Hasta La Ideas

During Milan Design Week 2013 Nike introduced The Art + Science of Super Natural Motion, a live body-mapping exhibition developed by digital artists Universal Everything, Daniel Widrig and Quayola + Sinigaglia to interpret Nike Free…

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Curator Chris Anderson on the media company’s new publishing platform

In a recent sit-down with TED Curator Chris Anderson, I had the chance to try out the TED Books app, a dedicated platform to hold the company’s publishing endeavor. Focused on short books, TED Books hopes to continue TED’s method of viral ideation by tailoring to today’s attention spans. This addition to the TED family has fascinating implications for the company, which has clearly moved from an annual meeting-of-the-minds to a global media phenomena. As Anderson, a publishing veteran, explains, “TED is a media organization devoted to ideas worth spreading.”

“Arguably, a lot of the reason why books are the length they are is because the physical form demands it. If you were to print a short book, it just feels cheap, so things have to be 80,000 words regardless of whether or not the content demands it,” says Anderson. “A book that fit the length of the idea that it’s trying to express became interesting to us.” Long enough to communicate the idea and short enough to feel unimposing, TED settled on 20,000 words—an ideal length for a single sitting.

“In a magazine, the mode of behavior is bit like a playground in that you browse—a page here, a page there. With a book, you’re on a train journey. You start and you work your way through, and there’s something very satisfying about that,” explains Anderson. “So what do you do on an iPad where you have lots of reasons to play and lots of opportunities to play?” After searching through available platforms, they settled on Atavist. The platform gave TED the level of interaction they were seeking, with narrative linearity and optional browsing of multimedia tangents.

Launched last January, TED Books is now moving away from Kindle singles to their dedicated app. The new platform accommodates browsing through in-line items that can link to images, maps, audio and video. Best of all, the interaction is optional—users choose the way in which they read by toggling the additional elements on or off. There is also social element that allows for a kind of user-generated marginalia. While books come in at $2.99 on the free app, TED encourages the subscription model for $14.99, which delivers two monthly books for three months. Founding subscribers (people who sign up in the first 90 days) will also receive free access to the entire back catalog of TED Books. Because users know what to expect from TED, the company can get away with this subscription model.

“I think one of the biggest problems in the book publishing world as it goes online is just the problem of discovery—so what’s the equivalent of walking into a bookstore and browsing to find the thing you want? The subscription model is an interesting alternative. You just say ‘Look, trust us.'”

The TED Books app is now available on iTunes. Check out the app in action by watching TED’s video.

Portrait by Josh Rubin

A massive collaborative exhibition showcases audio-visual delights

by Naheed Simjee

A resurrected rapper by way of a hologram wasn’t the only technological breakthrough that had people talking last week. Returnees from Coachella Part I flocked downtown on Thursday night for the opening of Transmission LA: AV Club sponsored by Mercedes-Benz and The Avant/Garde Diaries at the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA. The visionary and creative mastermind of the festival, Beastie Boy Mike D, invited 17 multi-disciplinary artists—including Family Bookstore and Roy Choi’s Kogi Korean BBQ food truck—to create extraordinary site-specific installations that demonstrate the influence and inspiration that audio and visual art forms have on one another. The exhibition runs through 6 May 2012 with a full schedule of live performances.

“It’s the new art, a new audience, new music and new technologies all together, and it’s a wonderful fit with the fabulous new Mercedes that is being unveiled tonight,” explains Jeffrey Deitch, director of the MOCA, who has been actively involved with the project since LA was selected for this edition of the festival’s destination. The first Transmission festival was held in Berlin and curated by Dior’s new head designer, Raf Simons.

The exhibition is an immersive experience in sensory stimulation. Upon entering the massive space, seductive lights and vibrant colors tempt patrons to freely explore in every direction. Immediately, Takeshi Murata‘s zany audio loop of a game show host’s voice enthusiastically announces a series of prizes: “It’s a new car! It’s a new boat! It’s a piano!” Exhibition-goers are lured to a projection of sequentially stacked images of The Price Is Right Showcase models revealing game prizes, and a totally unexpected surprise.

Another showstopper is Ben Jones‘ stellar creation of a triangular tunnel—paneled with Tron-like neon grids and sound bites of racecars zooming by—leading to an enormous room in which computer-animated projections take over the floors and walls, as if you’re suddenly transported into a life-size version of Pole Position.

Ara Peterson and Jim Drain have created a series of hypnotic spinning fan-activated pinwheels mounted at different heights and depths. This segment of the exhibition pleasantly seems to slow things down and makes you feel as if you’ve stumbled into the control room at the Wonka Factory.

Tucked away unassumingly in a room further down is another work central to Mercedes’ vision for the project. Visitors are invited to take one of the pairs of headphones hanging from the ceiling to listen to drum and bass tracks created by Adam Horowitz (Ad-Rock of the Beastie Boys), that perfectly sync up to a light performance surrounding the new Mercedes Concept Style Coupe. “The car itself is a sculpture and the original model was made out of hand clay,” says Mark Fetherston, exterior designer for Mercedes. “There’s a lot of shape and it’s an expressive design statement. We’ve taken a more artistic approach and here, we’re mixing with different people, so it’s not just a typical motor show approach. We’re trying to really attract new customers.”

The robust aroma of Miscela d’Oro Espresso beans emanates from Robert McKinley‘s coffee bar installation, based on a concept that Mike D introduced to Deitch when discussing ideas for the exhibition. Mike D and McKinley—who also served as the co-designer of the entire exhibition—are self-proclaimed coffee obsessives and consume a lot of it. “There’s been so many times where I’ve been at an exhibit and I feel like I’ve burned out at a certain point and if I could just get a cup of coffee, I could stay in the game a bit longer,” says Mike D. “I wanted to give all the people here that opportunity. We didn’t want to do it with just a cart, we wanted it to be an impressive cup of coffee, so we took it one step further and actually made it one of the installations in the space. Rob kind of went crazy, in a good way. The beans are from Naples. The coffee has a very classic Italian profile.”

The exhibition also includes works by filmmaker Mike Mills, paintings by Sage Vaughn and Will Fowler, Justin Lowe and Jonah Freeman‘s environmental installation combining fictional narrative with artifacts, Tom Sachs‘ Jamaican sound system-inspired sculpture comprised of several speakers, an axe, a chained iPod and tape deck, video art by Cory Arcangel and Sanford Biggers and a complete build out of a social space in which Public Fiction addresses the topic of the nightclub, that will also host several nights of live performances.

So what are the challenges of putting on a show of this magnitude? Mike D explains, “What ultimately prepared me for being able to do an exhibition like this was that, on multiple occasions, the Beastie Boys had to mount fairly decent size concert tours. Really it’s this quandary of figuring out what’s the visual presentation we’re going to give our music while making it fun and exciting and new. Hopefully, it’s something that people haven’t seen or experienced before, so that’s somewhat analogous to this project. What I’ve taken away from this and have been most inspired by is really just getting to work with the individual artists here.”

“I feel like they really work in the realm of translating the idea and making it into a reality and experience that everybody shares,” says Mike D. “It’s inspiring for me, coming from a world where we have all these parameters, where you want to build something, but someone says, ‘Oh, that will never work!’ or you want to do a record cover, but the artwork isn’t going to be the right size. These artists are really in the job of just being translators of creation. We’ve managed to do this by living here for the past two weeks and working 14 hours a day.”

Mercedes is using the creative platform to redefine itself by associating with the art of tomorrow; as Deitch confirms, “This is exactly what we want to be doing at the MOCA.” Transmission LA: AV Club will run through 6 May 2012 at the Geffen Contemporary.

Geffen Contemporary at MOCA

152 North Central Avenue

Los Angeles, CA 90012

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.

Your campaigns are all so visually gripping. Yet the website has no interactivity, no links, just plain text&#8212is that part of the Al Dente mystique?

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.

Tell us more about the agency, the team and methods.

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.

The Dior pinball, Thierry Mugler’s “Dream Machine”, among others—these campaigns consist of interactive games. Is participation the key to identification with a brand or a product? What does the playful dimension add to this involvement?

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.

Are there technical challenges involved with that level of interactivity?

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.

Is that what you call “chic buzz”? What is the connection with luxury? And what is the role of art in your creations?

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.

What’s next for Al Dente?

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!

Local artists inspire guests with interactive works

It’s hard to turn down an invitation to experience a few days in Beijing while staying at one of its hippest hotels, so when the Opposite House extended an invitation to visit we jumped at the opportunity. The hotel, along with its sister hotel Upper House in Hong Kong, strives to present a uniquely local experience wrapped in service with style, and perfectly suited to hyper-travelers like us. While certainly impressed by little details like in-room check-in and free mini-bars, the biggest surprise came in the form of the hotels’ art programs, particularly the constantly rotating artist program at Opposite House.

Hotel art is notoriously subpar, typically taking the form of cheap prints hung without much thought. Not so at the Opposite House, where the offerings significantly transcend what we’ve typically seen. While the space is filled with excellent art from a range of Chinese artists, the hotel takes it a step further by hosting artists for three-month installation periods, customized by each artist, in the hotel’s massive central forecourt. The hotel is tapped into China’s contemporary artistic core, acting as a host to both established and up-and-coming artists of the city’s prolific talent pool.

Approaching the emerald glass exterior of the Opposite House, the modernist styling blends seamlessly with surrounding bamboo gardens. A large atrium fills the interior while the front faces a traditional courtyard-style home, giving the hotel its witty name. The hotel spares no expense for luxury, and offers a number of bars (Punk and Mesh) and restaurants (the casual Village Cafe, the upscale Asian Bei, and my favorite, Sureño, with its Mediterranean menu).

Opposite House works with the local Red Gate Gallery to create its shows, selecting mainly Beijing-based artists. The hotel keeps the content of these exhibitions as diverse as the interests of the artists themselves. During my visit, I was fortunate enough to witness “Through My Eyes” from Mo Yi and got a preview of “I-Ching,” an installation of sculptures by Huang Rui inspired by the the eponymous book, known in English as “The Book of Changes.”

“Through My Eyes,” is an ever-expanding collection of photographed eyes that blurs the line between artist and audience. Participants pose for a photograph taken by the artist. Two prints are made: one the participant keeps and the second becomes part of the evolving installation, with inscriptions written in the borders by the subjects. While exploring the collection, I opted to be photographed and join the ranks of Mo’s subjects.

“I-Ching” features 64 phrases from the book of changes, inscribed on black and white umbrellas for an installation with both active and passive elements. When the artist is not present, viewers enjoy sculptural groupings of the umbrellas. When the artist is in the hotel, people are invited to stand with the umbrellas and the artist in a circle decorated with the yin yang symbol and to have a one-on-one exchange with the artist, which may be spoken or silent depending on the artist’s desire. While superstitious westerners may be quick to forewarn the dangers of umbrellas indoors, Huang’s show was a hit amongst participating guests.

I-Ching is currently on display, and is open to the public through March 2012. Previous artist exhibitions have included Chen Wenling’s sculptural series “Red Memory,” Li Xiaoling’s clothing-inspired “Enhance the Beauty” and a bespoke postcard collection from various students at Beijing’s Central Academy of Fine Arts.

Opposite House

11号 Sanlitun Road

Chaoyang, Beijing, China, 100027

Photos by Opposite House and Evan Orensten