quick + dirty #1: ian berenger, surfap, pets + ducroz.

I see many more videos that I love than I could do full blog posts on. Though I’m constantly adding vids to my Vimeo channel that aren’t on the blog, I decided to start posting some of them here even though they won’t each have a full written post. In the time-honoured programming tradition of the quick and dirty, that’s the name I’ve decided to give to this new post series of awesome vids that I think you’ll want to see…

ian berenger: our time is brief.

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surfap: super mario bros.

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pets + rémy m. larochelle: a good day for telling lies.

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ducroz: phosphene.

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gorillaz + jamie hewlett: on melacholy hill.

Gorillaz are one of a select group of artists who continuously and relentlessly push the edge of what music videos can accomplish. Working with some of the absolute best directors and animators in the business doesn’t hurt either. They’ve never stopped evolving the visual lives of the animated personas, and in so have created a video universe where the music and the motion complement and augment each other. I still think the vid for “19-2000” (also directed by Jamie Hewlett and Pete Candeland) is one of the best animated music vids ever.

If it ain’t broke don’t fix it. Gorillaz have teamed up again with Passion Pictures‘ Hewlett and Candeland for their latest, “Melancholy Hill.” The video is, basically, fucking incredible. There were over 40 people on the crew of animators and compositors, and it shows. The attention to detail is crazy and it pays off big time. Not watching this in HD would be the equivalent of going to a top restaurant and asking for ketchup. HD it baby.

Personally, I think it looks better on Vimeo but if that one gets pulled here’s the link to the vid on Gorillaz’s YouTube channel.

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Via Feed.

patrick boivin: at-at day afternoon.

Ah, Star Wars. Though I fear it’s starting to become the Helvetica of retro pop culture design references, just like Helvetica, or anything over-played, when it’s done really well in a new and exciting way allowances can be made. And if the outcome is as totally kick ass as Patrick Boivin‘s “At-At Day Afternoon”, then everything old is new again.

The premise? Gloriously simple. Imagine your dog was an At-At. Film it. Rejoice. Spread its awesomeness to the world. Make everyone feel like children again. Done.

And if you’re not sure what an At-At is, then I’m afraid I’m not sure we can be friends anymore.

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Via Motionographer.

félix gonzález-torres: portrait of ross.

I’m endlessly fascinated by the different ways people try to attribute “value” to art. If something looks complicated to make, then more people seem more easily willing to accept its worth. A still life, for example, or hyper-realistic drawing; things that not everyone can easily do. Then there’s the shallow judgment of the “my kid could paint that” crowd, the anti-Pollocks, operating on the assumption that because something, at first glance, appears simple that there’s no way that a deeper meaning could possibly make it more complex.

For me, the visual layer of art is just that: a layer. It’s a facet of a whole. And like any thing where that whole is greater than the sum of its parts, there is an entire other realm of art where it’s the intention and meaning, and not necessarily the immediate visual complexity, that make a piece unforgettable.

Félix González-Torres‘ “Portrait of Ross” is exactly that type of work.

This is as much a pile of candy as Warhols are pictures of soup cans and Rothkos are blocks of colour. This is a statement on the loss of love so profound that I broke into tears when I first read about it.

González-Torres was a Cuban-born sculptor and installation artist who worked in New York City in the 80s and early 90s. He was part of the “process art” movement, where the experience of creating and re-creating a work is as intrinsic a part of it as the “finished” product (part of the ideal being that, really, the piece can never be finished as its intent is to constantly re-create itself).

Ross Laycock was Félix’s partner, and when he was diagnosed with HIV his doctor set his ideal weight at 175 pounds. “Portrait of Ross” is precisely that: 175 pounds of candy set in a pile. The candy is unguarded, the purpose being for the viewer to take some of it from the mound. Each and every day, the remaining candy is removed, weighed, and more is added until it weighs exactly 175 pounds. Then it’s set back out again.

The candy is both a representation of Ross’ physical weight and a metaphor for the very best and worst of his struggle with AIDS. As the disease takes away, the person’s size may dwindle, but the weight of the spirit – the intent to remember and replenish, the power to celebrate – brings it back each morning.

To me this is meaning so pure and exquisitely expressed that I take it thoroughly personally. Being handed this sort of raw offering, Félix’s life becomes mine. I’ve been entrusted by him to help share the memory of his partner. And in doing so, my love becomes his. His loss becomes mutual. How else to try and explain to another person, who’s never met your love, the weight and importance of their being; all the things that you’d loved about them but which are impossible to relate without a universal measure that we both can adhere to?

I put myself in his place and wonder how I would possibly convert the best of things about someone I love into terms we’d both understand: the lumens of light held in their eyes; the decibles of their morning whisper; the pressure of their hand on your back; the groundspeed of their walk.

…Or their exact weight in a pile of candy. The heaviness that represents everything they are and ever were – every molecule, every scar. True, the soul is intangible and only encapsulated in the body for a time, but there’s no way to deny the meaning of the body as the vessel of all that the soul contains.

I think that here the value can be determined not by the skill it takes to pile candy in a corner – to evaluate “Portrait of Ross” like that would be intentionally small-minded. Here the value is not just in the experience shared, but in the sacrifice for González-Torres to share his most intimate pain. The immense strength of the human soul, not brush to canvas or hand to clay, is the genesis here.

I think of the holes life leaves us with and how we try to fill them. Some days we succumb to the smallest parts of ourselves and let them be filled with sadness. Some days we find the bravery to try to fill them with joy. With memories of light and moments so special and sweet that to recall them is a feeling not unlike the crinkle of remembrance, like pastel-dipped cellophane, untwisting itself within us like the opening of a piece of candy.

To me it speaks to the ways we try, and fail, to hold ourselves together. And when you need help there can be a polite request to take your own loved one and pass their memory into the collective consciousness. A never-ending public memorial. Not grand or tangible or even physically permanent in any way, just as our bodies are not, but just as our souls are: translucent, mercurial, airy, travelling. With every person who carried a piece of candy home, so went a  precious piece of memory and a transferral of duty. All humans remember those who we loved who are gone. And with this work, Félix asks us to help remember them both. We remember for those who cannot.

Life is not fair, but true love is. And when we celebrate it, a moment in the pale shadow of its grace brings us together.  Even strangers are more connected, and we are closer to each other and elevated to a purer version of ourselves.

Ross died of AIDS-related illnesses in 1991, as did Félix in 1996. Though I never met them, never knew of either during their lifetime, their lives have led to a story that has changed mine forever. I am different for “Portrait of Ross” having existed, and I will never forget them.

Via Now My Butt Hurts

zoltán lányi: i’ll have the waldorf salad.

Not only did Zoltán Lányi create this futuristic, fragmented, jolting experimental work to a track by Amon Tobin featuring Bonobo, but he did it while still in school at the Eszterházy Károly College in Eger, Hungary.

To me, the twitching, glitchy POV reminds me of a sort of post-apocalyptic, burned world being studied and leading to the discovery of a whole new level of mechanical life underneath the ruin.

Plus, it’s just really fucking cool.

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Via Ventilate

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universal everything: reel 2010.

Universal Everything is my favourite motion design shop in the world. Hands down. I’ve written (and raved) about them on shape+colour more than any other agency or artist in the world. Each time they release new work it reinforces my belief that there is always undiscovered art and beauty in the world. I love them and I’ve run out of superlatives.

Now, luckily for me, they’ve just released their new reel for 2010 and I can finally post some of the beautiful work from past projects that I hadn’t because it was older and I was worried I was turning into a stalker. This reel is a magnum opus of awesome. Behold:

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If you really want to get into it (and why wouldn’t you?) here are some of my favourite past posts on Universal Everything:

– MTV International Brand Identity

– Advanced Beauty

– 6 Billion People, 6 Billion Colours

– Forever

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erin hanson: reminders.

I’ll admit it; I’m a huge sucker for projects utilizing photograph and text. The possibility for creating a double-meaning between the supposed emotion of the image and the ostensible meaning of the words is like a big ol’ playground. Plus any image that involves cut outs that look like real life old skool refrigerator alphabet magnets is good by me.

Some of my other fave projects in the same vein focus more on emotional depth or existentialist questioning:  Kotama Bouabane’s “Melting Words” is a lonely play on sentiments of love and loss at the end of a relationship, while the large outdoor works of Nathan Coley offer more questions that answers about us, our meaning, and our place in the world.

Taking a totally different route, Erin Hanson’s “Reminders” series is filled with  flashes of our most unremarkable thoughts. Banal, boring, and inconsequential, like little snapshots of the things that run through our minds during a normal day and, more often than not, are dismissed and discarded before we’ve even had a chance to realize we thought them.

To me, though, our hopes and fears can be revealed by piecing together the inconsequential things. Often we push aside everything we don’t feel strong enough to confront into the mundane, and these small thoughts are like after-shocks from much larger quakes. What does our vanity say about our true sense of self-worth, what does our sense of obligation or disconnection to our family say about our sense of home, and what does the need to remind ourselves to wake up or go outside say about our lethargy and our over-willingness to connect and live digitally instead of physically?

Via Share Some Candy

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david o’reilly + jon klassen: black lake.

There are times when you fall in love faster than you thought you were capable of. All your old signals fade and your plans re-arrange without a word. Your stars align in brand new ways and all the nights you had designed become a dream for your days. Your heart expands and for a time your reality is married to the possibility of everything you can envision. Like a message in a bottle, gently nudged from your shore, this vision travels and, if you’re lucky, the person you love picks it up and carries it with you.

Sweetly, without warning, you construct your potential and in this moment your future and your present melt together. Into an instant eventual, an immediate inevitable. A second where  the possibility of love stretches before you like an ocean and you travel through your imagination; vast and epic and filled with hope, the way each wave yearns to curl up and crash back into the same waters it was first pulled away from.

This is that feeling.

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Following their work together on the video for U2’s “I’ll Go Crazy If I Don’t Go Crazy Tonight”, the heart-achingly exquisite “Black Lake” is a collaboration between one of my favourite directors, David O’Reilly, and Jon Klassen and it’s beautiful.

Via Motionographer

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shapeflow.

Shapeflow is an open-membership French art collective that seeks to engage and inspire designers, artists, and illustrators to share and contribute their work to the collective. The work on the site is divided into “issues”, each with a theme that then puts out an open-call on the site for anyone to submit their work for inclusion.

The current theme, “Springtime” (which I find pleasingly optimistic since most of Northern Europe is locked down in a record-breaking cold snap right now) has brought forth some bright, geometric, and inventive work, including some illustration and some interesting web-sourced data visualization.

Via Yay! Everyday!

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anitabling.

This next post is sort of a big delicious colourful enigma for me. These multi-media works from anitabling’s Flickr stream are totally up my alley: graphic, bright, multi-layered (literally), and geometric. And almost geologic, with the multi-hued stacks, slowly piling up on top of each other, layer by layer, to create an incredibly detailed strata when cut into from the side. Like some sort of otherworldly hyper-coloured canyon or rainbow rock formation.

Though some of her taller sculptural works, housed inside acrylic boxes, are displayed like museum pieces, she also references the cutting technique in some of her other unbordered pieces by literally driving knives or saw blades into them. Haphazardly, like a knife left-over in the butter dish after a hurried breakfast, as if more chromatic cutting and splicing and slashing is left to be done once she returns.

Unfortunately, her Flickr page (I’m going to assume for now that she’s a girl named Anita) doesn’t link to another site and it’s all in Spanish. So I’m not sure what the rest of her details are. She’s shown a few times in Montevideo, so I think she could possibly be Uruguayan.

If anyone has details on anitabling, or speaks Spanish and can translate some of the info from Flickr, I’m dying to know more and my usual internet searches turned up nothing. Feel free to email me or leave updates in the comments.

Via Share Some Candy

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