I’d like to say that I have no idea what this ad is talking about. But then I’d be a liar. As well as a slut…
(Agency: BBDO NY.)
Dutch artist Henk Hofstra is at it again. You might remember his “Urban River” where he painted an entire city street aqua blue. This week he unveiled “Art-Eggcident”: several 30-metre wide fried eggs cracked open along the Zaailand - one of the Netherland’s largest open squares, in the northern city of Leeuwarden.
Wow. Northern Europe is a beacon of pure vanguard awesomeness. It never ceases to bring me joy that they are so open to the most random shit… and in public no less! I suggest we all move to the Netherlands immediately.
The largest eggs are totally flat, but the smaller ones have a three-dimensional “yolk” perfect for climbing on and taking pictures so you can show your friends that you sat on a gigantic egg yolk in the Netherlands
We all know there is nothing as expansive and pure and all-encompassing as the imaginations of children. Those little un-biased brains have nothing much to worry about (hopefully…) and so they just connect right away. Kids don’t edit or judge or over-think themselves. They’re awesome.
With “The Monster Engine”, New Jersey-based illustrator Dave Devries takes the drawings of children and re-envisions them as more realistic looking art. I can’t tell you how much I love how faithful he is to the original drawings. He doesn’t edit or try to improve them at all - he just faithfully transfers them with a more experienced artistic skill. Can you imagine being a little kid and then seeing your drawing come to life like this? It would blow my little kid mind.
Via Gerry Mak @ Lost At E Minor
Holy fuck.
(Agency: The Campaign Palace. Director: Glendyn Ivin. Production: Exit Films.)
It’s really interesting to see how a company will market itself so differently to various countries. Obviously, there are social mores and cultural values that will affect how an ad will be received. Ads that run for ages to great acclaim in Scandinavia would make most conservative North Americans completely shit their pants.
For an example of a drastic shift in cross-Atlantic advertising, we need look no further than Schweppes. Following the subtle, visual brilliance of their gorgeous slow-mo North American spot “Burst” comes the fruit-laden psychadelic mind trip of France’s “Sensation”.
I’m not sure how something this colourfully awesome could be so weirdly bad. Drop a tab and let its technotronic waves of babealicious lust slowly wash over your genitals…
(Agency: FFL Paris. Director: Warren du Preez. Production: Stink.)
WTF? I’m all for ads that get artsy for no apparent reason, but this one just seems majorly hokey to me. Plus, I’m endlessly intrigued by how the French will use lesbionic powersex to sell pretty much anything. My favourite part is when the twins rub the bright yellow strawberry between their cheeks…
Oh, but they’re just getting stared. I guess there was some fear that perhaps the ad was too subtle and the sexy party vibe wouldn’t get across, so to really drive the point home they’ve also got a girl rubbing a carcinogenic raspberry on her lips. That’s right… rubbing berries on her lips. Have we run out of “9 1/2 Weeks” food sex clichés? All she’s missing is a pearl necklace and some clear heels.
These girls are SO HORNY! And that… makes me want soda pop? Like I said, I’m all for purely experiential ads, but I don’t get this one.
Plus, if you ever wanted to talk about subliminal imagery in advertising, I give you the following screenshot to peruse:
That’s right. It’s a vagina. It’s a big, French, Schweppes-loving vagina. And to prove it, it’s filled with three glowing Schweppes power-balls. That’s how you know this vagina loves Schweppes.
Don’t get me wrong, despite how incredibly terrible I think this ad is, the production value is totally awesome. The colours are crisp and vibrant - you can tell this is high quality shit. But there’s just something that’s so overtly sexually bizarrely weird about it. I think they might have been trying to achieve a throw-back 80s Robert Palmer “Simply Irresistible” feel of some kind, but it’s just not working for me.
Especially at the end when the embracing naked girls are swirled up into the vortex of a Schweppes bottle. Like a genie. Waiting until a guy comes and rubs off again…
One of my fave blogs, and a definite bookmark if you haven’t already, is The Denver Egotist. They recently scored some time with legendary design icon and all-around genius Stefan Sagmeister. Being smartiepants, they twisted it into the unconventional kind of interview that a design-mind like Sagmeister would appreciate.
Check out the interview here.
Dutch designer and artist Anna ter Haar has a love of colour, the patience for creating something pain-stakingly different, and a drive to push the boundaries of design, film, and art.
Of her series of altered furniture “Buitenbeentje” (Dutch for “odd man out”) she says “this research is the result of my fascination for everything that differs the normal: the odd man out, the freaks.
Certain appearances that are so ugly and disgusting that they become interesting”. I’m not sure if it’s really weird then that I find these chairs awesomely beautiful.
Like a multi-coloured stalactite, she laboriously drips different hues of polyurethane resin around the rim of a hole she’s cut in a chair or table and removed the leg. As each dripping dries out it hardens, allowing the next layer to continue, until eventually the amputated leg is reformed by the rainbowed resin. The results are organic, beautiful, and completely unique to each work. The series was shown at the international design fair Salone del Mobile in Milan this April.
She’s also got a cool time-lapsed vid that gives us a peek into her process:
In her graduation film project, she collaborated with Cris Bartel on an interesting film, paint, collage, video mash-up called “A Matter of Appearance”.
In this great making of vid, you can check out how they did it; first creating the shifting imagery and art work, and then projecting it over their subjects while filming:
Via Design Milk
In his ground-breaking new interiour design for Paris’ Flood Restaurants, visionary designer Mathieu Lehanneur has taken the integration of ecology and experiential design to new heights.
Sleek round aquariums sit throughout the space, each filled with 100-litres of Spirulina Plantesis. The micro algae creates oxygen through photosynthesis, aided by the large bright windows nearby. Besides their eye-popping futuristic vibe and awesome visual quality - the aquariums seem to almost glow with an organic phosphoresence - the pure, fresh oxygen they release into the air adds to a full-sensory, holistic experience. The design goes beyond what you can touch and see to improving the environment of the very atmosphere inside the space. You may not be able to consciously sense it, but undoubtedly your body will know.
I love the pure, retro-minimalist feel of the entire design. Besides the algae aquariums, Lehanneur dip-coated all the chairs and tables in PVC to give them an ultra-smooth, wet touch to the skin. The lighting takes the oxygenated concept even further - each fixture has an atmospheric, almost molecular look to it. As if each one is about to burst with air or float away.
Via Snell at Lost At E Minor.
American artist Kent Rogowski has been blessed with the ability to see things from their opposite sides. There’s a through-line in his work of taking something common, and possibly even a little cliché in it’s normally-accepted function, and reversing it into something unexpectedly moving.
In his latest exhibition, “Love = Love”, opening this week at the Jen Bekman Gallery in Soho, Rogowski discovered that puzzles pieces, as long as the puzzles come from the same company, are interchangeable. Which makes total sense - they’d use the same assembly line and just change the image. With that insight revealed, Rogowksi has created a series of amazing puzzle-piece mosaics. I love how he’s taken something commonplace and not necessarily all that inspiring and transformed it into something beautiful without actually changing it’s original intention. The puzzle pieces all fit together just like how they were meant to… he just used different pieces. And in so created something completely unique.
Rogowski made a big time splash last year with his series “Bears”. He took teddy bears, reversed their furry skins, and then re-stuffed them. The result is disarming second look at why we will or won’t accept something that’s supposed to be cute once it’s become disfigured.
Obviously, there’s a whole statement on our cultural obsession with physical perfection we could get into, but for me it’s more the way it’s forces us to reevaluate our concept of what an item should look like. Just like all great design, it takes something, alters it, and then forces you to decide if you can accept the changes. And if you can’t… then why can’t you?
“Bears” garnered tons of blog and media buzz and the exhibition is currently travelling around the world. Building on that momentum, Rogowski’s released a hard cover book chronicling the collection. If you want to get some inside info on Rogowski’s process and motivation, you can check out a Rocketboom interview with him here.
I also found this simply kick ass comment on “Bears” in Rogowski’s press section:
“I think these photographs might mean happiness. They are made by softness and cotton.”
-Nicholas, 3th grade student, PS84 NY
Made by softness and cotton! Kids are fucking geniuses.
My favourite of Rogowski’s work however is “Future(Perfect)”. In it he takes ho-hum looking snowglobes and, rather than commemorating a trip or souvenir or something soul-less, creates within each globe a moment in time not nearly as bombastic, but probably more eventually meaningful. Rogowski says “Like a photograph the moment is static and can be contemplated and preserved; the narrative is only suggested leaving it’s conclusion and meaning up to the viewer.”
There’s something about this that works two-fold for me. I think there’s a kind of nostalgic pull to the idea of a snowglobe - the way your imagination and focus becomes temporarily transported inside it. It’s a very personal and intimate moment when someone is gazing into one of these things. So to already be opened up to that feeling, and then see inside not something happy but something sort of heart-achingly lonely, makes it hit home even harder. In each one there’s a heavy moment of realization, hanging in that sort of viscous water, and the people inside don’t know just how close to the brink of it they really are. But we do.
And, just a little cherry at the end here, I also found this really hot neon installation, called (not surprisingly) “Neon”, on his site.
All images © Kent Rogowski
Love = Love found via Josh Spear.
This morning I woke up grumpy. I’m hung over from partying last night. The weather is shit; it’s freezing and raining. I was out of Advil. My streetcar was late, so I had to jump in a cab. I got rained on. I had to wait to catch an elevator up to my office. I found all of this incredibly, unbearably frustrating.
Then I found this video. I watched it. And I sat at my desk and cried.
Because it was the perfect time for me to be reminded of just how foolish and ignorant and incredibly, unbearably selfish I can be.
(Agency: colman rasic carrasco. Director: Steve Rogers. Production: Revolver.)
This video is another facet of MTV’s brilliant pro-social side. MTV Exit works to end child trafficking and exploitation around the world. The poignancy of this is so simple and direct, it grows not from manipulation or dramatization - just the comparison of two truths, neither of which we can deny. Plus, let’s be honest, a little Radiohead never hurt anything either.
I can’t rave enough about how honest, direct, and artistically engaging all of their PSAs are. Check out the work they’ve done to promote environmental awareness through MTV Switch, Holocaust awareness through MTV Think, and to halt the spread of HIV/AIDS with what is one of the best ads I’ve ever seen, period - “Shot”.
Zune Arts is one of my fave websites of all time. Not only do they foster collabs between the hottest artists and designers in the business, but they’re aware that in the new world of web and media the old idea of “create something - hold it back - make me people pay for it” doesn’t work anymore. Just ask the recording industry. But I digress…
Zune-Arts makes creation accessible and, even better, they understand that once people relate to a work there are tons of ways to promote it by making it their own: buddy icons, wallpapers, downloads. Zune-Arts makes it beyond easy to fall in love with new work and then spread it around. It’s brilliant.
In the latest Zune collab, “creative warriors” Three Legged Legs have taken electro-duo Chromeo’s track “Fancy Footwork” and turned into a felt-ridden zombie-filled night-time choreography romp. Besides being hilarious and random, that authentic Thriller-esque touch didn’t just happen. Three Legged Legs went all the way and worked with modern dance choreography Kristin Zipfel to get an authentic (or, as authentic as you can get working with felt-zombie puppets). The efforts show, and the vid is beyond kick ass:
Furthering their transparency, you can also check out a behind the scenes of “Piece of Me, Piece of You”:
Plus, if for some reason you haven’t seen it, one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen is another Zune Arts masterpiece: Corey Godbey’s stunning “Le Cadeau De Temps”. Watch it right now.
All pics via Zune Arts.
I love, love, love this project. Love. Daddy love. Daddy love long time. Anytime the visual and audio worlds come together in the hands of designers like these, the result is always spectacular. Exploring the same idea of visually interpreting music as the amazing animator and jazz musician Michal Levy, the video for “Blackbird” is a “collaborative music visualization” created by multimedia designer and information architect Thomas Frenzel and graphic designer Katja Schweiker.
I really dig the smoothness of the sound peppered with the sudden visual shifts, accenting the electronic interruptions in the song. If it was over-done, it would be jarring and annoying, but done skillfully like this it’s impossible to stop watching. Gorgeous. In the words of it’s creators, “it’s about trying and failure—trying to leave behind, trying to live in a forward-turned way, trying not to resign or surrender, trying to get aware.”
Behold “Blackbird” in all it’s glory, right now, right here.
Frenzel’s work extends into editorial and interface design, and I love everything he’s done. Lots of it is text-based, treating words and lettering in new and interesting ways; frosting, scribbling, spray-painting text over sleek, modern backgrounds. His interface designs are seamless but visually arresting - unlike some new-wave interface designers, he thankfully doesn’t sacrifice usability in order to seem avant garde.
Equally brilliant is the song itself, and just the music in general, of Michael Fakesch. The “Blackbird” video was created as part of his latest project, “VIDOS”, a vid anthology inspired by his last album “DOS”. Some of the hottest motion and graphic designers in the world are lined up to work on more videos based on songs from “DOS”, and I’m totally hyped now to get my hands on the DVD. Here’s a promo video for “VIDOS”:
The whole project has the same sort of high-design forefront feel of Matt Pyke’s upcoming hi-def soundscape project Advanced Beauty, which I’m not afraid to say, will be the hottest shit ever. (The world premiere of “Advanced Beauty” is going down May 9 at Lovebytes 2008 - the digital and new art conference in Sheffield, England. In some frenzied, unrealistic moments I seriously thought of flying to the UK to see it, but then life got in the way.) So I wasn’t surprised to find that one of my fave designers and Advanced Beauty contributors Mate Steinforth has also worked with Michael Fakesch, on a short vid called “Color Robot”:
Via Fresh Creation
American photographer Gregory Crewdson’s work seems less like photographs, and more like moments captured from epic movies. Dark, troubling, with a definitive sci-fi twist, they seem inspired by The Twilight Zone - that sort of added terror where everything that’s wrong is made even worse by how normal it seems on the surface.
He’s tapped into that sort of uneasiness that can be so easily applied to our notion of suburbia, where the veneer of normalcy can be stripped away in layers. Desperate Housewives has explored it in a very mainstream way, but so has equally brilliant photographer Julia Fullerton-Batten in her series “Teenage Stories”. Like Crewdson, she takes the everyday suburban landscape and populates it with something extra-ordinary. In Fullerton-Batten’s work it’s giant teenage girls, and in Crewdson’s it’s a variety of black hauntings; his shots are full of quiet moments where you can tell that something gruesome has just occurred, where we’re watching the reality settle it. Known for building entire sets on which to stage his shots, including hanging spotlights in the sky and using almost cinematically-scoped wide frame lenses, his pictures are intimate and epic at the same time.
Crewdson holds a Master of Fine Arts from Yale and has taught on the faculty there, at an other colleges, since 1993. As a teenager, he was in punk band The Speedies, where they fortuitously released a hit song in 1979 called “Let Me Take Your Foto”. You can listen to the track while looking over a huge variety of Crewdson’s work here, and if you’re on the punkstalgia tip you can check out the original vid for the song here.
His latest hardcover release “Beneath The Roses” shows his photographic series of the same name, created between 2002 and 2005. This is just the latest in a series of successful books encompassing his collections, following “Gregory Crewdson: 1985-2005″ and “Twilight”.
For more on Crewdson, his inspirations, and his opinions on critics and reviews, check out an interesting interview with him at Kultureflash.
Via Ari Stein @ Lost At E Minor
The web has allowed a whole new medium of collaborative photography to flourish. Artists teaming together is obviously nothing new, but the ease and instance of the interwebs make it totally free-flow for strangers around the world to shed their own little bit of creative light together onto one project.
I’ve noticed that lots of these collabs have found a way to focus on something universal and immutable: time. Our locations and cultures and languages are all different, but it’s always going to be 10:15 am everywhere and that’s not changing anytime soon. Similar to Craig Geffen’s awesome Humanclock, which collects photos from around the world visualizing every minute of every day, ten:15 wants you to send in a picture of whatever you happen to be doing at 10:15 am no matter where you are in the world.
There’s something about the communal collection of our banalities that make them become completely fascinating. Having photographic proof that some dude in Manila is putting cream in his morning coffee somehow creates a little more balance and order in the universe. While I was there, I noticed that a frequent collaborator to ten:15 is Michael Surtees, the man behind the lovely “New York City Colour Project”.
Uploaders can create their own user portfolio and the site and link it back to their personal site, making it a great way to search for new photographers or just to voyeuristically photo-creep on other people’s lives. You can search the archives by photographer, date, or location. There’s something about the casual nature of the photographs, that sort of laid back moment where someone picked up their camera or phone at 10:15 and just snapped, that creates some really beautiful shots - with an inherent spontaneity that can’t really be faked:
David Y. Lee - Brooklyn, NY
Verna Pitts - Minnesota
Barry Choi - Toronto
Jody Sugrue - Toronto
Here’s my first submission, sent in today. It’s my bonsai tree, Mr. Miyagi…
Via Gerry Mak @ Lost At E Minor
I’ve never seen anything at all like this before. Dear God is a non-denominational web-based prayer project - people email their personal prayers to whatever they deem their God to be (and a picture, if you’ve got something that represents your prayer visually) and the prayers are posted onto the site. Categorized in a multi-colour sidebar, prayers are searchable by topic: Belief, Confessions, Death, Faith, Family, Friendship, Hope, Humour, Joy, Love, Money, Sex, Work, and Stress.
Maybe it’s my own stereotype of religion on the web, but I can’t get over how good this site looks. At the risk of seeming like a design-trendster, it’s just so well put together that at first I had a hard time believing it was real. Conceived by the creator of The Coolhunter and designed by excellent UK shop Something Somewhere, the site is seamless, modern, and, even though I despise the word “trendy”, it’s just… so trendy. Usually we’re used to seeing stuff on the web this slick dedicated to expensive organic juices, and designer kicks, or electing Barack Obama. But God? Really…?
Just look at how sick this logo is…
There is such a hyper-modern balance of kistch and reality going on here. If you want to sign up for the e-newsletter, you’re invited to “Get on God’s Mailing List”. Am I the only one who thinks that sounds like a joke? Do I have a heart of stone and just can’t accept that something can be this in tune with what I normally like things to look like, yet still so out of synch with things I normally read about? Like “God”.
Yet the visual gloss of the site is weighed out by the truth in people’s words. With soul-bearing stories that remind me a whole lot of Frank Warren’s iconic PostSecrets, the prayers are honest and touching. The site is still new and so most are addressed to “Dear God”, but I did see a “Dear Allah” and a “Dear Universe” in there, so clearly they are open to anyone’s interpretations of who their prayers should be going to.
The prayers themselves range from “Truth Be Told Most Of Us Quit Listening To You A Long Time Ago” to “I’m So Sick Of No One Noticing That I Don’t Eat” to “All I Really Am Is A Kid Desperate For A Hug” to “Maybe The Only Truth We Can Really Understand Is Our Own”.
One thing is indisputably clear. People have things to get off their chests.
Like most blog posts, readers can leave comments for each prayer, literally giving you a direct line to support anyone whose story touches you. Most prayers have dozens of comments - complete strangers from who knows where in the world commiserating and telling you it will all be alright. There’s something undeniably powerful about that, no matter what your religious beliefs are.
In a way, it’s simple and brilliant. In another, I’m terrified that Starbucks or that guy that wrote “The Da Vinci Code” or Bill Gates is somehow secretly sponsoring it and doing data capture. Yet I can’t deny that I keep on reading more and more of it. I’ve spent an hour reading everything on this site now. I’ve been a little bewildered and one time I cried. I’m compelled to feel grateful that I don’t feel a need to write in a prayer right now, and maybe creating gratitude is part of the point. Or perhaps it’s just knowing that no one is alone: No matter who or where in the world you are, someone somewhere else will reach out to you through all the little zeroes and ones to say that they’ve heard you.
