iFeel
May 14, 2008
July 14, 2007
En Orbita
February 02, 2007
Art Inspiring Marketing
London is well known for its tradition as a breeding ground for marketing innovation (the Center for Integrated Marketing comes to mind), so it is not a surprise that the Tate Modern is offering us an interesting lesson through their new Tate Tracks.
As described in Tate Modern’s website, Tate Tracks is the result of an invitation to an eclectic group of musicians to walk around the gallery and “find a piece of art that inspires them to write a track.” Collaborators include The Chemical Brothers, Graham Coxon, and Klaxons among others. The tracks reside exclusively at the Tate Modern [next to the art that provided inspiration] during their first month of life, after that they are released to the world via the internet.
Without pretending to strip this initiative from its artistic value, we might want to look at it through the eyes of the marketer, in which case we will be able to see why this is such an important marketing piece as well.
Today’s marketing and communications industry is facing many issues mainly related to a simple fact: in a world without media options, ruthless irrelevant interruption could thrive; in the present multi-media society, every piece of communication must add some value in order to be considered. This is probably the most visible consequence of an applied attention economy.
Tate Tracks, as a communications program, is a clever initiative that accomplishes various objectives through one cohesive effort: It can potentially boost visits to the Tate Modern since it offers a fresh, new reason to experience art; it also becomes an excellent tool to drive traffic to their website after the one-month exclusivity of the track in the museum expires; and it gives people around the globe a reason to refer friends to the site or write about it, associating the Tate Modern with innovation in the cluttered world of modern art.
The most important characteristic of Tate Tracks, and probably one that is essential to the new school of 21st century marketing is that the program is real. The tracks are inspired by art, leading artists to create a piece that wouldn’t exist without the Tate Modern, and therefore adding significant value to anyone that appreciates the work of the artist, musician, or both.
According to the official press release, “The Tate Tracks initiative devised by Tate Modern, in partnership with advertising agency Fallon, will be supported by a range of promotional activity designed to reach fans of each act and each music genre. The project was developed to highlight the relationship between music and visual art and the role they play in stimulating and inspiring creativity.” We would certainly welcome an annual compilation, perhaps distributed via old-fashioned compact discs.
December 21, 2006
REPEAT [X∞]
Tokyo-based artist Takuji Kogo gave birth to *CANDY FACTORY as a front for his individual work as well as a platform to organize collaborations with (sometimes) regulars such as this blog’s favorite YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES. Kogo usually wears multiple hats, working as a curator/artist in ways that have deserved the label of “an information age version of Andy Warhol's Factory.” Just spend a few minutes exposed to his work and you will find that *CANDY FACTORY stands on its own territory somewhere in between numbers and air.
Infinite repetition seems to be among *CANDY FACTORY’s favorite tools. It is through manipulating this aesthetic element that we end up appreciating the chameleonic form of life itself. The same two seconds are manipulated in a simple, yet disturbingly powerful way to prove that no aesthetic detail should be underestimated.
A recent piece, BOOGIE WOOGIE WONDERLAND 2006 offers an excellent example of the depth of content and meaning that can be achieved via repetition and camera movement. Experience it and you will change your mind many times on whether you like it or not, as you will also change your mind repeatedly on whether it is sexual, funny, festive, cripy, beautiful, interesting, violent, unimportant, childish, serious…
November 21, 2006
Media-fiction [?]
Science-fiction has always provided society with a healthy dose of fresh ideas that at times proved to be more than just inspiration for “real life” science. Perhaps one of the most notorious sci-fi writers in recent times has been Philip K. Dick, who passed away over 20 years ago and yet his ideas are now more relevant than ever. Cinematic fame can be one way to prove Dick’s relevance, a handful of his books have been recently adapted to big Hollywood titles such as “Blade Runner,” “Total Recall,” “Minority Report,” “Paycheck,” and, most recently, “Scanner Darkly.”
A 2004 article at The Economist attempts to explain Hollywood’s fascination with Dick’s ideas: “...why is a strange, drugged-out and paranoid bygone of such interest to modern-day filmmakers? Partly because today's revolution in the biosciences, in particular in neuroscience, makes the questions he was asking particularly relevant. What is real if we can take drugs that alter our moods, or if we can tinker with our own memories? These issues were the flesh and bones of Dick's books, all those years ago.”
Take a closer look at the context of his stories and you will also find a media environment that more or less depicts the multi-screen, information-saturated, ubiquitous present day media world. This is an environment that is somehow familiar in most science-fiction; it seems that there has always been consensus with the fact that we are media and that media will outpace our own evolution exponentially.
A harder endeavor is to add details, imagine a system, the media architecture of the future, more than just the media environment that provides context to the storyline. This has been recently tackled by a new generation of artists that are part of the modern media-savvy society (in which the producer-consumer barrier is long gone) with the ability to predict with more precision the possibilities of futuristic media engineering.
The perfect example is the web-based comic Shooting War, which we reviewed in a previous post almost one month ago. The story is set in 2011, which is not far way in absolute time but certainly distant in “technology years.” This dichotomy makes the vision of this story very interesting, we can almost grasp the future; it is credible and incredible at the same time.
It is surprising how little attention has been devoted to the media environment of Shooting War. Well, it is true that media is essential to the plot and that the story itself takes a hard look at the current media establishment. However, the media architecture itself has been almost overlooked and we find this area particularly interesting because it shows an evolution of digital media in which the web, TV, wireless technology, and evolved video cameras merge to become a seamless experience.
Here is how it works: in 2011 video-blogging (vlogging) is as popular as ever, probably even more so than traditional blogs, WiMAX (wireless internet everywhere) is standard in all major cities, a new generation of digital cameras can stream video directly to any url (vlog) through an easy-to-use interface, a couple of big news networks still command the larger portion of a fractured audience, these networks use a human/software process to constantly monitor the vlogosphere, uploading any signal straight to the network as needed. This provides corporate TV with an almost unlimited source of content in about every subject possible, which can be distributed in any screen imaginable. The system benefits from our collective intelligence in the most literal sense.
Media convergence as opposed to substitution. This doesn't necessarily translate into any improvement for network TV as it is clearly reflected in the story itself. Shooting War contributes with our understanding of modern communication systems by imagining and delineating a complex media environment with outstanding simplicity.
Click on the images below to see our own explanation of the key players in this possible future.
The New Samsung Camera
Vlogging Camera Display
The Network
November 15, 2006
Looking [a/t] TOKION
One of the main problems with design is that it necessarily has to deal with a constant negotiation within substance and style. Richard A. Lanham proposes an interesting system to read, qualify, analyze, dissect, the weight of these two realms in media: The Style/Substance Matrix.
In the words of this attention economist “style and substance, fluff and stuff are loose and baggy categories but useful ones even so. Important versus peripheral, planned versus spontaneous, natural versus mannered, appearance versus reality, inside versus outside, why versus how, manner versus matter: we must make such distinctions every day.” Especially if you are in the business of crafting media.
In this context, it is particularly difficult to conceive a magazine’s website, mostly if the magazine has a strong voice in both territories. This is why the all-new TOKION website designed by Tiffany Malakooti is such a great example of style that lets the substance flow.
An essential element of Lanham’s Style/Substance Matrix is the “A/T mixture,” which serves the purpose of calibrating the act of looking “at” or looking “through” media; the former being focused on aesthetics qualities while the latter concentrates on pure content, always with the premise that “no point of the spectrum is intrinsically evil or virtuous; it seeks to describe rather than to proscribe, to analyze rather than to condemn.” The new TOKION site let us read right at the middle of the spectrum, and we thank Malakooti for that, the TOKION persona is finally alive on the web.
November 14, 2006
Anselm Kiefer, Explained
The SFMOMA is offering us an interesting view at Kiefer's work through an exhibition that runs through January 21, and an interactive program that reviews “four decades of art by Anselm Kiefer, including paintings, sculptures, books, and works on paper that reflect the artist’s career-long meditation on the relationship between heaven and earth.”
Kiefer has a particular way of embedding his own system of signs in his work, which is explored in a simple yet informative manner in the interactive program. The virtual curator reviews a sample of his work in the context of its "symbolic language" representing ritual, remembrance, and technology among others.
His views on technology caught my attention. The artist suggests "that communications technology fulfills the unifying role that state religion once did.” This couldn’t be more precise in the age of electronic information, a futuristic vision considering that this is interpreted out of a 1985 piece (Osiris and Isis).
Also below is a bizarre account of a recent MAC exhibition. Interesting to watch even if you don’t understand French, definitively worth the five minutes.
Anselm Kiefer – Interactive Program
November 02, 2006
Text, Liberated
We referred to the work of Richard Lanham and YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES in two separate posts. This time they come together as different parts of the same argument.
Lanham, in a chapter of his book The Economics of Attention titled What’s Next for Text?, argues that electronic media is slowly unleashing the full potential of the written word. Text as we know it in a static, lineal fashion has great (well-known) advantages. However, this traditional form shouldn’t be taken as the final destination of text. Electronic media is playing a role in advancing this medium in another direction, not necessarily in the spirit of replacement but in the spirit of innovation.
The Seoul-based group YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES is notorious for their experimentations with text in the digital arena. Their simplicity is outstanding when we internalize the profound effect in our feelings that their work is able to produce. They are indirectly answering Lanham assertion that “we want words to move for the same reason we want everything else to move, because movement means life and the space and time in which life exists.”
From the communications point of view, this media form is almost hypnotic; it is really hard to take your senses away from any of their pieces once they begin. Lanham, again, has an interesting explanation: “Our eyes are programmed to detect motion. We like it. When we see text move, we are drawn into the movement. And when the movement takes us to a land where meaning has a visual embodiment, we pay attention to it.”
Moving text is then a powerful media form in both the poetic sense as well as in the context of the attention economy. Its simplicity is the result of our strong relationship with text, developed over many centuries, and our genetic fascination with movement. YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES are certainly not the first ones to experiment with text but their work is original and more relevant than ever in a world that is just starting to grasp the concept of human attention as currency.
Below is a selection of some of their work in the political, storytelling, and even romantic realm. Enjoy.
CUNNILINGUS IN NORTH KOREA [English version]
JONGNO [English version]
November 01, 2006
Blogging Comics
“New York, NY - The year is 2011, and Jimmy Burns, a young anti-corporate blogger has just seen his Williamsburg apartment blown to bits by yet another terrorist attack on New York City. He’s recorded the gruesome scene on his videoblog camera-footage Burns beams live to a freaked-out world and that makes him an overnight media sensation. Exploited by his own network (Global News:”Your home for 24-hour terror coverage”), enraged by the terrorists, and determined to tell the American people the truth, Burns takes off for Iraq to get the real story of a war that’s been raging for more than eight years…” What follows is one of the most interesting experiments in media convergence in the recent history of comics.
Anthony Lappé and Dan Goldman’s Shooting War delivers a story set in the near future that forces us to take a hard look at our immediate past. Inaction will come at a price. That is probably one of the main takeaways of this absorbing story.
The medium, so far (according to Wired, there will be a hardcover print version next year), is an unusual combination of web + comics with an air of blogging that is consistent with the story itself. This is definitively an explosive combination. Right at the beginning of the web as mass media, Scott McCloud reminded us that, at the moment (1993), comics was “one of the very few forms of mass communication in which individual voices still have a chance to be heard.” That assessment remains true today, however technology has made possible other forms of media that are reshaping the toolbox available to independent voices.
It is impossible to summarize the importance of comics as media in this space. Impossible and unnecessary given the brilliant revision of this art form that is McCloud’s Understanding Comics. What we can anticipate is an evolution of comics in the digital form that will mix and remix with other media formats available now as well as with those yet to be invented. Another win for communication and communicators.
Here is a preview of chapter one, take it as my own trailer of this story.
October 13, 2006
Art is futile
Let’s give another round of applause to YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES. It is extremely hard to transcend the realm of quality and feelings when confronted with the Seoul-based (net) art group.
The Art of Sleep, the group’s latest piece is now available at Tate Online's net art space. The piece is accompanied by a second flash movie, The Art of Silence, which is based on an interview by Jemima Rellie in the context of their artistic practice. See a scrambled photographic excerpt of the interview at the end of this post.
The Art of Sleep is perhaps more cerebral than some of their earlier work but is loyal to their aesthetics and unique art/media form in every way. When compared to other pieces like Dakota (my personal favorite), it gives you more space to rationalize, to go beyond feelings, beyond the hypnotic state that these folks can and will induce in anyone willing to pay attention.
Please take a few minutes to enjoy their new virtual exhibit and don’t miss the interview, it transpires the same bluntness and honesty as their own art, which these days is highly appreciated.
