i'm a designer, i would say ... mostly of two-dimensional areas that have something to do with music.

oh i don't like buzzword lists, it'll have to be more than five ...

it's very process-oriented -- i think about materials and methods rather than the final form

it tends to be quite sparse -- i'm trying to be as clear as possible, or in the words of a colleague of mine: "you can't just put stuff on the page without a proper excuse!"

because of the above, it's often very "serialized" -- i'm often not thinking of a design as one final solution for one particular format, but try to set it up as a system that can be expanded and adapted. not only because this makes a lot of sense if you have, say, an album plus an EP plus a promo poster to do, but also because for me that's a way to prove that it really works, and doesn't only happen to look good under certain circumstances.

it should be quite subdued, or reserved (not sure about the right word here, and my favourite online dictionary seems to be offline right now) -- i don't like designs that are trying to impress me.

here i'm not sure how to put this in one word: most of it is very abstract and very concrete at the same time, kind of elemental you could say -- i'm rarely working with images that are trying to depict "reality", or anything else, but rather with the image itself, in terms of ink on paper / pixels on screen. so that the image shows the image and nothing else.

basically everything that's interesting ... it depends on the project, but it's often some kind of concept or idea that's behind the music, or something that's connected to that. quite often it's simply the work itself -- i'm doing a lot of little experiments that aren't related to any project in particular, where i'm basically just playing around to see what happens ... and then i sometimes use those when anything comes along that gives me the opportunity. the mathieu/ehlers "heroin" cd would be an example for that, or the patterns for silke maurer.

see below, "how do you begin thinking ..." -- it pretty much depends on the project.

i would say so, yes. i wouldn't know how i should work at all without e-mail -- a lot of projects, particularly collaborations, would never have happened without the possibility to send screenshots and sketches around. i guess it's the same for musicians, only that their files are bigger.

without some kind of remote data transfer, the whole process would be horribly complicated anyway -- from sending text to confirming images to proofreading (and proofreading again, and proofreading one last time) to getting films made ... i mean, i know that some people still do this with a lot of printouts and UPS, but for me it would be a nightmare. i don't even want to think about it.

the web itself (as in http://) is probably not quite so important in comparison, perhaps indirectly ... although i do a lot of research on the web; everything in the way of science/computers/maths/geometry/programming/etc is much easier to find there (and much more up to date) than on paper. so it definitely makes a difference.

well, what is an error? i think the principle has been around forever -- someone wants to do A and accidentially does B, which turns out to be much better than what he had planned ... we don't know whether the stone age drawing on that wall of that cave somewhere in france turned out exactly like the artist had it in mind. i guess not, with the tools they must have used in that time it's probably hard to be really precise.

there is no word for "zufall" in english i think -- it means something between "random incident", "accident" (in the sense of "something that accidentially happens", not car crash), and "fate" -- it basically says "random", but carries a strong resonance of things falling into place. "co-incident" if you want, something like a glitch, but not really ... "glitch" presumes there's an "ideal" or standard against which you can measure, while a zufall simply happens.

i'm not even sure that errors/glitches are really that common in my work -- at least i don't think of these things as "errors" or "anti"-something statements (in the carson way, i mean); they're more like unexpected opportunities. little gifts from nowhere. "oh, the computer has had an idea, thank you, computer!" -- that kind of thing.

from the point of view of the computer, errors don't exist anyway. things either happen, or they don't. it either runs or crashes, but it cannot go wrong. everything is equally valid -- what we perceive as an error is just another option in the end.

depends on the project. sometimes it is, sometimes there's a more general concept, sometimes the artist already has a visual draft/outline/idea, sometimes the artwork (or what ends up to be the artwork, or a big part of it) is already sitting on my harddrive ... that's different every time.

the ideas behind the software, or behind the design process?

anyhow, i don't think this is an either/or thing ... the tools and methods you use will always shape your way of thinking, whether you like it or not. you're not going to write a great string quartet if you don't know what a violin is -- hardware is always a part of the process.

i wouldn't speak of "cutting out", but you certainly think in a different way -- or at least i do -- when you work with "traditional" methods. i've done a few projects in wood/lead typesetting, and i had to make a very clear outline of the result right at the beginning, otherwise we would never have got anywhere. so it was very much driven by the final form, not so much by the process itself -- but perhaps that's just because i'm not so familiar with that process as opposed to the more computative or generative methods that i normally use.

as far as "technology" goes, i often use ideas that can also be found in digital music, or in the underlying software -- but not only there; a "loop" for example is a very universal concept, and have you ever seen a jacquard loom? those things are more than 200 years old; they're based on binary data storage devices just like modern computers. and just like modern computers, they had a huge influence on aesthetics as well as on working conditions in the textile industry – only back then there were riots and today there are none.

so while you could actually say that computers are "cutting out a large part of the process" if you refer to typesetters that are laid off, i don't see how this should be true for the design process itself -- for me it certainly doesn't feel like it. but again, that's probably more a question of what you're used to, rather than one of "computers" vs. "tradition" or "new" vs. "old".

no.

hard to tell -- as a designer, you're always in the position of taking on projects and you never really know what comes next ... in the near future, i'd like to focus a bit more on realtime / generative graphics, but right now i have a lot of print projects to finish so i don't think i'll have as much time for that as i'd like to. also, i want to produce a limited edition of silkscreen prints derived from the realtime graphics i'm doing (you've seen one of those at vis-onic while mikael was playing) -- i don't know how soon i'll be able to do this, but hopefully sometime this summer.