JAN SCHLÖSSER

Ātherwellen "What would energy from the aether look like?"

I've been fascinated by generative art for a long time — the idea that code can become a brush, an instrument. I grew up obsessed with classical 2D animation, that moment when a character moves for the first time and suddenly feels alive. I always wanted to create something like that from pure code. My programming skills weren't enough to get there on my own, so AI helped me write it. The vision is mine. The craft was a conversation.

The name comes from Nikola Tesla's idea of pulling free energy from the aether — an invisible force, everywhere, untapped. I liked the question: what would that energy look like? What would it sound like?

There are 400 animations total, each inscribed directly onto the Bitcoin blockchain as executable code. Not as files, not as links — as code that runs. As long as Bitcoin exists, they exist. Each edition comes with an archival pigment print, a USB stick with the animation, and the inscription on chain.
Five of them also exist as physical objects — an industrial monitor running the animation live, powered by a Raspberry Pi, mounted in a rack with an orange HDMI cable. I wanted at least a few of them to be something you can hear humming in a room.

Le Signe Bleu "I've never bought a stock in my life"

I started as a designer, became an artist more or less by accident through Andy Awesome, and somewhere along the way ended up deep in the art world. I discovered a lot of artists I became a genuine fan of, and when I was earning well as a consultant, I put most of my money into art — it was the world I understood. I've never bought a stock in my life.

I was always drawn to gallery shops, small concept stores, sneaker boutiques — places where someone with taste picks what goes on the shelf and you keep coming back to see what's new. Not because you need to buy something, but because it's interesting. Like a small exhibition. There's plenty of fashion I think is amazing and love looking at but would never wear myself.

I wanted to build a space like that. Somewhere relaxed, where I share my experiments and the things I find worth making — a mix of gallery and shop. Drops that come and go, a small permanent stock, and over time a small group of people who are into the same things and want to exchange ideas about them.
That's Le Signe Bleu.

*Andy Awesome "How I accidentally became an artist"

It started with t-shirts. I wanted to make my own shirts and needed motifs, so I drew an interpretation of the Ninja Turtles. A friend saw it, said "that's cool, do more." So I made ten — all riffs on characters and universes I grew up with. Star Wars, things like that.
I'd had the domain andyawesome.com sitting around for ages — just because I thought it was funny. When the t-shirt project needed a name, it fit.

Since the designs were always interpretations of existing IPs, I thought I'd frame them as art pieces — that way the t-shirt becomes a print, not just merch. I put up a website where you could preorder the shirts, then pinged the design blogs. A lot of them already knew me from my Caliboor studio work, so they ran it.
I went out for beers with friends. Four hours later, the first email came in — but it wasn't for a shirt. Someone wanted to buy the artwork. Turned out there was way more demand for the art than for the t-shirts.

Within a year I went from a guy who wanted to make a few shirts to showing alongside Shepard Fairey, Anthony Lister, and Ron English at the Sanrio 50th Anniversary in Wynwood during Art Basel Miami. My piece sold first — to an investment banker from New York. Work was shown on Times Square as part of the See Me exhibition, and in several group shows in New York.
Along the way there were collaborations with brands on everything from phone cases with Swarovski crystals to bowling balls.

Venzero / Musicmarker "You can pinch to zoom. We're screwed, right? — Yeah."

The startup years. Professionally, probably the most exciting time of my life. Five friends in Munich designing MP3 players and portable gadgets — manufactured in China, sold across Europe and the US. My job was design. All of it — industrial design, interface design, packaging, website.
This was right before the first iPhone. One of our products was Musicmarker — basically an offline Shazam. You heard a great song in a club, recorded a few seconds with our gadget, and later your computer would identify the track so you could buy it.

It was a wild ride. We spent a lot of time in New York, I won a CES Design Award and several others — IFA Product of the Day, features in lifestyle magazines. Having spent my whole career doing digital design, it was something else entirely to walk into a Media Markt and see a product I'd designed sitting on the shelf.

But as great as that time was, it had an expiration date. A colleague picked me up at the airport in New York on the second day the first iPhone was available. In the taxi he showed it to me — "look, you can pinch the image to make it bigger." I said "we're screwed, right?" He said "yeah." Today you can't even imagine what a leap that was. But as we now know, the smartphone ended the MP3 player era pretty definitively.

Caliboor "2.5 years, day and night, because the market was dead anyway."

It was the year 2000. I was in the middle of studying Kommunikationsdesign and thought I was going to get rich building websites. Then the dot-com crash happened. The market was dead. Agencies weren't hiring. Nothing was moving.
During my studies they once asked who wanted to go freelance. I didn't raise my hand.

But through the internet you could suddenly see, for the first time, what cool things people were making all over the world. Pretty naively, I thought — I can do that too. I just have to make something so good that it doesn't depend on any particular market, because somewhere things are always going well.

Two and a half years later — day and night at the computer, countless versions, working through Disney animation books I'd ordered from the US — the site was done. It won nearly 40 international design awards, was named Site of the Year by the big design blogs, and got published all over the place. My first client was Microsoft. I've been self-employed ever since and have never had a job.

Consulting
"The last day I worked as a designer was my first day at BMW."

After years in startups and a brief detour as an artist, I was thirty — had won plenty of awards, seen my work travel the world, and was still more or less broke. So I went to BMW.
I got lucky with the assignment — the BMW i sub-brand launch. But it was also my last day as a designer. Painting big brands by the styleguide wasn't for me. What I'd picked up from my startup years turned out to be more valuable — so from then on I worked in UX and as a consultant for digital transformation.

The projects were all over the place — the native OS UX for Asus in China, brand workshops in Sindelfingen for Mercedes, AI platforms for Siemens. Other clients I worked with, some of them for years: BSH, Lufthansa, LG, Telekom, IWC Schaffhausen. As UX lead, as a classic consultant, as a data analyst — I worked with several board-level executives and international teams.

Syyy
"We used to build prototypes to show where things could go. Now the prototypes actually work."

I've been working with AI since 2019 — my first bigger project was an AI-supported text editor at Siemens. The tech was exciting but early. When the large language models opened up in late 2022, everything changed fast. Clients I'd been doing digital strategy and transformation work with for years suddenly wanted AI — and the results were immediately real. Not PowerPoint slides about the future, but working software, actual savings, measurable value.

So I teamed up with a friend who runs a specialized IT company and we founded Syyy. We help enterprises figure out what's actually possible, build proof of concepts, automate processes, and train teams. The focus is industrial process automation and digital product prototyping — the stuff I've always done, just with tools that finally deliver what we used to only promise.

TeddyToast "Instead of biscuit companies, Microsoft showed up"

I've always been fascinated by character design. As a kid I drew comics constantly, and my first real success was Caliboor — an animated website where every section was introduced by a different character. At twenty I was dreaming about seeing my characters on cookie packaging, cereal boxes, that kind of thing. That's also why I've always been fascinated by Hello Kitty. You can sell a pencil that's normally worth 50 cents for a euro if Hello Kitty is on it. I wanted to do exactly that.

It never quite worked out that way. Instead of biscuit companies wanting my characters on their packaging, Microsoft and others showed up wanting animations to explain their products. But something is always something.
Like andyawesome.com, I'd had teddytoast.com reserved for years. In 2017 I took a year off from consulting to finally do what I'd always wanted — build a character brand with fun animations and nice products. Teddy Toast was born.

Florbis "Besides, I really like to paaaint."

At design school they told us not to design anything of our own for the first few years — just copy what the greats do. They told us to never say we became designers because we liked drawing as kids. I got a near-failing grade in life drawing because I gave the model comic eyes — they said I had no respect for the subject.
I did internships at agencies. I've never met people so pretentious who had so little to show for it.

was young, I was hungry, I wanted my revenge. So when I built the About page for Caliboor, I invented Florbis — a beat-up plant with hair loss and crooked teeth who told everyone that she really, reeeally likes to paint. Among other things. That was my revenge — and people loved it, and it was genuinely fun. So years later I gave her a few friends and turned it into a roast format.

Ureegem® "Same energy, different lane"

I've been a sneakerhead since I was a teenager — grew up playing basketball, listening to hip hop, always into streetwear. But I never wanted to look like everyone else, so instead of baggy pants I wore super oversized Levi's 501s. Same energy, different lane.

During the big streetwear hype — the era that probably peaked and ended somewhere around the Supreme × Louis Vuitton collab — so many cool things were happening that it got me excited to make my own. So I started Ureegem. Initially just for myself — pieces I thought were cool and wanted to own. Best materials I could find, hand-printed, nothing mass-produced.

Kululeku "One dollar a day"

The world is unfair. I think that's something you have to accept if you want to be happy. Some people are born beautiful, some smart, some rich, some with nothing. The disadvantages usually have to be made up for with more effort — which tends to make people stronger, but that doesn't make it fair.
If you were born in a wealthy country and managed to do well there, you've already been so lucky that it's only right to give some of that back.
My best friend had traveled across Africa and came back saying we need to open an NGO in Mozambique — give kids there access to school and education. So we did.

The first time I was there, a local colleague asked if we wanted to eat crabs that evening. I said yes, so he bought four large crabs from a fisherman for 80 cents. I asked how many crabs you catch in a day. He said five is a good day in that season. One dollar a day.

I thought — if we could teach young people to use a computer and do basic remote work in the same timezone as Europe for 10 euros an hour, that would solve a lot of problems. It wasn't nearly as simple as it sounded in my head. But I'm still convinced that education is always a path to a better life. A dream is a dream, but life isn't over yet either.