Young Joen

Older Joen

Recent Joen

Current Joen

My name is Joen Asmussen, I was born on the 25th of November 1979. I live in Copenhagen, Denmark. Noscope is simply snacksized portions of pointless stuff, and during a six year period from 2001 – 2007, a monthly updated graphical outlet.

You may also find me on:

• Twitter
• About.me
• WordPress.com
• Google+

I graduated from high school in 1999, majoring in maths and physics. I studied graphic design in south Denmark from 1999-2002. Since 2002 I’ve been employed at Copenhagen-based Titoonic, creating games & digital toys. Here, I’ve specialized in usability, interface and interaction design. I’ve been freelance since November 2007 until late 2010. I’m currently employed as a Design Wrangler at Automattic. I have a very young daughter, Selma. I believe in hard work over inherent gifts. Noscope is the result; by not having a clear goal in sight or purpose to existence, it came out of nowhere to serve as a personal learning platform. Eventually it grew meaning: pretty pictures for the love of doing it. I’ve learned, finding purpose is just a matter of looking in the right odd places.

A Few Random Factoids

• I love Sweden, used to live there and speak Swedish fluently.
• I enjoy reading science fiction, especially that of Arthur C. Clarke. My favourite book of his is Rendezvous with Rama.
• I love photographing, although I need a new camera.
• I find clouds to be one of the most fascinating part of nature, because no matter where I go, they can always serve me up something nice.
• I also love fractals.
• Kate has composed music for many of my installments. I purchased her great CD, and you should too.
• I am a member of Amnesty International and Unicef.
• I was always against the second Iraq war.
• I am very much against capital punishment.
• I am for the strict separation of church and state.
• I do not believe in god. That makes me an atheist. Atheism means “the lack of belief in a god or gods”. It does not mean that I believe there is no god. There’s a slight difference.
• There is no such thing as talent. To some people, “talent” means  something akin to “divine gift”, and since I do not believe in anything divine, I do not believe in predisposed skills. Instead, hard work, persistence and interest can get you a long way.
• During my 6 year “installment” period, I made 5 illustrations every month from 2001 to 2007. That adds up to 360 illustrations.
• I consume music in huge amounts. Some of my favourite bands are Atomic Swing, Sonic Youth and Kent. I’m also very much into jazz music with John Coltrane, Miles Davis and Stan Getz leading the way.
• Lately I’ve been developing a generative graphics engine which I’ve dubbed Von Neumann in honor of hungarian mathematician John von Neumann whose middle-square method took center stage of early versions of the engine.
• I’ve started selling print versions of various images from my archive. It feels good to finally get physical copies of my bits and bytes.

Colophon

The lot is powered by WordPress for the text and zenphoto for the photos (though that section needs polish).

The current, all-black design I call Oceania, because I’ve realized what I write about is all over the map anyway.

Recently I had a design featuring Moai statues. A previous design was Pangea and an even previouser design was Fauna, both of which are now which is now free and open-source (as in GPL).