Projects by students
Projects by students
"Never again! The podcast against forgetting" is a format in which Timon Wiese talks to various actors who are involved in the broad field of remembrance work, campaigning against the forgetting of National Socialist crimes and upholding the memory of their victims.
Why keep bringing up this long-forgotten topic? Because it is not in the past. If we look at the crises of the present, humanity has clearly not learnt enough from the mistakes of the past.
There is a dangerous dictator in Russia who is killing thousands of innocent people in an aggressive war of aggression. In autumn 2023, the terrorist militia Hamas murdered hundreds of Israeli civilians for anti-Semitic reasons, among others. And even in the USA, there is once again a presidential candidate who wants to pursue openly anti-democratic policies.
So it's high time for a wake-up call as a reminder of the darkest hour in human history.
For this episode, Timon Wiese spoke to two people who do just that in their daily work: Marie Zachger, student assistant at the Neuengamme Concentration Camp Memorial and Marcus Meyer, scientific co-director of the Valentin Bunker memorial site.
The podcast feature by Timon Wieso was created as part of the exercise "Podcasts as a feature". Lecturer Magdalene Melchers offers this exercise every two semesters, either as "Podcast as Feature" or "Visualised Features".
Video work "How Much Water" by David Flesch
The video work How Much Water by David Flesch was created as part of the AI Filmmaking & Future Aesthetics seminar, which was held over two weekends in the form of a workshop. In this workshop, the students explored new workflows in filmmaking with image-generating AI tools. They investigated how different systems influence the creative process - for example through time limits, quality restrictions and specific software requirements - and how editing strategies can be used to work with these peculiarities.
A central question was how these technologies change film aesthetics: How do we deal with challenges such as visual consistency and other software-imposed limitations such as maximum video lengths? What new possibilities are emerging, such as fluid image transitions and the resulting morphing one-shots that are specific to AI-generated images? Do AI systems only reproduce the aesthetics of polished advertising clips or Hollywood-style blockbusters, or do they enable new visual languages? What are the strengths and weaknesses of this medium? Can we also use it without reproducing stereotypical representations and instead experiment with absurd or speculative images?
In small groups or individually, the students created short video films using the generative AI tools of their choice. Compact technical introductions provided an overview of various systems, from browser-based online tools to the local, node-based interface ComfyUI.
The seminar was organised in co-operation with the House for Media Art Oldenburg. It was led by the "(post)digital" video and media artist Theresa Reiwer.