Happy Halloween

Hope you gorge on miniature candy and chocolate and leave glitter in your bed.

A Glazed Look

My father once made an abstract painting on a Matzah. It's beautiful (hard to capture on camera). He told me that sometimes he almost felt like eating his art, as a metaphor for the cyclical creation process.

Artists at Bunker Hill Community College in Boston created artwork on the theme of food as art, currently being displayed as a group exhibit called "Eat the Art". The show brings together a metric tonnage of artwork on the theme of food as art, featuring pieces in a variety of media from 42 different artists. Found here.

The Kaleidoscope

When you stop to wonder
'What the fuck am I doing here?'
It's like opening a can of snake-filled peanut brittle
the practical joke kind
green mesh wires jump out
taking you by surprise.
the complete random unpredictability,
the twists and turns of a preconceived yet untold plot,
drives you down tree-lined lanes.
pollen slowly rises
gets caught like wool clouds
in the back of your throat.
the questions make your eyes water
propel you to walk down white industrial aisles
fluorescent bulbs casting
an eerie pharmaceutical glow
to create a flow
artificially unblocking, releasing
the backlog of shit
that has made your days a haze.
slowly removed, just hovering above
like a fly sitting pretty on a lamp post
staring into the dull monotony below.
the constant hum, a distant beat
the sound of slow, but continuous movement
as people go to refill prescriptions,
pick-up neatly pressed white shirts,
clip the grocery list on a steel cart,
squeeze into a crowded car at rush hour,
forgetting to stop and wonder,
to gaze at the questions
that slowly arrange and re-arrange
as the kaleidoscope clicks
colors and shapes shift.

Super History

Superb photography project by Agan Harahap from Jakarta, Indonesia. The ‘Super Hero’ project consists of memorable political and wartime scenes from the mid-20th century featuring beloved superheros like Spiderman or Batman in some interesting and funny positions – true juxtaposition in effect. Found here.

Bin it.

Last year I attended an inter-agency conference on CSR and sustainability. Andy Hobsbawm, one of the founders of Do the Green Thing and European Chairman of Agency.com, gave a presentation on the origins and thinking behind Do the Green Thing. He postulated that great creativity is needed to motivate people to behave differently, "to tempt us to act differently with delightful creative scraps", and that creativity can inspire people to be greener. I remember being intrigued by his approach to influencing behavior and his application of lessons from adland to a greater cause (I also remember enjoying his simple, elegant, clean and highly visual presentation).

See Andy speaking at Ted here.

This memory was stirred recently when I came across Volkswagen's The Fun Theory site, and its experimental use of creativity to influence behavior (incidentally, one of The Fun Theory videos (number 3 below) racked up more than 1.3 million views last week).







It seems that the fun strategy is also being considered as motivating force for the hybrid market. At a three-day conference on the future of plug-in hybrids, one lingering question kept coming up: Who's going to buy these things? The answer, according to outsiders and industry leaders here: no one, if they're not fun to drive. Fun to play with. And fun to look at. More here.

Let the change begin.

Dripping with sticky sweetness

Is it just me or is Morgan Freeman inspiring loads of adverts? I feel like what may have once been emotive and moving has become the standard narration. There is only so long something good can last, be remixed and 'reinvented', before it simply becomes lazy and repetitive, completely losing its potency and power. Scripts that attempt to sell phones or paint have become a rallying cry, a call to arms and action, with a background soundtrack replete with clear piano notes. It's all just a bit too much. Where can we go from here? How long will this last?

I've come to really appreciate the witty and ridiculous...

Biblical Blocks

Bringing the bible to life with, er, Lego.






From the Brick Testament.

Iconic Language (tweet)

Simon Oxley, a British Illustrator and designer living in Japan, created the now iconic Twitter bird. He runs his own design and illustration studio, Idokungfoo (super name), produces illustrated imagery for iStockphoto and designed the iStockphoto logo. Some of Simon's elegant and sweet designs below (interesting interview found here).

We're all star dust (not Ziggy).

Explosion of Type Ia Supernovae From Multiple Ignition Points

Designing Patterns

I've been doing research on visualizations of data and information design. I've come across some really elegant graphics. Given the rise of emerging platforms and our penchant for the beautiful and quickly consumed and digested information, it seems that visual communication will only become more relevant and predominant...

Some cool finds below.

The World of 100: if the world were a village of 100 people by Toby Ng.






Stefanie Posavec's Writing with Words project explores methods of visually representing text and visualizes the differences in writing styles of various authors.





Visualize your visitors: A Heat Map of what's hot on your site.



Information Architects: Web Trend Map 4 – Final Beta.



There is one remarkable thing about randomness: Its existence is neither proved nor disproved and it appears everyday in science and in our everyday lives. Random walk presents visualizations of physical mathematical phenomena where true chaos and order within randomness is demonstrated by the use of pure numerical data and software simulations.






Identitee connects the lyrics to songs.



British History Timeline

The Belle & the Bull

The girl in the red gown
stands in the middle of a dusty ring
facing the beast
his nostrils rise and fall quickly
like energetic bursts of photonic energy
something right out of the moon
she faces matted fur
blinking but frozen
a beige broken horn
juts out strangely, an abstract sculpture
planted on top of a wild, pacing animal
she bathes in silence
strong, yet malleable, firm but soft
a kind of jelly tofu
caught in between courage and fear
the sun beats heavily on the ground
clouds of smoke circle around the pit
hushed, cloaked Hasids quietly pray
the girl in the red gown
throws miniature black daggers with a stare
further jostling the charged creature
the face-off continues
they're caught in a strange dance
moving ever so slowly
waltzing
around a quiet morning
filled with undercurrents of expectation, passion and rage
notes tasted delicately on quivering lips

Deconstruction

So here's the story:

An alien vessel appears above Johannesburg. It's motionless, frozen in the air, just hovering above the city. The South African government contemplates, ponders and debates about what to do for three months, until finally deciding to enter the spacecraft. They force themselves into the ship and find around a million aliens, vulnerable and suffering from malnutrition, that look like strange insect prawns.

The government then decides to transport the aliens to earth and create a bordered area for the aliens, where they can live, segregated from human society. It becomes a ghetto, replete with Nigerian gangs, drugs (cat food is like catnip to the aliens and traded for alien weaponry that only aliens can use, which is normally confiscated by a private paramilitary task force, along with anything else that seems remotely threatening), inter-species prostitution, poverty, discrimination and despair.

And then the story really breaks loose.

I went to see District 9 tonight and it was amazing. The writing, story, characters, acting, dark humor, and a sense of realism were all excellently crafted and delivered. I started to deconstruct the narrative because I wanted to attempt to recreate the creative process the scriptwriters might have gone through. I only detailed the opening scenario, the story really takes off from there.

It's interesting to see how wacky and off-the-wall it all sounds; it's a reminder of how the bizarre and strange should never put you off, the weirder, the better. We tend to self-censor, self-critique and edit ideas, so that the best ones may be brushed off as too nutty or not good enough or something to that effect.

Deconstructing movies, concepts, the sell, reminds me to let it all go, and just go for a wander in the corridors of the unbelievable and unexpected.

Bloody Brilliant

This guys should expand and demo other random tech gadgets. I'll love to see them do the Wave demo, then maybe it wouldn't be 20 minutes long...

Dead Fly Art

Via: One Large Prawn