phillip toledano: “bankrupt”.

Maybe it’s part of our own human arrogance, but there’s something fascinating about imagining the world with us no longer in it. Not a world where we never existed, but the world as it would go on if at this very moment, today, rapture-like, we all of a sudden disappeared. Not vacated and had time to clean-up what we thought shouldn’t be left behind, but just vanished with little warning.

With “Bankrupt”, acclaimed NYC-based photographer Phillip Toledano gives us perfect snapshots of something that equates our abolition about as closely as it can while we’re still hanging around. In another facet of his study of those sort of sterile, factory, monolithic modern offices he examined in his series “Cubelife”, here he looks at offices that are no longer because they went under. The interesting this is that, as is part of the risk of the modern Western economy, businesses now can almost literally disappear – bankrupt and shut down and finished in a day. These aren’t places where everyone was notified and packed up and left everything spotless for their predecessors. These are buildings where people quite literally grabbed what they cared about and then just disappeared.

The detritus speaks volumes. And raises questions – “why is there a single white gym sock on the office floor?”. With nobody remaining there to answer our queries, we’ll simply never get to know…

“As I started shooting bankrupt offices I found it to be more archaeology than photography. Everywhere I went I found signs of life, interrupted.”

Below is my favourite shot: the two errant pencils thrown into one of those awful, generic, cheap-ass flatboard ceilings found in faceless offices from coast to coast:

Toledano is super well known and much blogged about for his disturbing body-morphic series “Hope & Fear” (check out the “baby suit”…) but he’s also got some of the most innovative, interesting editorial work around. His entire site is definitely worth a full scope out, but here are just a few of my favourites:

Via SwissMiss

antony gormley: another place.

There’s an intrinsic, undeniable draw towards the sea. Maybe it’s the same lunar gravity that moves the tides, maybe it’s because we were all fish a billion years ago, or maybe it’s the lure of knowing that no matter what machines we strap to our backs or submerge ourselves in, it’s simply not a place where our fragile bodies will let us go for very long.

Or maybe, since we’re mostly made of water ourselves, it’s just the natural, molecular pull of little atoms reaching out to find each other again. A genetic memory too quiet for our brains to understand. What if our very bodies miss the sea? Our skins on the shore, our bones in the beach, our body pulls to return into the same water that it was born from.

In British artist and sculptor Antony Gormley’s “Another Place”, he perfectly captures the universal longing human beings feel for the ocean. Not with much crazy metaphor, but by casting his very own body in iron and replicating himself into a little army. 100 statues are moored into the sand along a 3.2 kilometre stretch of the Mersey Estuary on Crosby Beach near Liverpool, England. Each is over 6’2″ tall, weighs 1400 lbs., and was made from more than 17 different casts from Gormley’s own body. Like sentinels, they each stand 250 metres apart from each other. Some are closer to the shore and some are up to 1 kilometre out, but all are standing exactly the same and gazing into one direction: out to sea.

When the tides are fully out, each of the 100 men are completely exposed. But as the tide rolls back in, one by one they’re slowly swallowed up by the water. Like a ceremony, their yearning pulls it towards them. They each stand and wait their turn to be voluntarily enveloped.

Gormley continued to experiment with the use of multiple figures in 2006 with “Time Horizon”. A second set of figures was cast, this time placed into an olive tree grove at the Archaeological Park of Scolacium near Catanzaro, Calabria, Italy. This time they are each facing different directions and stand at different heights in the ground. “Time Horizon” doesn’t exhibit the same fluidity of “Another Place”, but a more ancient feel. The way the ground erodes and shifts amongst these statues is slow and tectonic and much greater than we can hope to see in a moment of standing there. These are movements so slow we can feel them, but will never be able to watch. “Another Place” rides the waves in a day, while “Time Horizon” carries the weight of eons.

To see more from Gormley, check out this video from his latest exhibition in London, “Blind Light”:

sky tv: “titanic”, “godzilla”, “king kong”.

One of my favourite art collectives working today is eBoy. They pioneered an entirely awesome, pixellated, throw-back style that’s influenced artists and designers around the world. These new ads for Sky TV are no exception. Super fun and filled with insider winks to film buffs, click on each one to see it full-sized and search out the cinematic references. Or, just check out how kick ass cool they are…

(Agency: Giovanni + DraftFCB São Paulo. Illustrator: Up Ilustração.)

andy huang: “doll face”.

Wow. Wow. Wow.

At only 22, artist and animator Andy Huang‘s work has already been shown at the Smithsonian in Washington D.C. Completed in 2005, “Doll Face” is the worthy recipient of several accolades, including being an Official Selection at the Annecy International Animated Film Festival in France and at the Electronic Theater at Siggraph 2006 in Boston. Watching the short, it’s not hard to see why it’s received so much love…

Besides just the timeless and universal look at narcissism and the quest for beauty, the mix between animation and live action here is flawless. I can’t stop watching it. Andy’s now working for Root Films in LA, where you can check out his most recent work. I might also be partial to “Doll Face” because it’s got a similar vibe to one of my favourite music videos, Björk and Chris Cunningham’s freakishly good lesbo-robotic “All Is Full Of Love”:

“Doll Face” via CubeMe

schweppes: “sensation”.

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 Australian 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…

stefan sagmeister @ the denver egotist.

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.

gregory crewdson: “beneath the roses”.

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”.

Via Ari Stein @ Lost At E Minor

it’s arrived: sony’s “tumble”.

A few days ago I got a tip that “Tumble” – a new commercial from Sony – was on its way. As promised the site is up this morning and you can check it all out now at right here.

The Tumble spot itself is cute. Obviously not as epic as Foam City and the Bravia stuff, but I think they’re smart for not trying to out-colour themselves on something that probably can’t be out-coloured. There’s no point in continuing to trump your own ads for one product with another of your own product, you’ll just split you own idea too far. So the big stuff we’ve come to know and love will stick with Bravia TVs, and the HD camera stuff we’re seeing with Foam City and now Tumble will evolve in this direction: more subtle, more understated, and more about the idea of capturing an image. Which, considering these are ads for a line of cameras, isn’t really a bad way in, is it?

I feel like the CGI of the actual falling cameras looks just a little bit fake, but the core idea is strong: the quality and technology of super high tech professional cameras gets broken down and put into your little hand-held Sony thing.

The best part of the mini-site is the Making Of Video. Sony just doesn’t shy away from letting us see what’s behind the curtain, and getting to check out the production on something as high-level as this is fascinating.

discovery channel: “i love the world”.

If you’re a Discovery Channel geek like I am you’ll get a major kick out of this ad. And, if you’re not a Discovery Channel geek like I am, you’ll want to be after watching this. Which is what makes it such a kick ass ad.

(Agency: 72andSunny. Director: James Rouse. Production: Outside)

Singing Egyptologists… what more do you need? There are little things that take a grade A spot and turn it into an A+. In this one, it’s clearly Stephen freakin’ Hawking singing “boom de yadda” at 0:53. That was pure win. Plus the tagline “The Earth is Just Awesome”… the casual use of one of my favourite words – “awesome” – that was, well… awesome.

Thanks to The Denver Egotist

zürich chamber orchestra: “rollercoaster”.

True, this isn’t the first time we’ve seen the whole visual design gives you a rollercoaster ride POV thing, but this is the first time I’ve seen it done so elegantly and in perfect sync with the soundtrack. Excellent work for the Zürich Chamber Orchestra, and an eye-catching way to attract a younger demographic to classical music.

(Agency: Euro RSCG Zürich)

Via Fresh Creation