Articles from: Art

Factually this is out of sequence but the results will be ready to see next Thursday. The idea – buy cheap art in the charity shop – make new art on top of it. Some remarkable results already – see this little ditty from Jnr.

The grand opening is on Thursday 26th November – the culture press are clambering for an invite – will finally put Brick Lane back on the artistic map…

In need of some instant fun we decided to have a Kemp Folds inspired session. Take two pictures of Hard Man, Ross Kemp fold and enjoy.

Once we’d warmed up we took random photos of our colleagues and held a fold off. Each person took a random print from the table, folded it as required then with baited breadth revealed it next to the same image folded by another colleague. The biggest gasp, laugh, shock won.

Great fold. Fold on.

This friday fun was suggested by the Dan ‘Hold the Fold’ Holder - who now has his own personal tribute site - Folder of the Holder

Inspired by In B-Flat and MJ Advertising, we wanted to think up ideas for creating a simple web page containing only 1 or more YouTube videos. A low tech video experience.

With thought starters: Music, diary films, banking tips, energy savings and holidays on the cheap, we set about thinking up some ideas. 15 minutes later we’d got suggestions of Tree of Transparent Truth, Interlinked Stories, Maxi-shape Creator, Buzz Headroom, The Flying Click-its, Replace the Dialogue, Magnetic Poetry and Don’t Go There.

This is worth checking out - an autoplay JavaScript version of B flat

Well, I for one have always imagined that a slightly beardy and bespectacled boy lived inside my machine (probably not to these ends exactly, but hey ) so I was WELL pleased to find this little gem floating about on the interweb over the weekend (courtesy of endgaget).

Multitouch Barcelona are a recently formed interaction design group and LBi are loving their experimentation in this physical space - the initial “is there really a guy in the box?” reaction. We’ve been playing around ourselves lately too… following soon, a link to a ‘Surface’ table that our RIA-meister Justin worked up out of a cardboard box over a weekend a few weeks ago.

I’ve been noticing a lot of animations over the top of real footage and photography at the moment. A gorgeous visual trend (and one I’m really hoping won’t be done to death).

These two really stand out for me. Not to Scale’s piece below is just pixellated goodness, and completely transforms the bleak swimming pool:

Not To Scale - Ubik ~ Voxel from ventilate.ca on Vimeo.

And Olga Mink’s more reflective ‘art-piece’ is mesmerisingly beautiful, slow and gripping. Reminds me of the feeling you get watching a Tarkovsky film - painful, but in a good way.

Fragments from Atlantida (2009) from Olga Mink on Vimeo.

Its not often enough that you let yourself get carried away by instant gratification and magnetism (although I think it happens to me more than most) but rather than post constantly about the stream of wonderfulness I’ve come across over the weekend, I’d pop my top five into one post.

01. Ikea BARNSLIG cushion by Maria Vinka (thanks to sub-studio) - a sneak peak of the new range due out in April… this cushion keeps your hands and feet warm!

02. Japanese wunderkind Nagi Noda’s animal hairpieces. One of my favourite artists. The best hair ever…

03. Moustache handkerchiefs from Avril Loreti. For those moments when a stiff upper lip just won’t cut it.

04. Japanese-style  Samsung phone ads (especially the Evil Hedgehog Controlscreen). From The Viral Factory. Mwaaahhhhahhahh!

05. Donna Wilson dog and cat teapot warmers. Could you say no to a cuppa from that poodle’s spout?

Indeed, following on from Riaz’s post I too attended the Microsoft Truman Session. Their take on the world come 2019 caught my eye.

I must say, their vision piece was extremely well thought out and crafted. There were of course some usual suspects: digital newspapers, an evolution of Surface and interactive mirrors (hey, we’ve already done that for Macy’s). I guess when imagining the future these technologies are de riguer.  I would have liked to see the vision piece driven by narrative however. Perhaps a storyline. How’s this: A story about a strange man that builds a world using holographic tools for the woman he loves?  Oh, wait.

Thru You is some guy’s (KUTIMAN) fantastically executed album based on you tube clip edits.  The only thing that could make this more awesome is if this ran on the fly, generating the clips based on algorithm.  Great work though.

There’s something really appealing about the mash-up of broadcast and outdoor media for artistic/social commentary purposes - it often brings out some painful truths. From old-school audio-pirates like Douglas Kahn (who I was lucky enough to have as a lecturer at uni for a semester) and Negativeland to current street art, I love the way it plays with the true value of advertising and the media. And they’re always hidden - are these artists who create something beautiful/funny/poignant/political, using what our industry creates as raw materials, operating in secret because of the threat of big business and the brands ‘we’ represent? Surely if we’re helping brands become more real, believable, genuinely useful and honest then this kind of expression is quite beautiful, and not at all scary? (Or maybe that’s just my art-school roots talking, but Iove the idea of someone mashing up our work).

I haven’t seen anything from my beloved Shoreditch Decapitator for a while now, but Posterboy is just brilliant - and with maybe a slightly broader repertoire.

You can check out his Flickr page here.Or watch his video: Posterboy on the NYC subway.

I love it when people take direct inspiration from other people’s creativity and give it new life. It’s great to see people use sub-plots, objects or characters as the starting points in their own expressions. Borrowing from established cultural artefacts seems to make the idea all the more real and resonant. For example the idea behind the musical Wicked touches everyone who had seen The Wizard of Oz as a child and triggers an immediate inquisitive response, to what the story might reveal.

A recent example of this spring-boarding is a book by Jack Torrence, the main character of the Stephen King film, The Shining. It uses the story of Jack writing his book and his inability to write anything other than ‘All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy’. The book uses this idea and using an increasingly varied approach to the layout reproduces that statement over 80 pages. It’s unlikely to be a best seller, but it’s a lovely example of taking a small idea and expanding it out. More details from the Guardian.

With digital work gaining in maturity (and much influenced by previous non-digital pieces) I’m wondering how long it will be before someone creates a popular new experience or narrative directly inspired by famous digital piece. Clearly there are some IP issues to resolve, but when one borrows from an established source you’ve got to come clean on your inspiration.

PS. For those with a passing interest in ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’, you might have been aware of HAL 9000s birthday a few weeks ago – 12^th January to be precise. I wonder if this date could become a notable day in our global culture for neural computing and artificial intelligence.

Green Man. Culled from Greyscale Obscurity.

Oh yes we have skills, and we are not shy. This is Murray’s birthday card, drawn by JPT. Think of it as an antidote to Adobedom, pencil therapy, something to do with the importance of making stuff. Bring on Spring with birds, beards, ukuleles, neon feathers and leafy garlands.

The intersection of data and representation is an rich area soaked in wonderfully tactile, beautiful visual and visceral experimentation… but these data sculptures, based on the moods of the artist Martin Kim Luge’s online friends, just hit the sweet spot for me.

Entitled Weeping Willow (l) and Rose of Jericho(r), they scrobble the mood tags on social network portals such as facebook, and “communicate in some level the presence of the others‘ mental state without direct contact.”

The Rose of Jericho “reads the mood adjective at the friends myspace-account in realtime from the internet. The adjective is compared against a database to map a numerical value to the emotion. This value defines the duration of the water pump controlled by a microcontroller, which is irrigating the Rose of Jericho. The higher the value the more water is arriving to the plant.”

“Every branch of the Weeping Willow stands for an online friend symbolically and the slope of a single branch is communicating their happiness or sadness. In other words: the happier the friend, the higher the branch will grow. If the branch hangs, it might be a high time to phone or visit him or her. Once a week the branches are sent to the user by post, and the recipient can put together a new tree to the growing forest himself. The branches are cut as construction set by laser-cutting and is sent by post to the user (and…) with a cup of coffee every Sunday you put the branches to the weeping willow together. Carefully you break the botton and the branches from the wooden board. Every branch is individually labelled and has a unique slot in the bottom plate. There is a clear assignment of friend and you can see easily the developing of moods. As weeks go by, a growing forest of weeping willows are collated, manifesting the collective state of one‘s social network.”

Wow. I want one.

NOTE: Apologies for so much paraphrasing, but its such a poetic idea that the artist’s own words do it great justice, and thanks for one of my favourite blogs, infosthetics, for the heads up.

Well now, here’s an unexpected 2008 retrospective. Curious Expeditions, a website devoted to unearthing and documenting the wondrous, the macabre and the obscure from around the world.