About Tao Takashi

Tao Takashi in his real life incarnation is many things. He’s a python programmer, a amateur video and audio producer, a photographer, a DJ.

He came to the internet back in the 90s before the World Wide Web was invented and hopped into IRC directly. After the WWW and it’s Mosaic browser came around he pioneered the WWW at his university (as much as it was possible back then by being just a student) and in the cultural/art area in his town. One of the first things was to create sort of a virtual gallery and later he joined up with a cultural institution in that city and introduced to them the idea of using the internet. From that many things evolved.

One thing was the hosting of talk sessions with artists, researchers, ISPs and interested public about the possible interaction between artists and the internet. One result of that was the creation of an internet café and many projects to follow.

In 1996 Tao developed one of the first collaborative event calendars based on the internet in which institutions in the city can add their events and get an output module in return. The idea born due to the fact that no really complete event listing was online available by then and the hope was that institutions would keep their events up to date if they also appear on their site. Additionally many web sites for these institutions have been created resulting in sort of an online city network. Another event like this was done via Düsseldorf and New York City.

Later more art events were taking place like a distributed one in some cities of germany like Düsseldorf and Berlin. It utilized RealAudio in order to give listeners streams from each of these events and allow the contributers in the individual cities to interact in some sort with each other. As it was 1997 much effort was needed to get things working technically and we even pioneered some first wireless internet technology which involved setting up various transmission point throughout the cities we wanted to connect.

Followed was a european event in which artists from over 10 european countries worked distributed together and tried to react to each others art at that day. The main connection point was a VRML based 3D space in which you saw the artifacts created by the artists grouped together in relationship to their contributions.

Tao Takashi is now entering Second Life as it seems a natural extension to the VRML experiments back then. Interactions are far more easily possible now, streaming is not cutting edge anymore and thus reliably working and possibilities seem infinite.

In his real life incarnation he co-founder of a web development company focused on Content Management Systems based on the open source CMS Plone.

Make sure to visit Tao Takashi’s showroom in world.

Real Life

Tao Takashi in Real Life is Christian Scholz. He co-owns the company COM.lounge which is active in the Plone and Second Life consulting areas. Add a bit of new marketing and web2.0 to that 🙂

He is blogging in german at MrTopf, is having a technical videoblog at COM.lounge TV and a private one at mrtopf.tv.

Christian is also on Twitter, Jaiku and Pownce.

You can reach Tao Takashi / Christian Scholz at tao.takashi@gmail.com.