Hasta La Creative!

First off I’d like to apologize for the size of the image, but I think in this case it’s worth it.

A little over two years ago, a small group of chilean design students decided to generate an online space that allowed design students from all its branches and schools to share their projects and create contact and collaboration networks that led to improve and enhance the national design scene. That website was Diseño Emergente (Emerging Design).

Now, with an insanely powerful base of monthly visitors and projects, Diseño Emergente is, without a doubt, the space where chilean (and slowly more latinamerican) design students converge and share, debate and display their ideas.

By chance of life, I had the pleasure of being one of the first few members of this community and for a while I was part of their staff, with whom to this day I keep a very close relationship.

This is why seeing progress like the one I’ll refer to is trully a reason for pride and satisfaction, knowing that in Chile there are people who dare to take the plunge, to go against the odds, and do it right, with love for what they do and the seriousness and responsability it deserves.

The reason for this slightly long post is to tell you about the release of Diseño Emergente 2.0,. A total review of the website’s interface and functions was made directly from the input of its own users and not just what the staff thought was right.

Even if you’re not a spanish-speaking person, I encourgae you to take a look at the portfolios section, I’m sure you’ll find a few things that’ll blow your mind.

For someone like me, who’s passionate about design, programming and interaction, this website really is a luxury. A whole bunch of new features that speed up your reading time, enhance relationships between users and also enhance the participation of 3rd party users from chilean student design.

So I’m just leaving the invitation open for you to check out the all new Diseño Emergente, ’cause even with its many haters, it’s impossible to deny its real cultural and design weight in chilean society.

My biggest congratulations, and deepest respect to the staff that daily tries to take chilean design to the next level. People like these are the ones that count.

This week has hosted the 2008 One Show, hosted by the One Club. Although the official last day is tomorrow, last night was the One Show Awards. These awards and winners are known to shape advertising for the next year to come. Here are just a couple of my favorites:Gold – Newspaper or Magazine Single Ad – WWF Thailand “Tree”, Ogilvy & Mather Bangkok Gold – Single TV Commercial – Halo 3 “Diorama”, McCann Worldgroup San Francisco For a full list of winners, Gold through Bronze as well as as Merit, click here then select the link for Download One Show Winners List.

Technorati Tags: One Show, awards, advertising, marketing, branding, campaigns

As promised two days ago, here’s more details about Homo Ludens Ludens, a new exhibition which reflects on the various roles fulfilled by play in our digital era. Homo Ludens Ludens opened on April 18 at LABoral the Center for Art and Industrial Creation which means that i was back in Gijon, Asturias, land of monster squids, rosy cheeks, deep-fried and vegetable-free diet, gorgeous landscapes and sidra thrown all over your favorite sneakers.

Homo Ludens Ludens is the last episode of a trilogy that LABoral is dedicating to the world of game. Following Gameworld and Playware, HLL explores play as a key element of today’ s world, highlighting its necessity for our contemporary societies. There are more than 30 works on show, so you can expect several installments about Homo Ludens Ludens.

The title of the show, Homo Ludens Ludens , alludes to the taxonomy of human evolution. The human being used to be regarded as a Homo faber (man the smith or man the maker in latin) for the control they could exert on the environment through tools.

Image credit: LABoral/Enrique G. Cárdenas

In 1938, however, Dutch historian Johan Huizinga introduced the idea that man is also an Homo Ludens (a “playing man”), a man for whom amusements, humour and leisure played an important role in both culture and society. Philosopher Vilém Flusser went further. For him, we are living in a society which, instead of working, generates information by playing with a technical apparatus, implying a transition from the myth of the creator towards a player. Playing can therefore be regarded as an act of emancipation.

The exhibition speculates on the emergence of a Homo Ludens Ludens – the contemporary player of games.

Among the many installations and documentaries i was really looking forward to see at LABoral was Bagatelle Concrete which Martin Pichlmair had mentioned a while ago in an interview i had with him.

Martin teamed up with Viennese artist and researcher Fares Kayali to turn a pinball machine from the ’70s into a musical instrument and, as he explained me at the time, The piece is a pinball machine that constructs music. It samples itself and manipulates those samples according to how you play pinball on it. We removed all competitive and all decorative elements of the pinball game and put digital electronics into this analogue electro-mechanical machine. While the gameplay is technically unaltered – all the bumpers and traps are still in place – the effect of playing is a composition instead of a highscore.

Image credit: LABoral/Enrique G. Cárdenas

The more successfully the player interacts with the machine, the more intense the accompanying soundtrack gets. The piece maintains the roughness of the electromechanical original game, mixing physical sounds happening on the playing field with manipulations of their recordings.

A post written by Nicolas Nova a few days ago brought to my mind what Martin told me in Gijon when i was complaining that that damn pinball was way too difficult to play for me. Apparently the artists had to dumb down the machine. They bought it on eBay, not knowing that the ’70s model was manufactured at a time when pinballs were extremely popular and the models issued had thus to be quite high level to keep players interested.

Image credit: LABoral/Enrique G. Cárdenas

Concrète references musique concrète and bagatelle alludes to the history of pinball games. Bagatelle was an ancestor of modern pinball. Created in France for King louis XVI, it looked like a narrowed billiard table. The aim of the game was to get 9 balls past pins (which act as obstacles) into holes.

Julian Oliver is participating to the show with an improved version of levelHead, the 3D memory game became an instant youtube and blog hit the moment it hit the online turf. The installation which uses physical cubes as its only interface is totally engrossing and nerve-challenging. On screen it appears that each of the cube’s faces contains a little room and each of them is logically connected with the others by doors. In one of these rooms there is a character and by tilting the cube the player directs this character from room to room in an effort to find the way out. Some doors lead nowhere and will send the character back to the room they started in. levelHead challenges the player’s spatial memory. Each player has 120 seconds to find the exit of each cube and move the character to the next. There are three cubes (levels) in total and, the mnemonic traps become increasingly difficult to avoid as the player progresses.

Video:

The game refers to one of the earliest memory systems which consisted in constructing imaginary architectures (memory loci) designed specifically for the purpose of storing information such that it could be retrieved by ‘walking through’ the building in the mind.

Today, domestic printers, digital tagging systems, address books and journals (on and offline) do the storage and indexing of information in exterior locations like remote databases or local file systems. Similarly, navigating in the real world increasingly tends toward dependence on external media and locative technologies.

With levelHead, moving from one site to another produces an imaginary architecture and positions this memory architecture as the primary means of navigation. Only one side of the cube will reveal a room at any given time and so a memory of the last room – of the positions of entrances and exits, stairs and other features – is necessary to proceed logically to the next movement.

Image credit: LABoral/Enrique G. Cárdenas

The tangible interface aspect is integral to the function of recall. As the cube is turned by the hands in search of correctly adjoining rooms muscle-memory is engaged and, as such, aids the memory as a felt memory of patterns of turns: “that room is two turns to the left when this room is upside down”.

With their Massage me jackets, Hannah Perner-Wilson & Mika Satomi allow massage to enter the video game realm. The jacket is the joystick. By massaging more or less vigourously the back of a volunteer you get to control a fighting avatar. I had fun playing both roles. Being the passive massaged one is extremely relaxing as the designers had spread and repeated the commands all over the back of the jacket, focusing on the areas most likely to beg for a good rub. Now remembering where to massage in order to have your avatar jump or kick requires some practice but playing randomly will not necessarily prevent you from winning the battle.

Massage Me session featuring Alessandro Ludovico, founder and editor of Neural magazine

I’m afraid the best piece of the exhibition for me was William Wegman‘s Two Dogs and Ball (Dogs Duet). Wegman has always been a favorite of mine (has someone else seen the Deodorant video? It shows him spraying his armpit with an aerosol deodorant until the can is empty, while giving a deadpan testimonial: “It feels real nice going on, and smells good, and keeps me dry all day.”)

In Two Dogs and a Ball, Wegman’s Weimaraner Man Ray and his companion are mesmerized by a tennis ball which moves off screen. Wegman explained that all he had to do to obtain the comic effect was to move a tennis ball around, off-camera, thus capturing the dogs’ attention.

During the press conference, Laura Baigorri –one of the curators– explained that Wegman’s video has been selected as an example of how the avant-gardes of the 20th century had introduced an element of play in the artistic practice.

The video is on ubuweb.

Two Dogs and Ball (Dogs Duet) and Axel Stockburger‘s Tokyo Arcade Warriors – Shibuya. Image credit: LABoral/Enrique G. Cárdenas

My flickr set.

HOMO LUDENS LUDENS runs at Laboral – Center for Art and Industrial Creation in Gijon, Spain (address and google map) until September 22, 2008.

Also part of the Homo Ludens Ludens exhibition: Art of War and El Burbujometro.

The people at Greenpeace are none too pleased with Unilever, the makers of Dove beauty products. According to Greenpeace, Unilever is purchasing palm oil from suppliers who are destroying the rainforests in Indonesia. This deforestation is causing all sorts of problems such as climate change as well as the extinction of certain species. So, what is Greenpeace doing about it? Well, on April 21, 2008, they released a bunch of apes (or possibly Orangutans) into London and Merseyside to guilt Unilever into stopping this madness! They also came out with the following video to hopefully raise awareness. I guess the price you sometimes pay to be beautiful may not be worth it after all.

In the vein of the Harvey Dent campaign site and the short lived “Joker-ized” version comes a new campaign from Warner Brothers in support of The Dark Knight the new Batman film.

Operation Slipknot, which is about corruption in the Gotham City Police Department. Apparently all the slots in the game were taken within 45 minutes of this email being sent out from Commissioner Jim Gordon.

???OK friend, you???re up to bat now. You have yourself a new assignment: Operation Slipknot.???

Another site for the Gotham Intercontinental Hotel has gone live, but the telephone number for the “concierge” has been disconnected.

I’ve been loving the way that Warner Brothers has been including hardcore fans who want in on the action without ruining the movie for those of us who don’t have the time.

With the 2010 Vancouver Olympics practically a year away, it would be wise for companies who are planning to get advertising slots towards this world-renowned event early. With practically the whole world watching, you can just imagine the number of companies worldwide jockeying for position for good slots in the expected expensive yet lucrative exposure that one can just imagine.

The strategy here is simple. It is all on a first-come, first served basis. You can expect giants such as Nokia and Sony to be at the forefront of it all in what is expected to be a circus of sorts since this meet will really hit the global target audience. Just look at Canwest which just closed the deal of their advertising pact for the 2010 Olympics.

Canwest Publishing Inc., the largest owner of Canadian newspapers, has signed an Olympic-sized deal to supply advertising to the 2010 Vancouver Organizing Committee.

The deal, which will be announced this morning, includes all 10 of Canwest’s regional newspapers, including The Vancouver Sun and The Province, but not the flagship National Post.

Vanoc is calling Canwest an “official supplier”, a category that generally is worth between $3 millon and $10 million. In a memo sent to staff Wednesday morning Dennis Skulsky, the president of Canwest Publishing, and Kevin Bent, the publisher of the Pacific Newspaper Group called it an “Official Regional Newspaper agreement”.

(Source) The Vancouver Sun

Technorati Tags: olympics, advertising, canwest, nokia, sony, global

Advertising is tough to get into. The application process is often subjective and sometimes creative directors want to make sure that your personality is match for the company. With the economy slowing down, it’s even harder to get an interview. So how do you break into the business? Unfortunately, I don’t have great advice. But, here’s what some high ranking ad and brand people from companies like R/GA, Yahoo, Google, JWT and Crispin had to say. These folks are members of VCU Brandcenter’s board of directors talking directly to grad students getting ready for the ad biz. If you pay close attention, there’s even some Yahoo/AOL buyout banter.

In honor of Earth Day, here is a catchy poster by a non-profit organization called Pro WildLife. Located in Germany, Pro WildLife is committed to protecting the world’s wildlife from over-exploitation, habitat destruction and abuse. In this particular poster, penguins are pictured with what appear to be machine guns. Not only is is both edgy and attention grabbing, but it also drives the point home that we should never take for granted nor abuse our environment, including the other animals we share it with. This is just one of several posters in the campaign which can be seen here.

Sure, big chain stores get plenty of advertising. When was the last time your Sunday paper didn’t have the latest flyer for Best Buy? And how often do you catch their commercials on TV? Unfortunately, powerhouse companies like those are causing several small record stores throughout the country to close. In efforts to increase awareness of these independently owned shops, tomorrow is Record Store Day. A “holiday” designed to celebrate boutiques filled with all those music geeks that know more about your favorite album than you ever cared to. So just for tomorrow, go grab that CD you’ve been jonesing for at your closest local store. Click the logo below to find a mom & pop near you.

See big mean tractors climb hills, lift dirt, pop wheelies and whatnot. Every once in awhile you might catch a glimpse of Vanna White proteges in hard hats.