Hasta La Ideas

Tonight, Core77 welcomes Nicholas Everett of Vanport Outfitters to our bi-weekly creative speaker series: The Hand-Eye Supply Curiosity Club hosted at the Hand-Eye Supply store in Portland, OR. Come early and check out our space or check in with us online for the live broadcast!

Tuesday, November 29th
6PM PST
Hand-Eye Supply
23 NW 4th Ave
Portland, OR, 97209

Vanport Outfitters was founded in Portland, Oregon with the goal of producing durable, handmade luggage and accessories using traditional craftsmanship and materials. Owner and Creative Director Nicholas Everett was born in Portland, where he grew up working at the family business crafting custom canvas products for sailboats and yachts. His 17 years in that field demanded a significant amount of design work with heavy canvas and the requisite fasteners and marine hardware.

(more…)

If you haven’t been following our occasional posts on the London 2012 Olympics, all you need know is that there are a lot of various accoutrement that come with such an event, and right now we’d like to catch you up on two just-released pieces to add to the pile. First, the official Olympic and Paralympic coins have been released. The former was designed by an architecture student, and features sort of exactly what you’d expect from this sort of thing (an image of the city’s skyline, icons of the various sports, etc.). However, it’s the Paralympic coin, designed by Pippa Sanderson, that wins our hearts. It cleverly incorporates a shot-up target, a bicycle spoke, a stop watch, and the face of Big Ben, all split into sections on one face of the coin. It’s interesting, fun, and beautiful, and bravo to the Olympic committee for selecting something more interesting than the usual. Second, the LOCOG has also unveiled the Olympic and Paralympic Posters. These are the “art” posters, and given that they include artists like Martin Creed, Tracey Emin, and Gary Hume, they’re more likely to be used to raise awareness of the London 2012 Festival (where they’ll be hosted at the Tate) than for the games themselves. Our favorite of the bunch is Bridget Riley‘s “Rose Rose,” which “has arranged colours in horizontal stripes, indicating the direction of athletic tracks or swimming lane.” They can all be seen here.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Sustainability and creativity converged on October 26th during the first Cleveland Designers Accord Town Hall, held at the Cleveland Institute of Art with sponsorship by AIGA Cleveland, the Northeast Ohio Chapter of IDSA, SmartShape Design, and The Cleveland Institute of Art. More than one hundred designers and innovators listened to presentations about the four key themes of the evening: energy storage, the small house movement, electric vehicle infrastructure, and water. Following the presentations, the audience separated into breakout sessions to share their perspectives and opinions.

Evening organizers Anthony Buehrer of SmartShape and Doug Paige of CIA welcomed the enthusiastic crowd and introduced the Town Hall topics and the entrepreneurs who are tackling the themes in unique ways.

Theme 1: Energy Storage & Getting off the Grid
Imagine lighting units smart enough to store energy during non-peak usage times and savvy enough to go off the power grid (operating from stored energy) at highest peak times. That’s the vision of Wireless Environment, a Cleveland-based company founded in 2007.

Company co-founder and President, David Levine, explained how their solution combines LEDs, integrated batteries, and patented sensors to achieve this objective. “The biggest issue for power companies is trying to meet the ever-increasing demands at peak usage times,” said Levine. “That’s a major reason they have to keep building more power plants.” He envisions a time when they’ll sell power much cheaper per kilowatt at non-peak, creating a market for devices that buy power off-peak and store it for use later.

(more…)

Just before the weekend, Los Angeles’ MOCA found itself embroiled in something of a battle between it and famous choreographer, Yvonne Rainer. The latter had come out publicly against the museum’s plans for this past Saturday’s annual fundraising gala, which was to be created by Marina Abramovic and would involve hired performers sitting on lazy susans under each table, with just their heads poking out, serving as an ever-rotating human centerpiece (here’s a photo from the LA Times). Hearing from an auditioning performer about what Abramovic had planned (and by extension, what controversy-courting museum director Jeffrey Deitch had give the okay to), and learning that the artist had demanded the the performers remain in “character” no matter if party attendees tried to feed them, get them to drink, “fondle us under the table,” etc., that was enough for Rainer, who fired off a letter to Deitch, labeling the event as “public humiliation at the hands of a bunch of frolicking donors” and “yet another example of the Museum’s callousness and greed and Ms Abramovic’s obliviousness to differences in context and some of the implications of transposing her own powerful performances to the bodies of others.” In response, the museum offered to have Rainer come to the rehearsals, which she did. While the choreographer found the scene, with hundreds of rotating live heads sitting atop tables both “touching and somewhat comic” and admitted that she herself has “never been averse to occasional epatering of the bourgeoisie,” it didn’t seem to change her opinion at all. Rainer updated her letter to Deitch, adding 50 fellow supporters names to it, and called the event a “grotesque spectacle” that “promises to be truly embarrassing.”

So that was all leading up to Saturday’s event. How did it all go over? The Daily Beast‘s Isabel Wilkinson has the first on-site report we’ve seen published, wherein the rotating heads are but just a slight bit of the weirdness Abramovic had ready for the evening. It’s worth reading Wilkinson’s report in full, so we won’t spoil it here, but we will say it involves famous women being hacked up with machetes, members of the crowd chanting “violence against women!” and a woman being quoted as saying, “This is misogyny at its finest.” All in all, at least for publicity’s sake, it sounds like yet another triumphant success for both Abramovic and Deitch.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

As any pensive puppet frog will tell you, it’s not easy being green—unless you have access to Diana Balmori. The landscape and urban designer works at the interface of nature and structure (to wit: Groundwork: Between Landscape and Architecture, written with Joel Sanders and freshly published by Monacelli). Her New York-based firm continues to push the boundaries with innovative green roofs, floating islands, and temporary landscapes that get people talking in more ways than one. On Tuesday, November 15, Balmori will be the one doing the talking, as she sits down for a conversation with Peter Reed, MoMA’s senior deputy director of curatorial affairs, at 92nd Street Y. She will show slides of her work, discuss the role of landscape in today’s cities, and explain her vision of life-enhancing design. Tickets are available here, and you can save 25% off by entering discount code UNBEIGE11.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.