Hasta La Ideas

Designer David Benqué examines the role of imagination in computer-generated folk tales

Giving mythical tales a modern makeover, designer David Benqué has created The Infinite Adventure Machine, a story-generating program that merges fairytale narration with digital computing. Modeled after the 31 functions of folktales identified by the philosopher Vladimir Propp, The Infinite Adventure Machine generates timed visual cues and synopses for imagining your own story. Propelling the plot is a formula that denotes each of the 31 functions, such as “Trickery” and “Guidance,” with a letter and a number to create a story that is equal parts craft and code.

Inspired by Neal Stephenson’s sci-fi novel, “The Diamond Age,” Benqué set out to create an adaptive book that informs the pacing of composition enhanced by the user’s own ingenuity. The speculative project was commissioned by Microsoft Research (Cambridge UK) and a participant of the Future of Writing project, The Infinite Adventure Machine signals a rise in narrative science that contemplates the speculative future of fiction. Although automated archetypes provide storytelling signposts, imagination still remains a fundamental element of the process. Benqué states, “I wanted people to question the extent to which reducing stories to a system is a meaningful quest and what part of our brains will remain an enjoyable mystery.”

The Infinite Adventure Machine is a featured project under the collective exhibition, Glitch Fiction. The show will be held at the Cité de la Mode et du Design during Paris Design Week until 18 September 2011.

Photographer Skye Parrot’s path from political science to indie magazine publisher

As the daughter of an art photographer, it never occurred to Skye Parrott to take up
photography as a career herself. Though she grew up around cameras, Parrott thought she was going to major in political science. “I thought I was going to law school.”

Instead, Parrott went to Paris. After a few internships and a stint as managing editor at Self Service magazine, her
outlook changed and she began working as Nan Goldin’s Paris studio manager. The legendary
chronicler of New York subculture acted as both an artistic and a business mentor to
Parrott. After two years of running her studio in Paris, Parrott moved back to the United
States and managed Goldin’s New York studio while launching her own career.

“Having the chance to work with someone that influential was amazing,” Parrott says. “It changed my work a lot, and helped me find my own voice.” Following the advice of an ex who encouraged her to work through her own influences to get “what’s yours,” she explains that how she “really needed to just do
my version of Nan Goldin again and again until I got to the other side.”

The other side happens to be an astoundingly successful artistic and commercial career
back in Parrott’s hometown of New York—”the center of everything,” as she says. In addition to campaigns for the likes of A.P.C., Nike and Pamela Love, she’s shot editorial work for almost every edition of Vogue as well as for Lula and other European publications.

Her photo exhibition “First Love, Last Rites” opened last year to widespread acclaim. A documentation of the year that she spent struggling with two damaged love affairs—one with a boy, one with heroin—the wistful series deals with misplaced yearning and the subjectivity of memory.

Parrot reflects that one of the best aspects about First Love was that it mixed her personal and commercial work styles. “I like pictures that are found, rather than
made, and that have an emotion. Even if it’s a staged moment, it’s a true moment. Even though I work with digital cameras, I don’t like digital to look digital. There’s definitely a nostalgia to my aesthetic.”

One of Parrott’s most exciting ongoing projects is the bi-annual arts, fashion and
culture magazine Dossier, which she founded with a childhood friend. “We
thought we were going to a ‘zine. But once we started putting out the call for
contributions, we started getting this amazing content. There was no way we could put it
out in newsprint with 500 printed copies,” Parrott said.

Some of that content included Zac Posen’s first-ever styled story—Posen is an old schoolmate of Dossier’s co-founder and editor Katherine Krause—and an
unpublished portfolio by the photographer David Armstrong, whom Parrott met while she
was working for Goldin. “We grew up in New York, which helped,” she says. “We
reached out to anyone amazing that we knew for the first issue, because we didn’t know
if there would ever be a second one.” They funded the magazine with contributions from
friends and family, and set it loose. “A lot of people were very generous when we hadn’t
done anything. They had faith that whatever we were going to make would be cool.”

Now on its seventh issue, Dossier—which means “file” in French—gives its widely varied contributors a space in which to exercise absolute creative freedom. In
order to keep that freedom, the magazine’s small staff keeps their day jobs and work for
free out of Parrott’s house. And in the fall, they’ll work around the magazine’s newest,
and smallest, staff member. “I’m not as busy as I used to be. I was excited to finish
up ‘First Love, Last Rites’ and get to work on another creative project, but then I got
pregnant,” Parrott explains. “That’s totally the definition of a personal project.”

From Madonna to Al Gore, how one publisher reimagines books for the digital age

Charlie Melcher is, in his own words, a man of eclectic tastes. With a hand in some of pop culture’s most influential phenomena, from “South Park: A Sticky Forms Adventure” to Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth,” Melcher has been redefining the publishing industry since graduating from Yale University in 1988. Conceptualizing projects like Madonna’s controversial “Sex” book is practically old hat to Melcher, who spearheaded the tome when he was with Calloway Editions. The progressive publisher explains the choice was obvious, “Madonna was going to get naked in an amazing book of erotica. What was not to like?”

Melcher worked his way up the ranks after college, re-launching what he’d called Melcher Press as Melcher Media in ’94, where he patented the technology behind DuraBooks. Waterproof, synthetic paper made of nontoxic resins and inorganic materials instead of wood pulp, the infinitely recyclable pages make for ideal beach reads or field guides. The technology also came into play for William McDonough and Michael Braungart’s environmentalist design manifesto,
“Cradle to Cradle.” Like Melcher, the game-changing book preaches a new kind of industrial sustainability—one that incorporates eco-consciousness from the ground up.

From the ground up is exactly how Melcher Media approaches all of its projects,
shepherding a new publication from its inception through various print and digital
incarnations. Working on “An Inconvenient Truth,” Melcher took Al Gore’s next project one step further, developing iPhone and iPad apps called “Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis.” The richly-colored pages, filled with interactive infographics, animations, maps and documentary footage, are all accessible with a swipe of a finger.

“For the last 20 years, I’ve labored to break out of the confines of the two-
dimensional Flatland of the printed page and redefine books as multi-sensory
interactive experiences,” Melcher said. The phrase that he uses, “deep
marketing,” is a type of marketing that creates a unique, immersive experience that
a reader will seek out on his own, which can range from reading a DuraBook in a
bubble bath to flipping through maps of Africa on the iPad while on the train to work.

If working on Gore’s books wasn’t enough of an indication, Melcher also exercises his strong interest in sustainability with his position on the advisory committee for Green Press Initiative and FSC certification for Melcher Media. Clients like HBO and MTV may seem off-brand, but Melcher insists, “The projects that we do are all things that I, or my staff, are personally passionate about. We love high culture and low culture. If it is [a book on] a serious subject, we try to find approaches that will make it as impactful and appealing to as large an audience as possible, and if it’s a pop culture project we try to find the angles that will make the most high-quality and innovative version available.”

As Melcher Media’s website points out, books have basically remained the same since the invention of the Gutenberg Press. If phones and other communication
devices have to keep updating themselves, there’s no reason why this venerable
technology should have to stay the same. “Pop-up books for adults, books with
sound chips and 3-D glasses and now interactive media-rich apps are all examples of an effort to reinvent the book in the digital age.”

The Audi Icons series, inspired by the all-new Audi A7, showcases 16 leading figures united by their dedication to innovation and design.