About

Stefan Müller Arisona
Dr. sc. nat., University of Zurich 2004 - MSc Electrical Engineering, ETH Zurich 1998 - MSc Computer Science, Uppsala University 1997
Principal Investigator and Member of the Steering Committee of ETH Zurich's Future Cities Laboratory, Singapore
Adjunct Associate Professor, School of Computer Engineering, Nanyang Technical University (NTU), Singapore

I am a researcher and artist who creates and applies customised software instruments in different domains. As a researcher I study, design, and implement new tools in order to explore more expressive interaction techniques. Currently, as a principal investigator at ETH Zurich's Future Cities Laboratory in Singapore, I focus on the creation of tools and techniques related to urban design, modelling, and simulation.

As an artist, I am interested in applying self-created tools for given design goals in order to study their effectiveness and their creative potential. My portfolio includes interactive digital art pieces and audio-visual live performances, and many of them have appeared at internationally renowned venues and festival, such as the Ars Electronica Center in Linz, or the Notting Hill Arts Club in London. I also regularly DJ and VJ, and have performed at clubs across the globe, such as Corsica Studios London, Shelter Shanghai, or my latest visualist residency at the famous Zouk Singapore.

For more information, please visit the work overview.

Contact Information

Biography

Dr. Stefan Müller Arisona is a Principal Investigator at ETH Zurich's Future Cities Laboratory, and an Adjunct Associate Professor at the School of Computer Engineering of the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. His main interests are at the intersections of science, art and technology, and his research focuses on interactive and generative design tools, on computer-assisted techniques for architectural and urban modelling and simulation, and on real-time multimedia systems.

He received an MSc in Computer Science from Uppsala University (Sweden, 1997) and an MSc in Electrical Engineering from ETH Zurich (Switzerland, 1998). In 2001, he joined the University of Zurich's Multimedia Lab (2000) as a research assistant, was visiting researcher at IRCAM Centre Pompidou (France, 2003), and completed his PhD thesis at the University of Zurich in 2004. From 2005 to 2007, Stefan was a post-doctoral researcher and lecturer at ETH Zurich's Computer Systems Institute. From 2007 to 2008, Stefan was a post-doctoral research fellow sponsored by the Swiss National Science Foundation at the Media Arts & Technology Department of the University of California, Santa Barbara and at the California NanoSystems Institute (CNSI). Since 2008, he is a senior research fellow at the Chair of Information Architecture of ETH Zurich, where he leads the urban simulation team. Since 2011, he is member of the Future Cities Laboratory steering committee.

Since 1994, Stefan has obtained extensive industry experience. From 1994 - 1998 he worked as a part-time senior engineer at Quix Computerware AG, porting operating systems to new hardware platforms and writing hardware device drivers for enterprise storage systems. From 1998 - 2000, he was a Unix System engineer and consultant at Atraxis AG, Swissair's IT operator. In 2008 he joined the ETH Zurich spin-off company Procedural Inc. as a software architect and contributed to the CityEngine, one of the most advanced generative modelling tools for urban environments. Procedural has received numerous international awards, such as Red Herring Top 100, and was acquired by ESRI in 2011.

Stefan is a co-founder of the Corebounce Association (Zurich, 2001), and since 2005, he has been the scientific director of ETH Zurich's Digital Art Weeks, an annual symposium and festival that explores new movements in digital art. He is a co-founder and a fellow of the Institute for the Converging Arts and Sciences (ICAS, University of Greenwich, 2009). As an artist, DJ, and VJ, he has performed internationally and his artworks have appeared worldwide at renowned venues such as Cabaret Voltaire (Switzerland, 2007) or the Ars Electronica Center (Austria, 2006 - 2008 and 2009 - 2010).

CV is available upon request.

News

...and a few oldies...

10.05.2012: Digital Urban Modeling and Simulation (Edited by Stefan Müller Arisona, Gideon Aschwanden, Jan Halatsch and Peter Wonka)

Our latest book will be released by Springer soon. The book is thematically positioned at the intersections of Urban Design, Architecture, Civil Engineering and Computer Science, and it has the goal to provide specialists coming from respective fields a multi-angle overview of state-of-the-art work currently being carried out. It addresses both newcomers who wish to obtain more knowledge about this growing area of interest, as well as established researchers and practitioners who want to keep up to date. In terms of organization, the volume starts out with chapters looking at the domain at a wide-angle and then moves focus towards technical viewpoints and approaches. → More Information

08.05.2012: Call for Papers for Leonardo Electronic Almanac Special Issue now Online

Lanfranco Aceti, Steve Gibson and I will co-edit a special issue on Live Visuals for LEA. The CfP is available here: http://www.leoalmanac.org/live-visuals-lea-call-for-papers/

24.04.2012: Digital Art Weeks Nominated for Swiss Art Awards, Presentation at Art Basel 2012

Great news for our Digital Art Weeks: We have just been nominated for the Swiss Art Awards 2012, and are now given the opportunity to present our work at the Swiss Federal Office of Culture's yearly exhibition at Art Basel 2012 (12 - 17 Jun 2012). Check out the official invitation → here.

17.03.2012: The Exploding, Plastic and Inevitable @ Zouk's Velvet Underground

Save the date for the night: The EPI is coming to Singapore, and which space would be a better match than Velvet Underground? My friends Tom Kuo (Toronto), Steve Gibson (Vancouver / Edinburgh), Dyz (Singapore), Marcellus & Sho-B (Zurich) and I will be spinning and flickering all night...

16.03.2012: Inauguration of the Singapore-ETH Centre

On March 16, we celebrated the official inauguration of the Singapore-ETH Centre at the new CREATE campus, including the completion of the Value Lab Asia. → Pictures

01.10.2011: FCL Gazette

The FCL Gazette #6, edited by me, is now available online at the → Future Cities Lab website

21.07.2011: Keynote Lecture at CGIV2011

I'll be presenting a keynote lecture entitled "Urban Visualisation Beyond 3D: Behaviour, Dynamics and Interactivity" at this year's CGIV on August 17 at NTU. → Conference Infos and Abstract.

01.06.2011: Project "MetroBuzz" Launched

We have started a new project for interactive visualisation of transportation data (based on MATSim output). MetroBuzz will develop quickly as it's already scheduled for several events. The code is GPL and available on → Google Code.

31.05.2011: VirtualVJ at CHI2011 in Vancouver

Steve Gibson and I are working on the successor of VirtualDJ which will include tracker-based live music and visuals. It premiered as part of the "User in Flux" workshop at this year's CHI. Steve has put up some videos. More shows are planned, in the mean time you can → Watch the videos.

01.10.2010: Moved to Singapore and Joined ETH Zurich's Future Cities Laboratory

It is very exciting to be "on the road" again only two years after returning from the USA. Again far away from Switzerland, but at the same time to our other "home" - Indonesia.

01.07.2010: EPI Website Updated

The EPI website was updated with latest videos and pictures of the Shanghai and Vancouver performances. Check it out at → www.telebody.ws/Exploding. Thanks Steve!

24.06.2010: Digital Art Weeks 2010 Xi'an China

From June 29 - July 16, Digital Art Weeks 2010 will take place in Xi'an China. As the scientific chair of Digital Art Weeks, I will organise a one day symposium on future cities at Xi'an Jiaotong University. → More information at www.digitalartweeks.ethz.ch.

12.09.2009: New installation "Pixel City" at the Ars Electronica Center, Linz

"Procedural City" is an interactive installation that creates procedural cities based on individual fingerprints. Realised by Procedural Inc. in collaboration with the AEC FutureLab. → Watch the video on YouTube | → Read more at the Ars Electronica Center homepage.

05.06.2008: Book Release: Transdisciplinary Digital Art. Sound, Vision and the New Screen

The book Transdisciplinary Digital Art, edited by Randy Adams, Steve Gibson, and me, has just been released as part of Springer's CCIS (Communications in Computer and Information Science) series. → More Information | → Springer site | → Springer link (online version).

28.09.2007: Moving to Santa Barbara

Check out a few → Pictures...

16.08.2007: Siggraph Course

Kenneth A. Huff, Bernd Lintermann, Pascal Müller and me presented a course on Digital Art Techniques at SIGGRAPH 2007 in San Diego. For those with access to the ACM digital library, the course notes are available here.

31.08.2006: Digital Marionette at Ars Electronica

One of Corebounce's interactive installations, the 'Digital Marionette', is shown at the Ars Electronica Center from August 31 2006 - September 2008. → Ars Electronica

14.03.2006: Indonesia Visit

We've just returned from Indonesia and are quite surprised it's still winter in europe... → A Few Pictures

Recent and Selected Publications

S. Müller Arisona and G. D. P. A. Aschwanden. 2011. Accommodating Varying User Roles in Participatory Urban Design. In: CHI’11 Workshop on the User in Flux. Vancouver, Canada.

S. Haegler, P. Wonka, S. Müller Arisona, L. Van Gool and P. Müller. 2010. Grammar-Based Encoding of Facades. Computer Graphics Forum, Vol. 29, No. 4, pages 1479-1487.

Transdisciplinary Digital Art: Sound, Vision and the New Screen. 2008. R. Adams, S. Gibson, and S. Müller Arisona (eds.). Communications in Computer and Information Science (CCIS), Volume 7, Springer Berlin Heidelberg. → More Information?

N. Juillerat, S. Müller Arisona and S. Schubiger-Banz. 2008. A Hybrid Time and Frequency Domain Audio Pitch Shifting Algorithm. Convention Paper. 125th Convention of the Audio Engineering Society (AES). San Francisco, October 2 - 5.

P. Müller, S. Müller Arisona, S. Schubiger-Banz and M. Specht. 2008. Interactive Editing of Live Visuals. In: J. Braz, A. Ranchordas, H. Araújo and J. Jorge (eds). Advances in Computer Graphics and Computer Vision, pp. 169 - 184, CCIS Series, Volume 4, Springer Berlin Heidelberg.

P. Müller, S. Müller Arisona, K. A. Huff and B. Lintermann. 2007. Digital Art Techniques. ACM SIGGRAPH 2007, San Diego, CA, USA. In: Course Notes of the ACM SIGGRAPH 2007, ACM Press.

P. Müller, S. Müller Arisona, S. Schubiger-Banz, and M. Specht (Corebounce Art Collective). 2006. Digital Marionette. In: Simplicity - The Art of Complexity. Ars Electronica 2006: 348 - 349.

S. Müller Arisona, S. Schubiger-Banz, and M. Specht. 2006. A Real-Time Multimedia Composition Layer. Proceedings of ACMMM, Workshop on Audio and Music Computing for Multimedia. ACM Multimedia 2006, Santa Barbara, October 23-27. → PDF

S. Schubiger and S. Müller. 2003. Soundium2: An Interactive Multimedia Playground. In: Proceedings of the 2003 International Computer Music Conference, ICMA, San Francisco.

S. Müller and G. Mazzola. 2003. The Extraction of Expressive Shaping in Performance. Computer Music Journal 27(1): 47 - 58.

S. Müller. 2002. Computer-aided Musical Performance with the Distributed Rubato Environment. In: G. Johannsen and G. de Poli (eds). Human Supervision and Control in Engineering and Music. Special Issue. Journal of New Music Research 31(3): 233 - 238.

→ Complete Publication List