Through the lovely blog Today and Tomorrow, I stumbled upon these French art-pranksters, prank-artists, guerrilla-dudes called  Encastrable (loose translation: built-in, I think).

This French duo (Antoine Lejolivet and Paul Souviron) uses street-art-type techniques and applies them to the über-dull world of DIY shops and supermarkets. Just using items that are on the shelves and without permission, they create these ephemeral installations that turn the supermarket into an artistic space. Nice. Funny. Critical.

Also, for some reason that reminds me of a Biz Stone (Twitter co-founder ) quote I read this morning: “Creativity is a renewable source.”
It’s a lovely day.

More inventive stuff with square boxes.
To finish off the week some pure eye-candy, by animation duo Ubik.
Nothing more. Just to sooth your souls. 
It’s a stunning animation made for Motionographer’s recent F5 showcase festival.

I like street art. Bumping into cool, beautiful, silly interventions always makes me smile. The fact that someone uses the world around us as a canvas just, you know, is great.
Mmmm, feels like it’s hangover Friday today.

Anyway, this one would definitely make me stop if I saw it. German artist Jan Vormann uses Lego blocks to fill up cracks and holes in walls. Dispatchwork, he calls it.
He’s done it in Italy and Israel before, but his latest contructions are set in Berlin. 

Photo by Kathleen Waak

Here’s a cute little idea.
Finnish animation studio Anima Boutique have developed a series of episodes called The Guys. They get people to send in their home videos, which they re-interpret, import their animated characters (The Guys) into the scenes and re-publish on their website. 
They’re all short, they’re all silly, so they all have potential to become your daily 10 seconds of nonsense.  On your mobile of course .

David Lynch embraces the internet yet again. On June 1 the director/artist will launch Interview Project,  a website that will release a series of 3-5 minute portraits of people that his crews met on a 20,000 mile road-trip round America. 
Watch the trailer and Lynch’s own little Lynch-style plug on the Interview Project website. Entertainment Weekly also has a preview of the first episode.

Would have been great if Lynch himself had interviewed all these people; the extraordinary meets the ordinary meets the extraordinary. Still, this looks like a nice piece of human content being dripfed into our digital brains over the course of a year.

Here’s a great idea that breathes new life into the struggling format of the tv commercial. Get your audience to make it.
Not some competition where you ask people to create the whole film. That has been done before and generally only appeals to the more hardcore creatives. But get the public to submit small bits and pieces, so everyone can easily participate and the result is a collaborative effort. 

Belgian mobile provider Proximus are making a stop-motion tv commercial based on photos that people have uploaded. Not just any pictures; people get clear guidelines. Currently they’re running an animated storyboard as a tv ad, pointing people to a website where they can upload their pictures to match specific frames of the storyboard.

Genius! Lots of fun! Immediate result for the people who participate! A very well executed website. Very little brand pushing going on there. 
And if they succeed, they’ll get the world record for most locations/actors/directors in a tv spot.

I was checking it over the weekend and people have already gone out of their way to shoot great stills. Check out the scene where people ‘fly’ around the little park. Someone had some fun with that. 

The only thing I’m missing is some form of identifying the names/locations of the people that are submitting. And maybe leave comments. That would have turned it even more into a social event.

Following on from the last post, here’s more French creativity in the video field:  a hilarious animation/music video called ‘Le Café’.
Made by Stephanie Marguerite and Emilie Tarascou. 
Music by Oldelaf.  

Time for that afternoon coffee.

Via @philtidy.

Check out this range of ‘brunch equipment’, made by London-based Dutch designer Ivo Vos. Neuroses have never been so much fun. 
The site has some other interesting design explorations too.  

Via Ryan Yeah.

Original approach to the crunch of all crunches.
Avant-garde composer Johannes Kreidler created an audio piece using data from the decline of the stock markets.
And the growth of the porn industry. 
Makes you smile on a Friday morning.

Aaron Koblin was part of the team that made that Radiohead-video-without-cameras and these are some amazing visualisations from US flights paths that he made. Check out the animation here.
Can we have that hanging on the wall please, with live updates, as a living painting?
In any case, another great Koblin example of technology meeting art. 

By the way: suggested by @bbhlabs, a rather inspiring bunch. Because yes, I got on Twitter (@leftrightcentre). When friends start sending you emails, saying “I wouldn’t have to email you this link, if you were on Twitter”, you know it’s beginning to make sense.
So far, so fun. I’m enjoying it and do think I’ll start finding it useful.

Big billboard ads are an obvious source of inspiration for any street artist. Simply because they’re an intrinsic part of any big city street. There’s even a Poster Alteration Art group on Flickr. 
London has its Decapitator but I do like Poster Boy, a New York street artist that spices up the subway stations over there with his radical mash-ups of posters. Armed with a razor blade as his weapon of choice, he cuts up ads and re-arranges them on the spot into something funnier, more political, more thought-provoking. 

Check his Flickr stream here, films from Wooster Collective, Animal Magazine and his own YouTube channel and articles in NY Mag and the Guardian. 

Lots of attention, so answers on a Tweet: will he show up in an ad soon, sell out to galleries or is he using the media to start his own little revolution. From his interview with the Guardian:

“That’s what I want Poster Boy to be about,” he enthuses. “The idea of taking your environment into your own hands and making it what you want. As long as you’re not hurting other people, it can’t be bad.”

Feel inspired by the collaborative effort of Bart Hess and Lucy McRae, quite aptly called Lucy And Bart.
In their own words: “instinctual stalking of fashion, architecture, performance and the body”.

Just to offset the 2 previous, rather serious posts, here’s a rather serious, but intriguing film, called Morituri Te Salutant. 
Animated and directed by Niko Stumpo aka Abnormal Behavior Child.
Made, you know, just because he felt like it. 

Via Submarine Channel 

This time of the year is mainly good for receiving some nice Christmas cards sent around by the creative industries. Keen to impress their clients, potential clients and anyone who’s interested in watching/reading, companies are spending some quality time and money on these ‘cards’.

A friend sent me this cool one, from agency AKQA, but Creative Review have collated the nicest ones from their mailbox here and here. 

So have a great break and here’s to an inspiring 2009. 

Music videos are meant to be dead, right? But every now and again, a little gem pops up. And this one for Metronomy is one of the most creative and funniest music videos I’ve seen in a long time.
A high-res (yes indeed) version on YouTube, or watch on the music video page of El Niño, the production company that reps the directors Megaforce.

I never mentioned it here and I didn’t manage to vote, but Volvo, Vice Magazine, The Independent and Yahoo ran this competition called Creative 30, to find the leading creative think-ers and do-ers in the UK. The winners have just been announced and the jury chose artist Katie Paterson, while the public vote went to milliner (isn’t that a beautiful word for hat-maker) Will Chambers. Paterson’s pieces are particularly intriguing. She makes various sound sculptures, influenced by science and nature and general cookie-ness. Charming stuff. 

But have a look at the other 28 nominated creative talents and check out their profile films. I particularly liked the work of photographer Jonnie Craig (see picture above), illustrator Mimi Leung, the beach chairs from furniture designer Max Lamb and ‘possible sculptor’ Daniel Mort.  
Nice initiative and interesting to see that a brand like Volvo wants to spend some money on this (Paterson wins £10,000 – Chambers a Volvo).

Art that’s suitable for the festive season.
New York artist Rosemarie Fiore uses all kinds of found objects to make her art, but her firework paintings are particularly intriguing pieces. By bombing sheets of paper with fireworks and controlling the explosions, she creates these abstract environments. I’d love to see/smell a real one and sounds like a lot of fun to make. 
Nice.
So who’s gonna turn that into a music video or a commercial?

The first one was the great 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa. If you’re familiar with the work of design studio Sanaa, you’ll understand it when I say that the space is quite minimal. Still, it works very nicely, also because they had a few art works commissioned as part of the architecture. There’s one of those James Turrell sky-windows, but the real clincher was this clever, but beautiful piece by Argentinian artist Leandro Erlich. 

They also had a really nice collection, mixing Western conceptual chaps like Jan Fabre and Damien Hirst with local artists and incorporating more ‘popular’ platforms like animation and figurines. I particularly liked this great installation by Yoshitomo Nara, in collaboration with graf.

The other museum we visited was possibly one of the most amazing buildings I’ve ever seen. The ChiChu museum was commissioned by some big cheese at the Benesse Corporation, on the old fishing island of Naoshima, just to house his 4 ‘Water Lilies’ by Monet. That’s right: one museum for 4 paintings. But it’s an amazing space, designed by boxer-turned-architect Tadao Ando and built more or less into a hill. 
It’s all very Nihon-clinical and almost lab-like (you have to take off your shoes before you tread on the white marble mosaic that makes up the floor of the main room), but it’s so well done it makes you smile. 
Taking pictures if forbidden, but this person managed to take a few.
Just go.

If you happen to be in The Hague or in Holland, pop by the GEM museum for ‘Les Beaux et Les plus Beaux’, what looks to be a fantastic exhibition by Dutch artist/sculptor Silvia B. 

I once had the pleasure of visiting her studio in Rotterdam and was immediately sucked into her wonderful world of hybrid creatures and thought-provoking esthetics. You have to love someone who creates a series of gloves like this Skinover series.

In the previous Japan post, I mentioned the Japanese tendency to experiment a lot with design and their obsession with it. When we went to visit the 21-21 Design Sight pavillion (made by Tadao Ando), we stumbled upon an exhibition called ‘Second Nature’, curated by a designer called Tokujin Yoshioka, which confirmed that thought. 

Apart from very interesting art/design pieces, like human/tree hybrids and chairs made of crystals whose growth is influenced by playing different kinds of music, the setting was amazing. The ceiling of the gallery was covered in 360,000 plastic straws, which made you feel like you were walking in another eerie, beautiful universe. 

We weren’t allowed to take pictures (an interesting habit in most of Japanese galleries), but Wallpaper has a nice collection of stills, plus a Q&A with the designer/curator. 

A very clever and creative piece of advertising/awareness raising for Transport For London. It was created by agency WCRS and directed by Chris Palmer at Gorgeous Films, who also did this similar TFL film a while ago.

I just wonder if there shouldn’t have been more of a digital side to the campaign. Some kind of interactive quiz or game element that allows people to pass on the film without actually giving away the answer. Something that builds up over time. There is a website for the campaign, but it doesn’t really add that much, does it. 
Still, very enjoyable piece of communication.

Apologies for the shocking lack of posting activity recently, but I’ve been on holiday in Japan. And guess what: the internet access there is surprisingly limited. Wireless: forget it. Internet cafés: if you ask, they look at you like they’ve seen a ghost. Because wifi is sooooo 2004-5-6, sir. Everybody over there is on their mobiles, surfing the worldwide wap web. Interesting. 

Anyway, Japan is a crazy, beautiful, funny place with lots going on. And they have good beer. So I’ll try to filter the creative info in my head into a few posts over the next few days. 

The first pleasant surprise came straight when we arrived. 

It turned out that the Tokyo flat that we had rented through a friend of a friend belonged to French ‘conceptual stimulator’ Item Idem. Not just a flat, more like a 3-room-installation-stroke-gallery. Thanks Cyril, for letting us stay in your crazy place. 

Yes, it’s true. Everything and everyone in Japan (or at least in Tokyo) is designed. Even the local laundromat looks cooler than the average London flat. Definitely cleaner. And technology’s everywhere.

So a company like Kenwood happily experiments with the design of their speakers. Check out these 2 beauties, which we saw at the Morphonics launch. The left one is meant to be hugged, so the bones in your body enhances the sound or something strange like that.
And the right one, designed by Claudio Colucci, was completely made in corian and costs something like €60.000.

Colucci is a pretty interesting designer. Some of his stuff is a little too organic for me, but at least he has a sense of humour, lacking in most design. I particularly enjoyed his Mutant Attack chairs, which were shown at the very nice Clear Gallery, next to some Japanese 60s/70s design classics from Shiro Kuramata.  
And he’s a funny chap in real life too. Him, his girlfriend and producer/curator Laurent took us out a few times and fun was had by all. I’ll never forget Claudio’s karaoke rendition of Eminem’s ‘Lose Yourself’.
Yes it’s true, everybody does karaoke in Japan. 

The header of this blog contains a few words that consist of more than 2 syllables, but the guys from design studio Zeitguised know how to describe things properly. Check out the title and explanation to their new piece ‘Peripetics’. More importantly: check out the film itself. It’s weird and wonderful and even though I’m not always a fan of abstract work, this is amazing to look at. 
A few years ago, I had the chance to work with Zeitguised on this mobile content project for which they created some ‘visual haikus’ and since then I’ve always followed their work. They’re one of the most intriguing design/animation units around; very technical, but there’s always this enthralling element of humanity and outlandishness in there. 
And if you describe yourself with ‘Breaks stuff, puts it back together and sells it for less’, you can do no wrong.  

We recently moved studio and one of the guys that I bump into every now and again in the kitchen is Noah Harris, who just finished this rather lovely ad for Ford Fiesta – This Is Now. It took him a good 7 months to finish, but it’s well worth it.
In good Web2.0-open-collaboration style, he got a bunch of designers/animators on board to create all the gorgeous visuals that show in the screens. Very now indeed. 
Now, I would have thought that Ford would include all the individual pieces on some microsite, get people to comment etc etc, but nope. They seem to have a microsite for this car, but no films. Instead they’re all on YouTube and you can watch them here.

Another rather talented director that sits in spitting distance from me is Tom Haines, who made this lovely music video for crazy Texan band White Denim. It has just been picked as video of the week on 6Music and it was criminally ignored for a nomination in the category Best Indie/Alternative video at the UK MVAs.

One of the most intriguing artists that has used, abused and appropriated the www with freshness and creativity is Han Hoogerbrugge. Artist, animator, designer, interactivist, call him what you want, but he’s always been intriguing, if only for his constant consistent attire of pin-striped suit.

And this week seems to be Hoogerbrugge’s week.

If you happen to be in Rotterdam, go check out his interactive installation ‘What You Say Is What You Get’, commissioned by the Boymans van Beuningen museum. He’s been developing a keen interest in installations recently and this is a next step. 

And then there’s the release of ‘Modern Living’, a book-cum-DVD all about Han and his wide range of work. A monograph as they say. It’s been a while in the making, but it’s all yours now. Check out Submarine Channel for more info.

And if you like the darker side of Han’s work, you should visit his new project, Prostress 2.0, an intriguing series of  ”Daily fresh servings of professional stress”. Different, as they say. 

I like the man. 

Here’s an online advertising campaign that will get some attention, taking interactivity to ‘another level’. Only in Scandinavia can you get away with that; imagine this happening in the UK. 
Made by Stockholm agency Dallas.

I was asked to be on the judging panel for the UK Music Video Awards, so I’ve been watching a lot of music videos lately. Always fun.
Because while I totally believe the genre of music video needs a re-think and we should (also) be looking at other ways of promoting music through moving image, there were still a lot of great films in the selection. Most of them you can find on video blog Antville and I’ll post a few links when the UKMVA shortlist is announced, but one I’d forgotten about and was happy to see again was ‘Work It Out’ by RJD2, directed by Joey Garfield for New York outfit Ghost Robot. 

And when I was making friends in our new studio (we moved!) and the guys from Bad Idea magazine gave me a DVD that included this little docu/short, I thought it was time to read up on the Crutch man called Bill Shannon. Talk about creative communication. This guy’s taking dancing/skating/body language to a whole new level. And do read the Artist’s Statement on his website.

In times where street art is hitting the galleries big time, it seems only fair that tiny street art is picked up by more tiny galleries. Ha ha ha. 
This exhibition at the Cosh gallery in Soho, London hosts the first solo exhibition from miniature street artist Slinkachu. For a few years, he/she (not sure about Slinkachu’s identity) has been making cute interceptions/installations in the London streets. Beautiful, funny, a little bit sad: these pieces are pretty clever. 
If you can’t make it to the gallery, there’s a lot of stills here.

I’ve worked on a few pro-social and environmental video campaigns, trying to bring across a message that no one really wants to hear. So I know it’s not easy to come up with something efficient, let alone creative. Because in the end, the client just wants to show polar bears or big lumps of ice falling into the sea. 
But this film-slash-installation by director Tim Godsall tackles that challenge pretty well, me thinks.

And a YouTube link, just in case the Quicktime version is taken down at some point. 

This Sneaker burger thing was made by Swedish designer Olle Hemmendorff, after Nike asked a bunch of designers to interpret some of their iconic designs.
Very nice & very clever.
Does anyone know where we can see the other 7 contributions? It looks like they’ll be exhibited in the Stockholm store Sneakers N Stuff, but if anyone has more online links, let me know.

Reading the words “audio-visual” and “experiment” in the same sentence always makes me a bit cynical and respond with a sentence that includes the words “moving” and “wallpaper”. But the Advanced Beauty project, conceived and curated by London-based digital design studio Universal Everything is well worth a look.

One: because they’re setting creative parameters to their artists. Technical as well as creative. And in my opinion, limitations are always a good thing in an art-type project like this. 

Two: because they’ve created their own platform. Where normally this kind of work would end up in festivals like onedotzero and, if they’re lucky, on a DVD that sells a few copies in the ICA to fellow artists and some agency creative directors, these guys have taken it in their own hands and distribute the work through a podcast. This way, they must reach people that they wouldn’t reach normally. And the DVD will follow later, which I guess will make them some money. 

And three: because I think some of the work is actually quite good. Especially the film by UV & Minivegas, which put a smile on my face. I’m actually looking forward to seeing the rest of the series.

“You couldn’t ketchup even if we handed you the tomatoes”. Wouldn’t you hire the people who came up with such a spot-on tagline to invent some crazy shit for your company/campaign/cat’s 5th birthday party? These guys can turn a toilet brush into something exciting.  
And now my friends from Knotoryus have published a little book, called ‘Face Everybody And Rule’. 
They’re a creative (their ideas!), fashionable (their style tips!) and generous (their champagne!) bunch, so if you happen to be in Ghent, Belgium, pick up a copy and see if it lives up to the slogan.

This ‘music video multiplex’ for Pop Levi is already a few weeks old, but at the time I hadn’t started the noble art of blogging yet, so I thought I’d post it again. In case you hadn’t seen it. 

Although I really like the idea, the execution isn’t overly great. So it won’t be long before someone really explores the interactivity opportunities. I’d like to see more screens. And why not more moments where you have to pause/play/rewind to complete the video. Or make your own version for that matter. 

I reckon this could be something for director/artist Roel Wouters, you know: him from the live-installation trampoline concept for the rather fantastic zZz video.

Which by the way has just been re-used for this car ad. Quite badly re-used, I should say. Bit missing the point really.
Does anyone know whether Roel got to make that himself? It’s the same music, but I heard that he declined.

Bloody Radiohead. They’ve done it again.

While the music video industry is nervously looking around, trying to avoid gloomy nose-dive scenarios, those Radiohead fuckers do something no one else has done before. Again. 
An interactive, no-camera-just-code, ready-to-remix video experiment.
Genius, right? Or is it just another marketing ploy, as cynics were keen to point out  last year when the band gave away their album on a pay-as-want basis?

I think you can judge from a few angles. 

From a creative point of view, I feel it scores well.
Apart from the fact that I’ve never really seen anything like it, it’s a great piece of visual expression that is typical for the band/brand Radiohead.
I also think that as a piece of filmmaking it does have its values. I watch a lot of music videos and my attention span is close to that of a goldfish, but this video kept me watching. Quite a feat. 

From an interactive point of view it’s a bit limited. The fact that it’s open source is obviously a genius thing. But unless you’re quite a geek -and let’s be honest, not that many of us are- it’s hard to interact with the work. In that way, Arcade Fire’s attempt last year was more successful, be it less aspirational. 

Technologically I’m sure it’s all great, but I personally couldn’t care less. Velodyne Lidar technology, whatever. 

And marketing-wise? A success, no doubt. After 3 days it’s already racked up more views on YouTube than a lot of it the band’s older videos. And which music video has recently received that much attention in the broadsheet media (ok – it’s the online version, but still). And has a collaboration with Google. 
But is that because Radiohead had a clever marketing plan? Or because it’s a great piece of work and worth the attention? 

One last point. Is this the solution to the flailing music video business? Obviously not. Although I’m sure production companies are already thinking about how to ‘implement’ this and score a YouTube hit themselves, this video really is just one example of doing something creative that also gets noticed.
Afetr all, even Robbie Williams made ‘interactive videos’ 5 years ago.