Michel Erler

Intro

Michel Erler is a designer and creative developer. With a background in interaction and UX design, he explores the potential of game engines, decentralized systems and AI to enable new ways of relating to emerging technologies.

He holds a first class honours degree in BA (Hons.) Interaction Design Arts from the London College of Communication, University of the Arts London, and a M.A. Fiction and Entertainment from SCI-Arc, the Southern California Institute of Architecture, in Los Angeles.

Upcoming: Y-Combinator Hackathon April 12, 2019.

→ Email → CV

Work

Michel has worked as a designer for Red Badger, QAGOMA Brisbane, and Takram London. He participated in exhibitions, workshops and symposiums at the University of Oslo, University of the Arts London, Ars Electronica Linz, Haus der Kulturen der Welt and SCI-Arc among others. Selected projects are listed below.

Ways of Seeing

We live in a time in which more images are taken by and for machines than by human beings. The way they see and construct the world has real implications. Ways of Seeing is an immersive experience in which you can perform the role of different machines and explore the world through their eyes. Wandering through the city as a smartphone constantly looking for facial features, the world appears as a flickering, triangulated accumulation of vectors. Constructing the environment as a giant point cloud, an autonomous car attempts to navigate through the streets. At night, a drone detects the body heat of the city’s inhabitants with its infrared sensors.

This is a game environment to engender forms of empathy and understanding for how machines construct the world. By clicking on different subject positions you are able to switch between different cameras, different algorithms and ultimately different ways of seeing.

Ways of Seeing at State Studio Berlin. © Anne Freitag

Spimeio

What would a world be like in which every object is ID tagged, trackable through time and space, and linked to a database holding a vast range of information abouts its history, market value, sentimental attachments etc.?

"A revolutionary smart way to organise all your belongings"

Spimeio is a fictional service provider operating as a platform for physical goods. Users are able to overlook and organise all their belongings in a digital inventory, giving them the option to directly store, lend or sell objects. Furniture with integrated RFID-reading technology functions as an everyday scanner for objects. Technologies used for this project: Arduino, Raspberry Pi, Node.js, HTML and CSS.

→ http://spime.io → LCC Degree Show Video

Deep Learning Kubrick

The video installation explores the boundaries of image recognition software. Taking a still from Stanley Kubrick's The Shining ever four seconds, the algortihm tries to describe what it sees. Adding descriptions bit for bit, an alternative narrative emerges.

Contact

Get in touch via mail@michelerler.com.