TheFWA - Andreas Rothaug - Futura Epsis 1

Often I simply sleep and let my subconsciousness handle the thinking to provide me answers when I wake up.

Please give us a brief bio of yourself.

Andreas Rothaug from Hamburg, Germany. Founder of Futura Epsis 1, artist, designer & developer - autonomous biological robot created in the mid eighties of the 20th century.

What do you do for inspiration?

I focus myself and try to make my mind free to see clearly. Ideas and thoughts pop up all the time.

How many hours do you work each week?

5 to 100 - I follow a concept of passionate work and living. 24/7. Rather than the usual 9to5 scheme I often celebrate nightly excesses until 5 am since I often live pretty timeless.

Sometimes I break out the studio with parts of the hardware to work in different countries as a weird, nerdish kind of holiday for 1-2 weeks.

How do you relax or unwind?

Excessive use of music. It defines my day. I also draw. You might often see me just sitting somewhere thinking silently.

If you weren't working on the internet what would you be doing?

Focus more on my artistic career, traveling through time and space. Exploring more of the human mind.

What's your favorite part of your job? What's the hardest part of your job? What do you do when you get stuck?

I worship the moment where theory becomes practice. When you create life inside your universe. The hardest part is surely to decide which idea to follow, where to let your energy flow. When I get stuck I work on it until it works. Good german.

Often I simply sleep and let my subconsciousness handle the thinking to provide me answers when I wake up.

If there are any pivotal experiences/decisions you could point to that helped shape your career, what would they be?

To have the approach to simply create and to follow my vision without letting myself be influenced and limited by dogma too much.

What did your very first site look like? Is it still online?

1999 - a huge 10mb flash website with pre-rendered frame by frame PNG sequences. The page is not online any more but of course we still store a local backup of it in the archive. Wait another 10 years for the Flash retro boom.

Have you written any books, if not do you plan to?

I recently wrote an article for the "Futurism" issue of the BranD magazine that will be released in Hong-Kong around September 2012. It is about interaction design and the future of technology with focus on creating a brand user experience.

The web is getting out of the web. Do you find that thinking in digital solutions alone hinders you? Do you feel the urge to solve the problem using all mediums necessary?

We are surrounded by toys! And yes, I feel a strong urge to use available mediums. The possibilities in creating increase with the amount of available mediums. We need even better concepts to merge the digital net with our biological nature.

Looking 10 years in to the future, how far can websites go?

Only 10? Quantum leaps in technology are hard to predict. And the future me is already laughing at past-me about his thoughts. But let's try it for the curiosity.

3D hologram interfaces. No keyboards, mice or touch screens any more though still in use since the world evolves slow. BMI (Brain-Machine-Interface) controllers and gesture based interaction in a 3D space.

We already have a strong 3D boom, transparent displays are on the way and through hollywood society gets acclimatized for (spending money on) new interaction methods.

Of all the websites you/your company have produced, which one are you most proud of?

Well, at the moment definitely "Floating" - a 3D sound visualization for the use with shutter/polarization/red-blue glasses. The visuals can be remote controlled with an iPad over a water-like interface.

Since we used a standard for controlling the visuals, Floating can be used with interfaces ranging from tablets to music instruments, micro controllers and even Kinect or BMI based installations.

We also created a HTML5 micro page with one scene of the sound visuals as a teaser for the full experience which is rendered in realtime.

There is perhaps a shift in web use these days. We are seeing a decline in the purely experiential sites in flash with huge production efforts, to a relationship with clients based on tools and services, that many times have simples interfaces. How do you see that trend developing? Will Flash suffer?

Where is our spirit? Isn't what we do about creating? About evolving? When a technology is at the end of its life circle people always scream because they fear change.

They fear to lose money because in the past decade they built on that particular technology.

We (again) experience a shift in the computation performance of "computers". The rise of iOS and mobile computing made it necessary to go away from performance hungry calculations locally towards cloud based processing.

Users can't be expected to explore content at home in front of their massive machine with a melting CPU any more.

Creating rich, explorative experiences requires graphical performance and modern (mobile) devices provide easy and extremely powerful connections to that performance. We can be excited about pushing the boundaries of what is possible in the future.

We are just at the start of new kinds of user interaction; the basic website as we knew it is from the past. The future is a cross platform, cross device through time and space experience.

What are your views on design/graphic school. Do you think someone can get into the field without educational experience in a school environment?

I am such an example. Since I started to program with 13 university was uninteresting for me and only a short guest performance of one semester. Ever since I can remember I felt more comfortable with learning by myself.

Each topic one is interested in raises questions and opens new topics. Falling in the rabbit-hole needs discipline but is worth so much more compared to predefined learning regulations that need to fit a lot of people and not your uniqueness and your interests.

Still, perhaps not the right way for everybody since you need to be focussed and willing to sacrifice yourself. But is there a better motive than self-realization and knowledge?

What would be your ultimate vehicle to travel in?

Spaceship and/or teleportation. I never got a drivers license since it is frustrating inefficient and no plans at all to change that until cars can fly.

There must be a project that you have always dreamed of doing, what is it?

Mirroring my consciousness into a digital system. Longtime project which hopefully works out until my biological hardware dies.

What does the future hold for your company, or you as a person?

We will try to expand more. We are already serving clients in Germany, France, Italy, Denmark and USA and by the end of the year 2012 Russia.

What are you excited about learning next and is there a long term challenge you are considering tackling?

I love to learn. To improve is a great feeling and wisdom opens your mind. For the future I want to learn more languages and figure out how to make a living while standing behind my moral values.

Any parting shots or pearls of wisdom?

Stay young in your mind and never forget how you saw the world as a child. Play more. Free your mind from what you believe is real. Nothing is.

It has been a privilege, thanks very much

The pleasure was on my side.

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