Saam Farahmand Turns Music Video into an Interactive Exhibition

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This writer is a big fan of the music video. If it’s done well, you’ll have something like the best of both worlds between a great short film and a song you really dig in this perfect, compressed package. But what happens when you take a video out of its normal confines of computer monitors or, more rare these days, a television screen? Director Saam Farahmand was tasked with making a music video for the up and coming band The xx. But instead of shooting, editing, and releasing, he and the band decided to make something of an event out of it by creating an interactive exhibition now running in London’s Vinyl Factory space. You wander around a big room with three cubes, on which footage of the musicians appear as projections, accompanied by connected, ever-changing lighting. It sounds great as a one-off, interesting project, but Farahmand seems to think this is the future of the medium:

“It is in essence a physical music video, a looping shrine to the album that you cannot compress, send or turn off. We have to understand that these pop-up ‘rooms’ and ‘spaces’ should and will become as commonplace as music videos, bridging the gap until we have the technology to ‘stream’ a 3D experience through our home computer as if it was a YouTube clip. The xx are the perfect ambassadors for the medium. Their music is mesmerizing, and deeply physically affecting.”

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Dieter Rams 101: When Less and More Is More

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It will come as no surprise to longtime readers that in lieu of a break room (design news, after all, stops for no one), UnBeige HQ is home to a sleek shrine of sorts at which we regularly reflect on the enduring importance of Dieter Rams. And while we haven’t yet had the opportunity to cross the pond for “Less and More,” the Design Museum‘s current exhibition of the designer’s groundbreaking work, we found the next best thing: a firsthand look from Bibliothèque, the London-based firm who designed the exhibition. In an entry on the Eye magazine blog, the designers describe their approach to showcasing Ram’s design ethos:

Our exhibition design has been informed by the graphic nature of the objects. The layouts on many of the Braun products are excellent examples of three-dimensional information design—not only the use of controlled typography, but also in the pragmatic use of colour, geometry, positioning, and alignment of dials, switches, buttons, jackplugs, and screws. Our approach was to express this by extrapolating these aspects and using them as visual elements throughout the exhibition experience.

The show features exploded graphic elements of Rams designs (here a speaker grille, there a distinctive hi-fi interface) that delineate the various areas of the exhibition, and the back wall is painted with a 23-foot-long mural of the Audio 300 stereo system to “reinforce the rational approach to product layout.”

So, did Rams approve of Bibliothèque’s work? Indeed. “He understood our graphic interpretation of the products, and he was keen to explain his own approach to graphic design within the sphere of product design,” note the designers. “It was an absolute honor and an inspiration to get firsthand insight from one of the elder statesman of design.”

“Less and More” is on view at the Design Museum through March 9. Read on for video footage of the exhibition and recent interviews with Rams.

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Atlantas High Museum Salutes John Portman

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Architect and Atlanta native John Portman, who designed a hefty chunk of his hometown’s downtown, gets the star treatment in a peachy new exhibition at the High Museum of Art. On view through April 18, 2010, “John Portman: Art & Architecture,” features architectural projects by Portman, now 85 (Frank Lloyd Wright guest lectured in one of his college courses at Georgia Tech), as well as his furniture, paintings, and sculpture. Among the 15 completed and current projects featured in the show is the Hyatt Regency Atlanta, Portman’s pioneering atrium hotel of 1967 that he followed up with soaring airy spaces in Detroit’s Renaissance Center and the Marriott Marquis in New York City. These days, his firm is doing a bustling business in Asia, with projects underway throughout China and in India (a Hyatt for Hyderabad), and of course, South Korea’s Incheon Tower, a twin-towered complex that will stand 151 feet tall. Can’t make it to Atlanta? You need not be tardy for the party—check out the below video for more about Portman.

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