.

GAIA – The Artificial Intelligence To Substitute Our Political System

GAIA is an acronym for Global Artificial Intelligent Administrator, programmed to establish a political system more individual, more direct, faster and more just. Our digital footprint allows GAIA to calculate an accurate picture of our interests and ethics. It enables a multidimensional vote of every citizen, thus providing permanent democracy in real-time.

TYPEFIT - The Workout Messenger App

TYPEFIT is a messenger app offering workout videos based on typographic characters. Its sporty approach encourages you to communicate with your body while simultaneously working out. By typing characters and words, the app creates personalized training videos. The individual moves can be learned by using the app and then sent as messages in the form of selfie-videos.

Taxi Burma – A Day in Myanmar

The Diploma Project “Taxi Burma” by Francesco Ciccolella is an animated travel essay published online. Blurring the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction it gives an audiovisual insight into what’s often praised as one of South East Asia’s most authentic travel destinations. However, experiencing Myanmar’s magic comes at a price… This diploma is nominated for the Josef Binder Award 2016.