In a move that signifies deeper ties to sports betting for the digital media publication, Barstool Sports has a new investor. Penn National Gaming, a regional operator of casinos and racetracks, intends to acquire a 36% interest stake in the site worth about $163 million in cash and convertible preferred stock, according to the two…
Turkish Airlines has often taken pride in being the first brand from Turkey to advertise in the Super Bowl, but this year’s spot will also mark another international debut in the Big Game: its first Spanish ad agency. David Madrid created the airline’s 30-second spot–its fourth consecutive Super Bowl ad appearance, which was preceded by…
Direct Marketing
Ceylinco Life
Background: At times of crisis, Sri Lankans flock to donate blood. This was evident during the 30 years of conflict, and more recently during the April 2019 Easter bombings at churches and hotels. It represents civil society coming together to face a common adversity. However, as months pass and memories fade, people tend to forget the injured who may still be recovering and need continuous treatment, including blood transfusions. Task: Mobilize Ceylinco Life’s stakeholder community with a CSR initiative to support the recovery efforts through blood donation camps across the island. Creative Idea: Draw your pint and save a life.
Advertising Agency:Phoenix Ogilvy, Colombo, Sri Lanka
Chief Executive Creative Officer:Rajiv R. Menon
Senior Art Director:Rogger Kenneth Schales
English Copywriter:Rajiv R. Menon
Senior Account Manager:Imraz Shiblydeen
Film
Adidas
The Predator boots give players an unfair advantage.
Advertising Agency:TBWANEBOKO, Amsterdam, Netherlands
Film
Quelli che con Luca
‘Quelli che con Luca’, is a non-profit association founded to support the research against all forms of childhood leukemia. A disease that despite all the achievements collected so far, still has a long way to go: right now, in fact, leukemia is the most widespread form of childhood cancer in the world and, every year, 20% of the kids affected by it lose their battle for life.
Advertising Agency:Havas, Milan, Italy
Deputy Executive Creative Director:Bruno Vohwinkel, Aureliano Fontana
Copywriter:Eleonora Giugliano, Riccardo Baita
Art Director:Micaela Elisetti, Oscar Colapinto
Client Service Director:Daniela Melodi
Planner:Sara Taschera
Producer:Alessandro Pancotti, Maura Beretta
Production Company:The Family
Directors:Massimiliano Takacs, Antonino Amoroso
DoP:Marcello Dapporto
Executive Producer:Lorenzo Ulivieri
Assistant Producer:Ina Richter
Original Music:Philip Abussi, MOKAMUSIC
Sound Design:MOKAMUSIC
Mixing:SUONI LAB
When you find the goodness, any moment can be made better. So on Sunday 2.2.20, Heinz is bringing so much goodness in so little commercial time by showing four situations…at once. #FindTheGoodness.
The dollars are adding up fast. So here are some tips for pruning the subscriptions you no longer use.
Following the death of Kobe Bryant, Hard Rock International has made edits to its first Super Bowl commercial set to air directly before halftime. The spot, directed by Hollywood’s Michael Bay, will feature Jennifer Lopez, her fianc? Alex Rodriguez, and Miami’s own Pitbull and DJ Khaled. But the version of the ad that airs on…
Facebook vice president of engineering Jay Parikh is leaving the company after a little over 10 years. Parikh revealed the news in a Facebook post Tuesday, saying that he will spend the next few months at the social network to assist with the transition, and he does not have any immediate plans. Facebook had not…
The ranch just got cooler. Watch Lil Nas X and Sam Elliott reach for the sky and drop it down low in a winner-takes-all western showdown the world has never seen before.
In Kia’s Big Game ad for the All-New Kia Seltos AWD SUV, rookie running back Josh Jacobs returns to the streets of his hometown, Tulsa, Oklahoma, to offer his younger self some powerful words of inspiration. Josh’s journey took him from homeless youth to first-round draft pick. But there are many others who share such beginnings. Find out how you can join in the fight against youth homelessness: http://kia.com/GiveItEverything
Like many people across the world, i started the year dispirited by the images of the fires in Australia. The country, it seemed, had become a testbed for the extreme climate conditions we’d all be facing soon. When I found myself in Frankfurt to visit Trees of Life – Stories for a Damaged Planet, i was bracing myself for similar reminders of how foolish and irresponsible our species is.
Strangely enough, that feeling of helplessness and discomfort didn’t materialise. Trees of Life might thus be one of the very few exhibitions that look at the Anthropocene without hammering the visitor with guilt. Instead of pointing us to all the things that are wrong with this world, the exhibition invites us to consider our real place in the world, in terms of space and time. It’s an invigorating, albeit profoundly humbling, experience.
Dominique Koch, Holobiont Society (film still), 2017
Trees of Life – Stories for a Damaged Planet. Video overview of the exhibition
Using artifacts from the Senckenberg Natural History Museum in Frankfurt as fragments of the world in the course of its evolution, the art exhibition presents bold new perspectives, new thought models that are anchored in science. Combined together, the artworks, the petrified trunk and amonites that had shared the Earth with early dinosaurs, the moldavites from a meteorite fallen on Germany 15 million years ago, Charles Darwin’s sketch of evolution and other pieces of scientific evidence challenge our anthropocentric worldview.
Trees of Life – Stories for a Damaged Planet inspires visitors to embrace new knowledge and critically reexamine established ways of thinking the world. Starting with a confrontation between “the survival of the fittest” and the more nuanced concept of the holobiont…
Symbiotic Earth: How Lynn Margulis rocked the boat and started a scientific revolution
A holobiont is an assemblage of a host and the many individual species living in or around it. Together they form an ecological unit. Reef-building corals and animal bodies are examples of holobionts. The concept of the holobiont was formulated by evolutionary theorist and biologist Dr. Lynn Margulis in her 1991 book Symbiosis as a Source of Evolutionary Innovation. Her theory that interdependence was a key driver of evolution first met with severe criticism, even derision. By stressing the importance of symbiotic or cooperative relationships between species, her theory challenged the mainstream competition-oriented views of evolution. Her ideas met with resistance outside of scientific circles as well. First of all, her theory of tiny and big species relying on each other didn’t sit well with the “survival of the fittest” doctrine that is still driving the capitalist rhetoric. But her theory also indicated a paradigm shift. Suddenly, humans were not at the apex of the world anymore, they were part of an intricate system in which each of their actions had repercussions.
Dominique Koch, Holobiont Society, 2017. Installation view at Frankfurter Kunstverein 2019. Photo credit: Norbert Miguletz
Dominique Koch, Holobiont Society (film still), 2017
in her video Holobiont Society, Dominique Koch propels Margulis’ “heretical” theory of interdependency into the socio-political sphere. Her video installation interweaves images that evoke an ambiguous future with a soundtrack composed by Tobias Koch and interviews with theorists who have bittersweet, lucid and at times almost optimistic views on the world we are busy destroying.
American biologist and feminist Donna Haraway puts the holobiont concept in an ethical perspective. Since all species (no matter how small or modest-looking) are co-dependent on each other, we have to take care of each other. Ideas about actions to undertake for the future of the planet should be coming from below, not from positions of power.
Philosopher and sociologist Maurizio Lazzarato draws painful parallels between neoliberalism, with its ruthless appropriation of resources and accumulation of property, and the rise of the far right with its rhetoric of retrenchment that creates divisions between cultures, classes, sex, races, etc.
No matter how bleak their diagnostic, both Lazzarato and Haraway offer glimpses of hope: they see the rise of a new awareness, of new forms of resistance.
The images that accompany the interviews are ambiguous. They are visions of a powerful nature devoid of any human presence. They evoke a kind of Romantic sublime that doesn’t illustrate the interviews but gives the words of the thinkers a space to sink in and be further pondered upon by spectators. Electronic music by Tobias Koch fills in the room on a separate audio track. It’s only January but i doubt that this year i’ll come across any artwork that will move me as much as Holobiont Society did.
Sonja Bäumel, in collaboration with bacteriograph Erich Schöpf, realisation with molecular biologist Manuel Selg, Expanded Self II, 2015/2019. Installation view at Frankfurter Kunstverein 2019. Photo: Norbert Miguletz
Sonja Bäumel, in collaboration with bacteriograph Erich Schöpf, realisation with molecular biologist Manuel Selg, Expanded Self II, 2015/2019. Installation view at Frankfurter Kunstverein 2019. Photo: Norbert Miguletz
Sonja Bäumel, in collaboration with bacteriograph Erich Schöpf, realisation with molecular biologist Manuel Selg, Expanded Self II, 2015/2019. Installation view at Frankfurter Kunstverein 2019. Photo: Norbert Miguletz
Sonja Bäumel, in collaboration with bacteriograph Erich Schöpf, realisation with molecular biologist Manuel Selg, Expanded Self II, 2015/2019. Detail of the installation after 3 months spent at Frankfurter Kunstverein
Some scientific studies estimate that human cells make up only 43% of the body’s total cell count. The rest are microscopic creatures such as bacteria, viruses, fungi and archaea. They live in our gut, on our skin. Our health (including our mental health) depends on them as much as they depend on us. They help to digest our food, strengthen our immune systems, influence our mood, etc.
This fairly recent discovery that more than half of your body is not human seems to further challenge the so-called human exceptionalism and to strengthen Margulis’ interdependency theory. The very existence of the microbiota challenges our idea of humanity, prompting us to wonder whether we are individuals, multispecies entities or ecosystems.
In her work, artist Sonja Bäumel pays homage to our microbial companions, revealing their existence and enrolling their “collaboration” in the development of artworks. She has several pieces at Frankfurter Kunstverein. The one i found most spectacular is Expanded Self II, a living cast of her body that challenges our assumptions about the body as a hermetic entity.
Bäumel used agar to create a cast of herself. What she left behind on the nutritive substrate was her own microbiome. The agar was then sealed and the living organisms that had covered her body were left to grow, morph, bloom, expand and reveal the full extent of the artist’s skin flora.
The living artifact suggests that the human body is not one unit but a symbiotic ecosystem, an accumulation of the smallest parts: microorganisms that inhabit and rule the human hosts.
Edgar Honetschläger, Go Bugs Go (film still), 2018. Courtesy and Copyright the artist
Edgar Honetschläger, Go Bugs Go (teaser), 2018
Collection of prepared bugs in systematic arrangement, about 1880. Installation View at Frankfurter Kunstverein 2019. Photo: Norbert Miguletz. On loan: Senckenberg Gesellschaft für Naturforschung
Collection of prepared bugs in systematic arrangement, about 1880. Installation View at Frankfurter Kunstverein 2019. Photo: Norbert Miguletz. On loan: Senckenberg Gesellschaft für Naturforschung
Edgar Honetschläger, GoBugsGo, 2018. Installation view at Frankfurter Kunstverein 2019. Photo: Norbert Miguletz
Insects are other life forms whose survival we depend upon. In the past, men preserved bugs by pinning them and displaying them in museum collections. We still do that of course but in front of the collapse of insect populations, more proactive measures are needed. The disappearance of insects puts the future of the planet’s ecosystems at risk: no insects, no food for the reptiles, the amphibians and the fish. No pollination either so no food for us.
In 2018, artist and filmmaker Edgar Honetschläger teamed up with economist David Wöss, art historian Henny Ulm, to set up GoBugsGo, an NGO that endeavours to keep insects, birds and wild animals in this world.
The initiative invites citizens concerned about the future to join forces, buy land and give it back to nature, providing thus plants, insects, birds and other animals with a refuge from fertilisers and other human interference.
With its hand-drawn aesthetic and laid-back style, the film is engaging and humourous. The message however is strong: No insects = no food! A simple call of action addressed to our bellies. Perhaps the most moving aspect of this type of art-meets-life project is that it reminds us that nature needs insects more than it needs us. Were humans to disappear, biodiversity would recover. If the insects that die out, however, flora and fauna might never recover.
Agathoxylon, (Detail). Age: Lower Triassic, 225 million years. Photo: Norbert Miguletz. Installation view at Frankfurter Kunstverein 2019. On loan: Senckenberg Gesellschaft für Naturforschung
Stromatoliths in limestone (Cyano bacterial colonies). Installation view at Frankfurter Kunstverein 2019. Photo: Norbert Miguletz
The exhibition also uses (deep) time and outer space to contextualise our existence on the planet and further question anthropocentrism.
The Senckenberg Natural History Museum lent examples of stromatolites from its collection. The stromatolites exhibited at Kunstverein were formed in the Precambrian period, the earliest part of Earth’s history that extends from about 4.6 billion years ago to about 541 million years ago, when hard-shelled creatures started appearing. The fossils consist of layers of primeval cyanobacteria, a single-celled photosynthesizing microbe which Margulis regarded as the basic unit of all life and also a source of free oxygen in the atmosphere.
Meteorites are even more mind-boggling. Formed 4.5 billion years ago at the birth of the solar system, these fragments of asteroidal and planetary bodies contain the chemical elements that make up our entire solar system and from which all life on our planet developed. For example, the water in our oceans might very well come from comets, the calcium in our bones and the iron in our blood from supernovae explosions, and the hydrogen (which makes up roughly 9.5% of our bodies) is a primordial element from the Big Bang. We carry chemical substances within us that are derived from the stars in the cosmos. The most distant corners of the universe are thus within and around us.
David M. Hillis, Derrick Zwickl and Robin Gutell, Plot, 2003. Installation view at Frankfurter Kunstverein 2019. Photo: Norbert Miguletz
All of the above suggests that the metaphor of the tree to represent the evolutionary process and the connections between species are no longer adequate.
Evolutionary biologist David Mark Hillis created the Hillis Plot, one of the first phylogenetic illustrations in which the position of humankind is visualised as a systemic part of the whole, and not in a superior position. The full-size graphic can be found online.
This project originated as an attempt at a new visualization in light of new laboratory methods and what was then becoming current knowledge. It was only with DNA sequencing of the genome that biologists were able to create a comprehensive taxonomic classification showing the relationships of organisms to each other.
It is a humbling representation of the place of mankind on this planet, miles away from Charles Bonnet’s Scala Naturae (1781) and other hierarchical visualisations that have placed mankind at the apex of all living beings and guided much of our Western way of seeing the world.
More works and images from the show:
Studio Drift, M16 + bullet, 2019. From the series Materialism. Photo: Ronald Smits
Studio Drift, AK47 + bullet, 2019. From the series Materialism. Installation view Frankfurter Kunstverein. Photographer: Norbert Miguletz
Ricarda Dennen, (Sound), Marius Jacob (CGI, Animation), Simone Rduch, Dario Robra, Martin Thul (Master Students, Intermedia Design Trier), Prof. Daniel Gilgen (Installation), Marcus Haberkorn (Sound Editing) (Hochschule Trier), Leben im Wassertropfen, 2019. Installation view at Frankfurter Kunstverein 2019. Photo: Norbert Miguletz
Meteorite Horace. Discovery year: 1940. Installation View at Frankfurter Kunstverein 2019. Photo: Norbert Miguletz. On loan: Senckenberg Gesellschaft für Naturforschung
Cotylorhiza tuberculata (Spiegeleiqualle), wet preparation, occurence: Mediterranaen Sea. Photo: Sven Tränkner / Senckenberg Gesellschaft für Naturforschung. On loan: Senckenberg Gesellschaft für Naturforschung
Cotylorhiza tuberculata (Fried egg jellyfishes). Installation View at Frankfurter Kunstverein 2019. Photo: Norbert Miguletz. On loan: Senckenberg Gesellschaft für Naturforschung
Sonja Bäumel, Installation view at Frankfurter Kunstverein 2019. Photo: Norbert Miguletz
Trees of Life – Stories for a Damaged Planet, curated by Franziska Nori with scientific advice from palaeontologist Philipe Havlik, remains open until 16 February 2020 at Frankfurter Kunstverein in Frankfurt.
A smart phone’s “Airplane Mode” or “Ringer Off” setting does not protect people from privacy invasion. What’s worse, the privacy invaders are lurking in malls, at public events, even outside your place of worship. According to National Catholic Reporter, political marketers in support of Donald Trump are increasingly using cellphone data from churchgoers to target […]
For the second year running, Kia has decided to shelve the tactics that car brands so often employ in their Super Bowl ads–celebrity endorsers, stunt drivers, adolescent-grade humor–in favor of a sober and provocative message. Released today, Kia’s spot for the Big Game pretty much leaves aside everything you’d associate with a car and instead…
Facebook this week globally launched its Off-Facebook Activity tool, which allows you to see and manage the activity the social network receives about you from other sites. As part of this tool, you have the ability to clear your off-Facebook activity history. Our guide will show you how this is done. Note: These screenshots were…
The Sundance Film Festival is a buzzy opportunity for brands to interact with film fans, actors and directors and industry execs in between screenings. The 36th annual festival, which kicked off Jan. 23 and runs through Feb. 2, is screening 118 feature films with premieres including Taylor Swift’s Netflix documentary Miss Americana and Zola, which…
(TrendHunter.com) The ‘Manara’ minimalist desk lamp is a design-conscious fixture for the home or office that will bring a touch of intelligence to the simple process of illuminating a space. Designed by…
A Audi retorna ao Super Bowl deste ano disposta a promover uma mensagem de sustentabilidade com olho em sua nova linha de veículos elétricos – em especial o Sportback, seu novo carro da linha e-tron. A forma como a marca traduziu isso junto da agência 72andSunny Amsterdam em um comercial, porém, é das mais exóticas, …
O post Super Bowl 2020: comercial da Audi coloca Maisie Williams pra cantar “Let It Go” em favor de um futuro sustentável (?) apareceu primeiro em B9.
A Amazon Studios está retornando ao Super Bowl com uma prévia de 60 segundos de sua próxima série original, “Hunters”, que estreia no dia 21/02 na Amazon Prime Video. A série de 10 episódios apresenta um grupo anti-nazista de Nova York, em 1977, que descobre que vários nazistas do alto escalão vivem na cidade e …
O post Amazon Prime Video usa o Super Bowl 2020 para divulgar nova série “Hunters” apareceu primeiro em B9.
Depois de no ano passado provar que seu refrigerante principal era “mais que uma bebida ok”, a Pepsi este ano vem para o Super Bowl disposta a divulgar a Pepsi Zero Sugar, a versão sem açúcar da marca. O curioso é que a campanha da Pepsico com o refri não economizou munição para confrontar no …
O post Super Bowl 2020: comercial da Pepsi brinca com a Coca-Cola para promover versão sem açúcar do refrigerante apareceu primeiro em B9.
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