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Beobachtungen Events Serious Games t minus ten

No need to run and hide!

Music Monks performing live on stage at Castle Lemberg on Friday, September, 5th., 2025.: “Naja, eigentlich liegt’s dann an denen halt!”

Music cuts a communication channel straight through your body & mind, laying an access directly to the subcutis of your soul. Through this straight & basal communication link music pours itself directly into your inner world and experience, stiring up powerful emotions. Your emotions.You don’t have to understand the communication that music pours into the cut. You feel it. And thus you understand it. You understand it in your world, you unterstand it in you.

takomat – the understanding interface ; (c) takomat GmbH 2004 – 2025

For years I have sought to create such a direct communication link for scientific communication. To carry on Carl Sagan after he was gone (even if we still have Neil deGrasse Tyson around), make Contact with others (even if they are not “ready to go!”), to save the world for everyone (even if it’s the game for real). We fused emotional storytelling and scientific simulation in video games to let people get in interaction with scientific/systemic knowledge by letting them touch a virtual world and maybe even letting them being touched by a virtual world – a virtual world that could be possibly yours (think of ownership in Minecraft). Maybe that was the error: We created worlds for you instead of letting “it” directly rain onto the soul-soil of your world. Maybe simulation is not the solution to save the real world. Maybe it’s music. Music gives me soul-shivers – simulation does not. No one wants to read Simulacra & Simulation by Jean Baudrillard, but everyone has seen Matrix.

No need to run and hide – it’s a wonderful, wonderful life.

No need to lie and cry – it’s a wonderful, wonderful life.

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Beobachtungen

Veronica, Springtime Electronica!

25 years ago, during springtime, I was sitting in „Computer Lab3“ at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne surrounded by Silicon Graphics Indigo2, Octane & Onyx work stations, creating 3D-computer graphics & animation for my diploma work „menschensiedlung“ (“human settlement”). I was literally living in Lab3, doing 16hours-shifts every night & day in the Euclidean Space of Softimage 3,8.

While I was living on coffee, Snickers, render time and vertices, working in this brand-new electronic 3D space, I listened to one music album up and down and all of the time. It was music from an electronic space for listeners who worked in an electronic space.

It was Madonna’s „Ray of Light“.

This album helped me to bring my spirit into the machine.

Her music was my human flashlight in that vast, cold, dark and soulless electronic space of 3D computer graphics.

Her Ray of Light was my guiding beam to not get lost in the vast-vector-night-sky of those myriads of vertices that I created and connected so carefully and concentratedly into electronic spacetime.

It enabled me to still see and follow the constellation of my artistic vision in that techno-image, human-hostile 3D space. With every vertex that I placed onto that virtual night sky I was yearning to transform electronic space into a human settlement and thus colonizing it with human love and human effort for human art.

Now, 25 years later, I am listening 24/7 and up and down again to a just lately released & long overdue re-mix album:

It is Madonna’s „Veronica Electronica“.

The remix streamed back all of those thousands of vertices I created 25 years ago back into my eyes again.

I am FEELING the spirit of that past right now while I am listening to her re-mix.

And now – 25 years later – raytracing the light beams back into the light source of my own soul, I finally feel the tears streaming down my face.

Warmer than a Ray of Light.

menschensiedlung, (c) 2000 Daniel Schwarz / KHM