Archive for June, 2007
Ray Caesar
I love the detail and the sense of escapism in Ray Caesar’s digitally rendered artworks. His work reminds me a little of Mark Ryden’s, without the slabs of meat and the lofty price tags. [see also Mark Ryden]
Originally from Lost At E Minor: Music, illustration, art, photography and more by
reBlogged by michael on Jun 26, 2007, 2:01AM
Erin Elizabeth Bardwell
Working out of New York, Erin Elizabeth Bardwell captures those moments of guilty vulnerability where the subjects look as surprised by the sudden attention as they’re excited by it. Her portfolio is a gritty, urban diary cataloging the constant sense of flux which overwhelms the city. [see also B Marie Lavioiette]
Originally from Lost At E Minor: Music, illustration, art, photography and more by
reBlogged by michael on Jun 26, 2007, 2:44PM
Ars Virtua Presents: We are the Strange
Ars Virtua is proud to present the Second Life premier of We are the Strange :: June 29 at 6:00 pm SLT [SLURL].
M dot Strange takes us into the new realm of video game structured and inspired storytelling with his character’s harrowing quest for ice cream. The variety of animation styles, game and cultural references and distopian beauty of this work make it important to modern filmmaking. Add to this that m dot strange created this virtually single handedly and had it selected for Sundance based on his YouTube audience and you end up with a very powerful piece of contemporary media.
We are the Strange is an animated feature film in which two diametrically opposed outcasts fight for survival in a sinister fantasy world. After meeting in the somber Forest of Still Life, an abused young woman (Blue) reluctantly follows a care free dollboy (Emmm) to Stopmo City on his unreasonable quest for ice cream. They’re lives are constantly in jeopardy after they’re caught in the middle of a deadly battle between bizarre monsters on their way to the ice cream shop. A flamboyant ultraviolent hero(Rain) appears and effortlessly dispatches all the horrible monsters in his path. Blue meets Rain before he partakes in an impossible battle against the source of all that is evil in Stopmo City. When it seems as if darkness will have the last laugh a gleaming fist made of aluminum foil bursts through the ground thus starting the final showdown
between mega_good and hyper_evil.
We Are the Strange is its own imaginative and immersive universe. M dot Strange spent three years painstakingly creating this film, using a range of animation techniques: traditional, stop-motion, computer, and his own unique blend of 8-bit graphics and anime, dubbed “Str8nime.” The stunning visuals are complemented by a soundtrack that is both beautiful and harrowing. The end result is a freaky technocarnival ride that climaxes with a momentous battle between innocence and darkness.
Originally from Networked_Performance by
reBlogged by michael on Jun 26, 2007, 11:17AM
Extreme Green Guerilla
As global warming is at the top of the agenda, worldleaders are askedto act immediately, from forced recycling to carbon offsetting and celebrities launching a 10-year campaign to make environmentally friendly living fashionable.
Are these efforts really improving the environment? What is eco-friendly living? When we live in a period where the worst climate disaster is about to happen, how can we live the ultimate green lifestyle?
Extreme Green Guerilla, Michiko Nitta‘s graduation project at RCA, Design Interactions, brings the current green lifestyle to the extreme. Her “manifesto” looks at 3 important areas of our daily life: communication, food and death.
The extreme guerilla adepts form a network of amateur self-sustaining people who have shortened their lifespan to sustain the ultimate green lifestyle. Whilst going to extreme lengths to protect the environment, they try to enjoy a decadent quality of life by utilizing urban waste and biosystem. This consists of embracing emerging technology to develop the ultimate green solution.
They try to avoid being tied to big corporations and using electronic devices to send emails and sms. E.G.G. are also against conventional posting service, as it leaves a great CO2 footprint. Instead, they resort to A.M.S., the “Animal Messaging Service”. Michiko discovered that many animals have already been tagged by scientists, to follow migrations for example. The RFID tags would be hacked and used by the guerilla to carry messages around. Of course not all animals are very reliable and swift. The herring gets eaten very easily so sending a message via herring will be priced very low; the blackpoll warbler is extremely lazy, he flies only 3 hours per day so they are cheap ones as well. Now pigeons and whales do their job more seriously and way faster so using them is more pricey.
The designer had a look at food and the mistakes we make in our quest to be eco-friendly, confusing being healthy or buying fair trade products with green activity. We want to eat organic steak but only the “noble” parts, not the head of the pig, nor offals which means wasting quality meat. So what would an extreme green food be like?
EGG breakfast: 0kg emission
Extreme green guerrilla’s food has to be resourced from existing materials within the local area. A solution is to embrace the roadkill diet but that is not really appealing, is it?
Pigeon + Quail = Piguail
A solution might be to modify the urban vermin, such as pigeons and rats and cross it with animals whose meat is a delicacy. One example is an animal called Piguail, which is hybrid of Pigeon (vermin) and Quail (gourmet). Or the Rattit, half rat, half rabbit. They would survive in urban areas like vermins but they would be yummy like a rabbit (can’t believe i’m writing these lines, i’m a vegetarian.)
Rat + Rabbit = Rattit
Michiko consulted with a scientist and it seems that rabbit and rat come from the same family and have very similar bone structures. Creating a piguail would be much more tricky as the quail belongs to the phaesant family, not the pigeon one. Besides you cannot control the way an hybrid animal might look like, or taste like.
While looking at death she founds that the Earth is too crowded for sustainability, therefore premature death is the ultimate gesture practiced by the extreme green guerrilla.
When a member of EGG becomes twenty years old, his/her ears are pierced with a euthanasing earring, as a part of the ceremony E.G.G.s celebrate when this person reaches adulthood. The earring will be permanent and contains muscle relaxant and a lethal drug.
Throughout their life the inner core of the earring rotates day by day. On their 40th birthday, the muscle relaxant and lethal drug are released through a hypodermic needle, leading to peaceful death. By promoting a young death, extreme green guerrillas can sustain the ultimate green life. If you know your life will last only forty years, how would you plan it?
Michiko’s point is not to say that this is the future she wants. Her role is more to provoke in a witty way, have people question their lifestyle and get the debate on green issues going.
Originally from we make money not art by
reBlogged by michael on Jun 20, 2007, 7:32AM
TEDtalks: Stefan Sagmeister: Yes, design can make you happy
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Analyzing a list of things that have made him happy, graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister realized that almost half of the items were in some way related to design. In this intensely personal talk, he shares the details of some of those moments, and gives props to three artists whose work has had a positive impact on his world. Concluding with some examples of his own work, Sagmeister offers a real insight into his aesthetic and philosophy of work — and life.
Originally from swissmiss by
reBlogged by michael
Videos available of the IIT Institute of Design Strategy Conference
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The Chicago-based IIT Institute of Design strongly believes in human-centred innovation which “starts with users’ needs and employs a set of reliable methods, theories and tools to create solutions to their problems”.
In May, the Institute organised the Design Strategy Conference, an international executive forum addressing how businesses can use design to explore emerging opportunities, solve complex problems, and achieve lasting strategic advantage. The conference starts from the premise that design, with its ability to understand users, redefine problems and create systemic, human-centered solutions, can help companies better understand their customer’s daily lives, and lead directly to valuable (and valued) offerings that are effectively tailored to their market. Videos of the presentations are now available. The speaker list featured:
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Originally from Putting people first by
reBlogged by michael on Jun 10, 2007, 1:17AM
Book review: Verb Natures
Verb Natures (Amazon USA
Editor’s blurb: “What is fascinating is the inability to separate the real from the digital, because they already form part of the same nature.†So we said in the last issue of Verb. Here we explore how this fusion takes place. Buildings and cities grow, are transformed, and dissolve. How can this evolution be generated, controlled, enhanced or imagined? Is our environment programmable? How does the fusion of natural and artificial matter produce new architectural organisms, new environments, new natures? How does technology animate space, and how do users and programs animate matter? The fifth volume of Actar’s boogazine looks for a new definition of the organic.
A “boogazine”? It’s a hybrid volume designed to combine the flexibility of a magazine with the depth and format of a book. Published since 2002 by Barcelona-based editor Actar, each of the boogazines explores a specific aspect of current architectural production.
I wish they had kept the book habit to write a few lines about the editors.
The AlgorithmicSpace
Don’t be fooled by the term “natures”. Here, the “natural” often looks supernatural and its realization is most of the time informed by algorithms, strict geometry rules and other mathematical processes. The book is thus quite techy but even i could understand what the techniques are about. I found that it was actually the strong point of the book: the many images, graphics, interviews with the designers, researchers or architects and clear explanations of the vocabulary and building strategies made me feel very smart. I managed to get a deeper understanding of construction and design processes which i would otherwise find too arcane and sophisticated.
Beijing’s Watercube (more images)
The book focusses on over 20 projects, some are ueber-famous, others were new to me. I was particularly happy to get more insight on the Beijing National Aquatics Centre (nicknamed “the watercube”) or R&Sie; fabulous Dusty Relief in Bangkok. The book goes beyond buildings and looks at interactive rooms (Ada in Zurich), ports (Fugee Port in Taiwan), the artificial reconstruction of a natural mountain (the Dénia project on the Spanish coast) but also design projects such as Clemens Weisshaar & Reed Kram‘s Breeding Tables which were launched 2 years ago (and with much press coverage and public wonder) at the Salone del Mobile in Milan. Oh, yeah! and there’s even some arty projects like the Brooklyn Pigeon Project.
A few years ago, architects Benjamin Aranda and Chris Lasch decided to record New York from the perspective of the movements of a flock of birds.
They equipped pigeons with wireless video cameras and microphones, turning them into satellites that fed images and sounds of the city below. As the architects explained in an interview for the book “In conventional satellite and aerial mappings of the earth, an enormous amount of effort is dedicated to squeezing out any trace of movement from the image and even from the environment.” (…) “So by reintroducing time into the map ours is in some ways a more accurate depiction of the world. But funny enough, this doesn’t make it any better map.”
More in this video intro and interview.
Originally from we make money not art by
reBlogged by michael on Dec 31, 1969, 4:59PM
