Hasta La Creative!

Buckle up.

Washington Post (Nov 26, 2007): “Widespread expectations of a recession could be self-fulfilling because of how financial markets and mainstream America are interconnected. If investors are sufficiently convinced a recession is ahead, they would be reluctant to lend money to businesses that want to expand, making it so.”

Here are the expectations:

Google Trends: term “recession” in searches and news (U.S).

Blogpulse: term “recession” in consumer-generated media (blogs, newsgroups)

NY Times (Dec 4, 2007): “Growth in advertising spending in the United States is slowing considerably, according to several forecasters whose predictions are closely followed. But they believe the continuing strength of ad spending online — as well as the stimulative effects of the elections and the Summer Olympics — should keep the industry from suffering a recession in 2008.”

Telegraph (Dec 15, 2007): “Morgan Stanley has issued a full recession alert for the US economy, warning of a sharp slowdown in business investment and a “perfect storm” for consumers as the housing slump spreads.”

Time to dust off the trusty chart showing how advertising during recession is good for business in the long run:

The results of a McGraw-Hill research that showed companies advertising during the 1981-82 recession averaged higher sales growth (source).

By far one of the most beautiful videos I’ve seen lately.
 
It seems the guys at Lakai took this video down from every streaming website there is. Quite a shame. For those of you who saw it, hope you liked it. Those who didn’t, I’ll try to find it again and when I do I’ll post it right here. 
Link: Lakai.
Via: ComputerLove.

That Dexter Viral campaign created by London agency Ralph which according to them “proved so controversial that Ralph received calls of complaint from the public and London’s Scotland Yard Police” is still quite sticky months after its release. The premise it the fun personalization trick, where you can type in a friends name and freak them the hell out used in many a viral campaign before we were even set a personal one but we didn’t take it seriously since the serial killer in this video is looking for a mid-30’s male with a background in media calling themselves Ad Rag, so I figured us Art Directing females of undefined age calling our site Adland and ourselves Dabitch were safe. 😉 Note to Ralph, try targeting a little more correct next time. On the other hand, we love the show and especially the titles.

In other silly news, the 24-Hour Michael Bolton Station Declares Bankruptcy, gee who would have thunk it.

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At the Artissima art fair last month in Turin, i discovered a new player on the local art scene: the Parco d’Arte Vivente (Park of Living Art).

It all started when i almost fell on my knees in front of an installation by Michel Blazy. The first time i saw his work was at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. The installation Post Patman stank, rot, crumbled and formed mushrooms, attracted insects and birds but i love it.

The work on show at Artissima, Le tombeau du poulet aux quatre cuisses (The grave of the four-legged chicken), is a skeleton laying on a bed of earth and surrounded by mushroom. The skeleton looks indeed like the one of a chicken, a giant chicken and as it is made of dog biscuits (made themselves from animal products) will be slowly desintegrating over time.

The PAV was also exhibiting one of Jun Takita‘s sculpture Jusqu’aux recoins du monde, the sculpture of a brain recovered with bioluminescent algae. For years, the Paris-based artist has been interested in bioluminescence.

Jusqu’aux recoins du monde

According to traditional classification, photosynthesizing organisms
belong to the plant kingdom. Plants transform light into energy but are not capable of bioluminescence —that is, they cannot emit light. Excepting a few species like the dinoflagellates, which belong to both the plant and animal kingdoms, bioluminescence is found in only a few animal species. Biological evolution has not
given rise to an organism that can both consume light as energy and use that energy to create its own light. However, over the last few years, genetic manipulation has made it possible to create bioluminescent plants. These plants/nonplants artificial organisms transgress the laws of nature.

Light only Light, by Jun Takita. Image Yusuke Komiyama

It is easy to perceive a figure in the landscape within 10° of one’s line of sight (the size of the visual field of a fist held out at arm’s length). For example, constellations are based on the principle that one reads stars at a distance of up to about 11° from one another as part of a group. Even when we look at the sky, the human hand is the unit of reference for measuring an image. If an object exceeds this 10° visual field, we have to move our eyes in order to perceive it in its entirety. Vision is then constructed by the accretion of several images memorized by the brain. In 1998, the artist started to work on a garden project based on this phenomenon.

On the left, portrait of Jun Takita

The elevated garden is to be situated on top of a building in Tokyo. As Tokyo is a very polluted city, it is not unusual to see gardens being grown on the top buildings by inhabitants in order to cool down a bit the temperature of the city.

The central element of Takita’s own garden is a mineral sculpture composed of three walls forming a cave and a bush pruned into a hemisphere. The inside of the cave is to be covered with a bioluminescent moss produced with genetic engineering technology. The moss will emit light via photosynthesis. The visitor is led to a viewpoint along the axis of the sculpture, where the bush is framed by the cave. The distance from this point to the bush will permit the eye to perceive the whole installation at once.

The visitor is invited to discover a visual experience made possible through genetic engineering. During the day, the light of the sun is much stronger than the one emitted through bioluminescence, therefore the form of the bush will be lit by the sun, and its shape will serve to distinguish it from a dark background. After sunset the opposite happens: the bioluminescent background will be broken up by the silhouette of the bush, forming a negative figure (via Takita’s paper and the notes i took during the artist’s presentation during the round table, titled Places and creative processes of the living arts, and organized by the Parco d’Arte Vivente at artissima).

One of Jun Takita’s works will be part of sk-interfaces which opens at FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology) in Liverpool on 01 February until 30 March 2008.

Last week i went to the temporary headquarters of the PAV to check out their exhibition Living Materials. It closed yesterday but will be traveling to Austria. I do not have the details about that second show yet. But when i do, i’ll let you know because Living Materials is a very charming exhibition.

Every work presented involves the public in a timed process cadenced by the cyclic rhythm of biological and ecological phenomena. Life and death are simultaneously present and aesthetically represented in the continuum of procedural works which ask us about the man-nature relationship in the age of biotechnology.

The works on show include Le Poulet and photos of Jun Takita’s work but also:

Ennio Bertrand, The creator has a master plan (first created in 2003 under the title Lemon Sky and revamped for Living Materials).

An array of hundreds of lemons are pierced with small metal sheets, they are in fact Volta batteries supplied with citrus energy which powers tiny Leds, one every 4 lemons. Originally the lemons looked like the ones you can see on the image above but when i visited the PAV, the lemons were a yummy green as you can see on the image on the right. I actually liked that a lot, in yellow, they were too perfect, too plastic looking, but covered with decay they were more living than ever.

The artist writes: I imagined that the lemons during their “work” of withering and decomposing would give back the sun stored by the tree in his fruits during its productive phase in form of small flares.

I think it’s fascinating that a fruit of nature through an electronic device can palpitate for some days. It seems the proof to me of our dependence on the environment, of our tight and deep bond to nature.

The project proposes a reflection on the energetic resources of our planet and re-explores one of the artist’s theme of predilection: time. Six months of ripening, several days of life for the work and very short flashes of light, like snapshots of the passing by of time.

The last work on show is Food Island, by Andrea Caretto & Raffaella Spagna. The complex water system feeds several interconnected little islands containing various natural elements: stones, plants or animals.

A pump dipped in a water container sends water which reaches each island through transparent tubes. The water produced through various natural mechanism or which is not needed by the island is then collected and sent back to the main water container. the whole installation constitutes a kind of hypertextual narration which explains phenomena of growth and transformation of the material, from inorganic to organic and vice-versa.

All my images.
and the press pictures from three sixty. Video interview of Michel Blazy.

The first few minutes of the movie The Kingdom. Many say the movie sucks. I don’t really care, I just know these first minutes are great.

Cut + Run’s newly promoted editor, Ben Campbell, recently finished editing 36 short films for Sony Vaio notebooks, which are part of a unique project that captures the creative influences of a unique character: John Malkovich, the Academy Award – nominated actor, producer and director.

This collaboration captures the unique world of John Malkovich and the stimulation and creative thinking he experiences while traveling around Paris. The films feature influences from a variety of sources including John’s choice of music, architecture, authors, films and books. The films were shot during John’s time in Paris directing his play “Good Canary”.

The campaign was created by agency Fallon and directed by BLINKK – an award winning photographic / film-making collective of Annelise Howard Phillips, Leila Naaman and Damien Laurent with production by OneSix7 Productions.

Ben says: “This is the most creative project I have worked on to date, editorially. Blinkk had shot the most beautiful footage in Paris. They also coaxed out some dialogue gems from John, from which Andy Lockley at Fallon chose his favorites.

“We used these snippets of dialogue as the basis for the edit and experimented by placing our preferred visuals over the top. Using picture to change the rhetoric of John’s dialogue was really exciting. A bit like laying up different genres of music to change the feel of a final picture edit. But without any script approval from the client or John we were kind of in the dark as to how the films would be perceived. Sony, John, Andy and Blinkk are all overjoyed with the results, as am I!”

Superadgrunts, see one of the 36 shorts here:

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• ADN.es – Un calendario de curas guapos, clásico de la Navidad romana
  when we were in rome last time, my mum couldn’t keep her eyes off priests. must buy her this calendar
• Advertising Lab: Wackiest Warning Labels Awarded
  The Watch also has just published a book Remove Child Before Folding: The 101 Stupidest, Silliest, and Wackiest Warning Labels Ever. Another good one is The Warning Label Book.
• Mediengestaltungs Blog » Calling: Artist-in-Residence program at IAMAS, Japan
  The Institute of Advanced Media Arts and Sciences and the International Academy of Media Arts and Sciences (IAMAS) conducts an Artists-in-Residence invitational program.
• Double Happiness Manufacturing
  recruitment, looking for SL workers

Fighting depression and schizophrenia, Richard Saholt has used art to quell his interior mayhem and stay alive.

So, I wanted to know a little bit more about the Indy shop Tactic since they were pitching against some of the “top heavies” for the IHOP business. Why I was searching, I came across the Australian shop Tactic.

I love the site design. Simple, and the rooster head on the man lounging around on their homepage I just dig.

I enjoyed some of their print work for National Geographic, it is sharp and some of it is pretty damned funny. They have some quality motion graphics and sound work. Check them out, they are definitely worth a look.

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