© Kirby Ferguson (via YouTube)
There is an element of explotation to all creatitvity, to appropriate is to take without permission —that’s creativity. You don’t ask others if you could do it, you just do it. Who would you ask anyway? It’s okay to take if you do it the right way.
As a foreigner very much into Asian –more particularly Japanese– culture, philosophy and design, cultural appropriation is a topic I’ve thought about quite a bit already —and even more so since I’m a father now, trying to be the best role model I can be.
Just like with his absolutely amazing series on remixing, Kirby Ferguson makes some valid points on this sensitive topic during his Farewell to Cultural Appropriation.
On a related note: Ferguson is bringing his 2020 series This Is Not a Conspiracy Theory to YouTube (for free). Episode one is available already, the other five parts will be released every two weeks. I haven’t seen it as of now, so I can’t tell you if it is any good, but given the recent track record of the filmmaker, I’m going to watch it for sure!
the process® is the practice. the artifacts are just the side effects.
© Tavo Studio (via Vimeo)
Where is your OASIS?
There is always a space between art and design, and that’s the spot where everyone
wants to be.
Oasis is a manifiesto in favor of the search for the balance between design and art.
Where is the border between client´s requests and your aspirations?In short, it is a difficult balance to achieve.
© nomena (via Vimeo)
© nomena (via YouTube)
nomena is investigating new types of space perception. research and practice, academic and commercial, technology and aesthetic.
As mentioned in the about section of this blog, I love projects which cross-scale in media and studios (and creatives) who work interdisciplinary. Japanese studio nomena by Shohei Takei is such a studio, working at the intersection of art, design and science to create amazing tactile projects.
© Thibaut Charlut / La Blogothèque Productions (via YouTube)
Une chorégraphie Originale par Sadeck Waff is an astonishing choreography for the Olympic and Paralympic Games 2024 in Paris crafted by Sadeck Waff, beautifully captured on film by La Blogothèque. The video shows him performing with 126 professionals and amateurs to music composed by Woodkid, performed by the Orchestre National de France.
What a marvellous piece of art.
© Kirby Ferguson (via YouTube)
Our creativity comes from without, not from within. We are not self made, we are dependent on one another. Admitting this to ourselves isn’t an embrace of mediocrity and derivativeness —it’s a liberation from our misconceptions, and it’s an incentive to not expect so much from ourselves, and to simply begin.
As creatives, we are usually driven to chase what we think of as purely original ideas. While I was studying design, a video series called Everything is a Remix was making the rounds, offering another –presumably much healthier– perspective on novelty and inspiration.
A decade later, Kirby Ferguson is apparently redoing the series for 2021 and I recommend every creative to watch it —but especially those who are still in training.
© Jason Bruges Studio / Sam King (via Vimeo)
An interesting installation by London based Jason Bruges Studio for the past Olympic and the upcoming Paralympic Games in Tokyo:
The Constant Gardeners will create a new visual language to communicate and celebrate the motion of the professional athletes and their feats of physical prowess. The installation will produce dynamic, representative patterns, which ‘the gardeners’, a team of four industrial robot arms mounted on linear rails, will precisely rake into a large-scale gravel canvas, consisting of fourteen tonnes of crushed black basalt, surrounded by a further four tonnes of silver-grey granite. In a series of daily performances, ‘the gardeners’ will work together to create around one-hundred-and-fifty unique illustrations throughout the duration of the Tokyo 2020 Olympic and Paralympic Games.
© Above&Below and Einar Fehrholz (via Vimeo)
Aquateque is a short film and multimedia installation exploring the river Ruhr through a variety of new media technologies. The diverse ecosystem of the surrounding is captured through audio, visual and 3d modelling tools and transformed into a generative augmented space. The project explores themes such as digital material ecology and neural networks as artistic tools to dream about alternative and fantastical worlds in which nature, machines and humans collide.
© Six N. Five (via Vimeo)
Ordinary, everyday objects are the ones who rebel in a high-class house. Hidden, invisible, concealed, they disrupt the harmony of the calculated interior design. A true class revolution takes place, where the underdogs rise up against a so-called perfection.
I’ve been a huge fan of the beautiful, hyper-realistic CGI Six N. Five crafts for quite a while now and the latest short –of which a special version was sold as a NFT– is no exception. The Revolt features the clean and smooth signature aesthetic, the strong physicality and the excellent fabric qualities I admire within the imagery of the studio from Barcelona.
Besides the linked video, there’s a free desktop-application for this piece which enables the user to roam the house freely and discover the individual furniture objects with, alongside other options, Virtual Reality hardware. And while the visual fidelity naturally looses some of its high quality when experienced through a current VR headset, I’m still impressed what the small studio was able to pull off with the different set pieces here.