After a second year of successful media partnership, Cool Hunting is excited to share the finalists for 2013’s Lovie Awards. As the European sister to the US-based Webby…
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After last year’s successful partnership, Cool Hunting is happy to return as media partners once again with Europe’s Lovie Awards. A sister to the US’ Webby Awards, The…
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Local NYC storytelling in a new web outlet for long-form journalism
Dedicated to long-form, local human-interest journalism based around NYC, the web-based publication, Narrative.ly marks a sign of changing times for the medium, where the rift between breaking content and meditated stories is causing outlets to choose sides. As Narratively founder Noah Rosenberg explains, the site is essentially about storytelling….
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An interactive digital woodland at London’s Tate Modern
Having won the hearts of music fans and artists alike with the wonderful co-creative spirit of “The Johnny Cash Project” and their digitally groundbreaking video for Arcade Fire, “The Wilderness Downtown,” Chris Milk and Aaron Koblin (head of the Data Arts Team at the Google Creative Lab) have joined forces again for a new project called
“This Exquisite Forest.”
Drawing on the overwhelming response they received in the frame-by-frame drawings that created their Johnny Cash video, Milk and Koblin are now broadening the scope of their creative partnership by offering a digital game of consequences to the global online community. This project takes the form of a new web platform where people can evolve each other’s drawings frame-by-frame into new animations.
The title of the project is inspired by the Surrealists’ game of consequences, called “The Exquisite Corpse.” Suitably, this week’s project launch was hosted by Tate Modern in London, in a gallery filled with 20th-century masterpieces. A large interactive screen in an annex of the gallery allowed visitors to navigate “This Exquisite Forest” with a handheld laser device, which, when pointed at the wall, triggered new animations to spring forth from the branches and leaves of the trees.
The initial seeds of the project have been sown by eight artists chosen from the Tate’s own collection. Dryden Goodwin, Olafur Eliasson, Bill Woodrow, Mark Titchner, Julian Opie, Raqib Shaw and Miroslaw Balka have all contributed work, creating an archive of drawings that the public can then appropriate and change according to their own taste. People from around the world can add their drawings online, while London locals can do so in person at the Tate Modern, where a bank of interactive screens are available for visitors to make their creative contributions to the project.
We spoke to Aaron Koblin about having his work in such a prestigious museum and how the project has grown and changed with the involvement of his collaborator, Chris Milk.
I’m thrilled, this space is amazing. It’s a bit intimidating actually, but it’s a beautiful and wonderful space to be in. We’ve put so much time and effort into putting this project together, so it’s a bit surreal to be standing here and see it finalized and ready for people to do whatever it is that they do with it. It’s an exciting moment. Tomorrow we’ll open up the website and see what people do.
Chris and I worked on a project called “The Johnny Cash Project” a couple of years ago, and in that project we saw people really wanting to express themselves more and take it further. So we thought we should build something that empowers them to explore their creative potential together. And that’s what this project is.
When Jane Burton (Tate Media Creative Director) reached out to us shortly afterwards and asked what we could do together with the Tate, then we knew this was a great opportunity to let people express and explore in a totally different way. To see what happens when you use the internet to allow them to connect in a way that I don’t think people have in the past. Random strangers exploring ideas in a really visual way.
I guess it is. I have unofficially been involved in some of Chris’s physical installations in the past. I’ve been helping behind the scenes, but this is our first physical collaboration.
This project is more complex in a lot of ways. It’s very open ended so people can really do all kinds of things with it. And it also has this physical component as well as the interactivity. It’s a bit like YouTube combined with Google Docs combined with a social network—it has a lot of aspects to it. So it’s been a different way of thinking and a much bigger experiment.
I think we’ve only gotten better at communicating. There’s very little held back. Which sometimes is brutally honest, but also very valuable and it makes the iteration process very quick. We can openly discuss things and come to conclusions pretty quickly.
Since we’re both in California it’s not too bad. Sometimes Chris drops into San Francisco for the day, or vice versa. We’re in the same time zone so video conferencing is really easy. It’s definitely a less traditional process where we’re not in the same room that often.
It’s been an interesting fusion. I think working at Google has been great. They are amazing people with great resources. I’ve been able to use that opportunity to create some pretty exciting art projects. We’ve just been having a lot of fun really. There’s so much cool technology and so many interesting uses for it. So we really experiment with the potential of the web and see if we can’t push these technologies to their limits in weird ways to see what happens. So it’s a pretty dream job, for a nerd who’s into art.
Celebrating the Internet’s most valuable European players
Now in their second year, Europe’s Lovie Awards are quickly gaining momentum with a jam-packed program based around meaningful recognition of achievement in the interactive fields. In an awards-heavy industry, The Lovies—sister to the US’ Webby Awards—stand out for carefully selecting work that is as relevant now as it will be in the future. This distinction is clear even in the naming, which borrows from Ada Lovelace, the world’s first programmer who insightfully saw the computer as a tool with way more potential than simply calculating sums.
“The Lovie Awards are a pure kind of awards,” explains founder Nik Roope. He, along with a permanent panel of judges from the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences will pick winners from over 80 categories, ensuring a more standardized selection process for the annual competition. “I think awards are really important,” Roope says, adding that they created The Lovies “to try to help establish what things should be the standard, and what we should celebrate.”
In the lightning-fast field of technology, it’s easy to be overwhelmed by the increasing surplus of applications. Like the Gold Rush or the Industrial Revolution, this surge of digital arts and sciences is “full of brilliant inventors etc., but it’s also full of bullshit,” Roope remarks. In the same way he and his agency Poke London help clients navigate through the ever-changing digital landscape, the expert judges behind The Lovies reel it all in and decipher what will become embedded in our culture, creating “anchors” for the world to use as meaningful benchmarks for creative thinking in the digital realm.
As media partner, Cool Hunting is excited to see what The Lovies will put forward this year. There are still a few days left to submit an entry, which is “open to all European organizations and individuals involved in designing, building, managing, maintaining, marketing or promoting Websites, Interactive Advertising & Media, Online Film & Video, and Mobile & App content for European business, consumer or general audiences.” Also keep an eye out for the awards themselves, taking place this November during Internet Week Europe.
Fusing photograms and cell phone snaps in an exhibition exploring the evolution of photography
In his current exhibition, “Neither Camera Nor Companion” at Blanket Gallery in Vancouver, Berlin-based artist Mark Soo has created a series of photographs which thoughtfully and cleverly take the viewer on a journey through photographic history. By drawing on his fascination with how culture and technology have continuously influenced photography, Soo manages to combine magnified digital noise, darkroom processing, and crisp photogram silhouettes with striking results.
Very broadly, my work often begins by looking at the relationship between culture, technology and the ways they have influenced each other. So this series of works, originally titled “Madame Guillotine“, started with wanting to find a different way to juxtapose digital and analog photography in a way that blends both, rather than keeps them separate.
What I did was to make a photograph that literally fuses a technique dating from the earliest days of photography, the photogram, with something emblematic of the direction of photography today, which are digital photos taken with a cellphone. In the end, all these things ended up coming together in a traditional analog darkroom.
I started by taking a bunch of digital images of prints of the French Revolution with my low-res cellphone, and transferred them to a negative. I then took the negatives into the darkroom and printed them as traditional color photographs. In the printing process, I placed various objects on the photographic paper in order to produce a photogram on top of the printed image. In some sense you could say these works function as a condensed history of photographic technique. Partly what I liked was how the detailed organic shapes of the photograms contrasted with the grid of digital pixels in a way that I hadn’t experienced before.
I traveled to France a few times over the last year and while there, I got interested in the guillotine and its history—gruesome stuff for sure, but definitely fascinating. I ended up taking photos with my phone of anything related to the guillotine, without thinking much about what exactly I was doing. So they were snaps of images in books mostly—pictures of pictures. Anyhow, I started to think about the guillotine blade, and how it resembled the shutter of a camera; this got me thinking about photography in relation to the French Revolution.
Then I started to see parallels between what was occurring on a political level during the French Revolution, with this tremendous shift in photography happening today—the digital revolution: in both instances people are moving from the perceived traditions and hierarchies of the old world toward something they feel is more democratic. As traditional photolabs are closing, places like Flickr and Instagram, or Google Images, are becoming more indispensable to how we consider image-making in general. I thought it was particularly interesting, on an abstract level at least, to draw comparisons between these two points in history.
“Neither Camera Nor Companion” is showing at Vancouver’s Blanket Gallery through 21 April 2012.
Founder Patrizio Miceli on the recipe to his Parisian agency’s success
If “al dente” is synonymous with perfectly cooked Italian pasta, then Patrizio Miceli has chosen the right name for the communications agency he launched in 2004. Al dente has built some of the most creatively compelling advertising campaigns of recent, for luxury brands like Dior, Juliette Has a Gun, Thierry Mugler, Costume National and Hudson Jeans.
Part hedonist, part refined connoisseur, Miceli is known as a true Italian who cooks pasta for prestigious clients and throws lavish parties like the recent 500-guest carnival for Colette. Curious about the secrets behind the success of his Parisian agency, we sat down with Miceli to learn more.
A website is not where things happen! We don’t believe that institutional, dedicated main websites are the places to be anymore. We advise our clients not to focus on this. The proper places to be for advertising is to fish were the fish are: on the Web, on Facebook, on blogs, on YouTube. You must use networks and let the messages circulate. An institutional website must be the relay station of the expression of a brand through a wide range of various media. The whole has to be inter-connected.
As for our website, we are at the service of our clients, and as such, we have to be able to understand and promote their identity, and therefore our own identity must be sober and transparent. Our motto is: be on time at the right place with the right message to the right target. This know-how is our signature. Another way to communicate about ourselves is to organize pasta parties. We are thinking of making a special sauce from the house!
We can also show what we are capable of, such as what we did in 2009, when the economic crisis hit all of us in the field of advertising and communication. We launched a call for a motto making fun of the crisis. The authors of the best motto earned €100 rewards and we printed them on T-shirts. This campaign “Aldentelacrise” was met with great success. We sold about 20,000 pieces within six months at places like Colette in Paris.
We work on positioning, branding and innovative campaigns. We provide global campaigns for our clients by telling stories through various media, written or digital, and by taking advantage of the wide range of technologies we now have at hand. We try to reset long-established brands in their tendencies. Our goal is to catch currents and trends. We provide a monthly report on digital and social trends to our clients, but this comes along with a deep comprehension of the identity of the brands we are in charge of. We spend a long time researching the history of the brands.
A good illustration of our creative process and methods is the pinball we invented for Dior‘s “Mise en Dior” necklace. The brief was to conceive a campaign illustrating the spirit of Dior’s jewelry through this particular semi-precious necklace. We were trying hard to find the twist that would make it. Someone in the agency was singing this song “Comme une boule de flipper” (like a bullet in a pinball). That was it! Then we embedded and quoted all the codes of Dior, like the medallion chair which is the starting point of the game. The music, a re-mix of classical Mozart, is part of the color of the atmosphere we have tried to put in it. It was so unusual and audacious, when you think of it, for a brand like Dior to campaign under the song of a pinball! At the end, it got the highest congratulations from top executives and Bernard Arnault himself, and we’ve counted more than 110,000 views on YouTube since it launched on the site in October 2011.
This is part of our crowd-sourcing strategy. We believe that one of the best mediums to carry and diffuse information is people. It is much more efficient than anything else. Mainly because you trust the opinion of your friends and network more than any journalist’s or expert’s advice not to mention ads and brands themselves! Besides, this buzz has the advantage of being much more cost effective than traditional advertising.
So the main challenge for us is to conceive appealing campaigns able to catch the attention and interest of opinion leaders, with respect to the brand identity. We believe that playing is one of the best ways to participate and feel involved, because the pleasure is in the game.
For the “Dream Machine” we created for Thierry Mugler’s Angel fragrance, we imagined the first multi-media application available on Facebook, iPhone and iPad. To create this app, allowing visitors to compose their own dream with sound and images out of the selection of five keywords, we had to go through an impressive process. We first conducted a poll among 50 people to analyze the words they would use to describe their dreams. Then we had to translate these words into images and create an algorithm able to deal with the five selected words and produce a film (the dream of each visitor) by digging through 250 video sequences and assembling the selection. More than 50 million combinations were possible. The voice was added through text-to-speech technology that allowed us to offer a personalized message along with the dream to every user. Launched in September 2011, the campaign drew more than 100,000 users.
To be efficient, the buzz has to start like a whispered secret. The more the message seems to be out of reach, hard to get, rare, the more precious it is. The buzz also must reach the right people, hit the right network.
Being chic is telling a story as disconnected as possible from the product you’re trying to promote and sell. In order to create a “chic buzz” we often resort to art, which enables us to be really subversive, off-beat and unconventional with elegance and style.
For example, the campaign we made in September 2011 for the new Costume National fragrance “Pop Collection” pays tribute to Andy Warhol’s famous screen tests with ten contemporary artists and personalities that we shot with a Super-8 camera. The quotation is obvious, allowing us to introduce self-derision and humor, but the result remains very stylish.
But I think the most cutting-edge campaign we have ever made is for CNC SS 2012 campaign. It is called “Disrupted Generation” and uses cuts from Tumblr, data-bending, recycled pictures and distortions.
Aside from the campaigns for new fragrances by Chloé Parfums and Nina Ricci, we’re preparing the next campaign for Hudson jeans starring Georgia Jagger. We also keep going on with CNC. For their new campaign we will play on the self-portrait, with people invited to make their own from their cell phones. And…we are to open a branch in New York!
The LA-based photographer talks about her latest show, “To Adrian Rodriguez, with Love”
Sometimes life, as with art, takes an unforeseen turn down a path we would have never intentionally traveled, forcing us to see things differently. LA-based photographer Melanie Willhide seems to have experienced the phenomenon more often than one may like, but rather than be derailed, Willhide has been inspired. When a fire destroyed many of her belongings some years ago, she created the intensely fragile “Sleeping Beauties” series. Now, her latest body of work is named for the perpetrator that robbed her home. “To Adrian Rodriguez, with Love” is now showing at NYC’s Von Lintel Gallery and, after viewing the exhibition we felt compelled to learn more about the artist’s serendipitous inspiration.
As it happened, Willhide’s laptop was stolen by a burglar, but then recovered by the police. She struggled to retrieve the wiped contents—two bodies of work, family pictures and her own wedding album—but what files she could save were corrupted. Rather than lament the loss, the artist was intrigued by the fragmented photographs and learned how to replicate the “language” used to distort them. As a result, she was able to generate more using vintage photographs and other sourced material she’d collected for visual reference. She created complementary images, bringing about what Willhide calls a “mish-mashed body of work” that she feels represents what had been stolen from the machine, and even more so, the life affected by the incident.
The bizarre duplicities and mind-bending effects achieved in “To Adrian Rodriguez, with Love” mark a stylistic departure from Willhide’s earlier work, introducing a theme that is likely to continue. “Utilizing the language of the corrupted files has a lot of potential,” says Willhide. “There’s something really powerful about seeing the delicacy of the digital file.”
By revealing how she creates the optical illusion in her photographs, Willhide champions the art form of digital photography as it embraces programs like Photoshop in a non-traditional sense. “It requires me to think of Photoshop in terms of how it shouldn’t be used,” says Willhide. Shifting concern from the authenticity of an image’s subject to the image as a whole, she feels, gives photographers an “opportunity to come out against the real”—a sentiment suggesting parallels to surrealist movements across other mediums.
Melanie Willhide‘s conceptually driven “To Adrian Rodriguez, with Love” will be on show at NYC’s Von Lintel Gallery through 24 March, 2012.
A Chicago convention explores artistic failures of the digital world
The upshot to digital failure, GLI.TC/H is a conference on noise and new media that sees artists from around the world gathering for a weekend packed with lectures, workshops, discussions, screenings and more. The second iteration, happening this weekend in Chicago, will explore topics like how to crack, break, hack, pirate and otherwise alter digital media. After Chicago, the celebration will move on to Amsterdam and then Birmingham, UK.
Accompanying the physical conference is an extensive Internet component accessible though their website. We had a bit of fun playing around with GLI.TC/H online, which includes a wiki page with primers on databending, an explanation of the project, a history of glitch art, and some glitch theory. The main page, while hilariously difficult to navigate, does link out to an exhibition, a schedule of events, an impressive flickr page and T.RASHB.IN, a bank of community-sourced images, some of which were used for this post.
A program called extrafile allows users to play with image file formats, and has been made available for download. To promote the event, supporters have produced a series of video “bumpers,” which showcase the glitch ethos in action. We recommend you all head over to the site soon to explore the material before GLI.TC/H disappears for another year. Cool Hunting has been tracking glitch art for a few years now, and it’s nice to see the community organizing an event of this scale.
A young graphic designer’s first monograph is full of color and motion
A lot of artists might think twice about issuing a retrospective before they
reach 30. But the young Canadian graphic designer Julien Vallée—
whom we covered earlier this year—already had a considerable
body of work from which to choose. Vallée’s art is distinctive for its daring combination of traditional handcrafts and
digital manipulation, and his painstaking combinations of cut paper and stop-motion
animation are by turns whimsical, dazzling and baffling. People leap through screens
and turn into shreds of paper, while smoke, light and glass mingle in seemingly impossible
combinations.
“Working on this book was an amazing opportunity to take a look at the
work [I’ve] produced in the last few years. I never really had time to do it before,” said
Vallée. “There was a lot of behind-the-scenes material, and it was hard to cut it out without losing details behind the process.”
In Rock, Paper, Scissors, Vallée pulled together a selection of his commissioned work for clients as diverse as The New York Times, MTV and AOL, as well as a few of his
personal projects. In keeping with Vallé’s multimedia approach, the reader can also access exclusive videos—both of the projects and behind-the-scenes work—through
Gestalten’s website.
The monograph took seven months to compile with the aid of several friends and
collaborators. The text was written with Montreal-based artists Eve Duhamel and
Mike Canty. “For the design, I started myself but realized soon I was still too close to my work. I found out it was better to have someone that was not involved in the projects,
looking at them with fresh eyes,” said Vallée, who turned to Montreal-based design studio Feed and a friend, Matthias Hübner, at Gestalten for help.
“Rock, Paper, Scissors” will be available for purchase in
the United States through Gestalten’s website by the end of October. For a closer look at Vallée’s work, check out his website here.
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