T-shirt featuring a QR code. Snap it with a internet-enabled camera phone and be taken to
the wearer’s website of choice
Quick Response Codes (those square pixellated barcodes that, when scanned by a camera phone, bring up information or link to a particular website) have moved into the world of bespoke fashion. Emma Cott, a Munich-based clothing label has launched a new collection of t-shirts enabling users of social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace to take their profiles to the street, sporting an abstract code design on their chest. Visitors to emmacott.com can generate their own QR code (that links directly to the website of their choosing) and add it to their choice of t-shirt. It’s self-promotion made very simple.
Last night Tate Modern played host to the Escape Awards, the annual ceremony held by the London-based computer graphics and VFX school, Escape Studios, to honour the work of the UK’s best CG talent. Nominees included Framestore CFC, The Mill, MPC and Glassworks with a wide range of work up for each of the eight awards, ranging from student shorts to CG for Doctor Who, Harry Potter and Guinness. Well done to Framestore, who took three of the big trophies – click through for the full results…
A duratran image from Marcus Tomlinson’s current Paris show, Form
Photographer and filmmaker Marcus Tomlinson’s latest exhibition is currently running at the Galerie Patricia Dorfmann in Paris. Form features a series of duratran images and also a film that Tomlinson worked on with London-based studio, Glassworks, which is made up of some 3,500 still pictures.
If you find yourself in the Brick Lane area of London some time before March 23, light artist Chris Levine’s spectacular Stolenspace show is well worth a visit. Her Maj has never looked funkier.
Barrett Lyon’s map of the internet from 2003, The Opte Project
MoMA’S Design and the Elastic Mind show reveals design’s role in mapping the digital frontiers of today’s world. By HUGH ALDERSEY-WILLIAMS
Throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, explorers would return from their voyages describing new places and new wonders they had seen. Each time, cartographers would publish what was routinely termed ‘a new map of the world‘. We tend to think the job is done today. But new maps of the world are appearing faster than ever – and they look like nothing ever seen before.
The new maps are often not geographic but informatic, describing regions that lie one way or another beyond the visual. When human experience becomes too complex to hold in the memory, we strive to create memorable images of that experience. It is thought that musical notation was devised at just the point when people had created more music than could be simply remembered. Likewise, maps were not important until people’s horizons expanded beyond their locality. It’s the same now, except that our need is to picture vast banks of data, information flows, and regions of space beyond the scale of human imagining.
Over a 25 year period, Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky made just seven feature films and three student shorts, yet his cinematic work stands out as one of the most significant contributions to moving image history. In films such as Solaris, Mirror and Andrei Rublev, Tarkovsky dealt thematically with the notion of memory, childhood and dreams and became a master of the long, unedited shot and distinct formalistic approach to filmmaking. Many studies of his work have also observed the links between his films and the visual arts. Black Dog Publishing is behind a new, comprehensive volume dedicated to his life’s work and we have an exclusive extract to present here on the CR blog. The following essay, by Mikhail Romadin (the art director on Solaris), looks at the relationship between Tarkovsky’s films and painting.
Just watch the first minute or so of the above clip, a Brits broadcast from online entertainment channel ITN On. As product placement goes, you might think that Will Ferrell’s new film, Semi-Pro, had lucked in what with the reporter’s clipboard proudly declaring its title to camera (0.33). But keep watching – Farrell’s only gone and innocuously got his film into another shot (from 1.12-1.30): this time the intrepid reporter’s standing next to a billboard advertising the movie and – hey – there’s its title again, on the side of the taxi she’s climbing into! Lucky coincidence?
Well, no. All of these references to Semi-Pro were actually added in to the broadcast digitally and, according to MirriAd who are behind the work, this is a first for “embedded advertising in showbiz content”. While the work is for an online commercial channel, targeting an audience who, potentially, would be interested in seeing the film, doesn’t this all just feel a little creepy?
More evidence of the “new” advertising: the centrepiece of Onitsuka Tiger’s marketing over the coming year will be a meter-long model of a trainer-shaped mini-city created using Rapid Prototyping technology. The model appears in a commercial and in print ads, but copies will also tour in an exhibition and be made into promotional merchandise. Plus - and here’s where it gets really Ad2.0 - Onitsuka is going to bring out a range of trainers based on the model later this year…
“Gloves, it has been decided,
make a reader paw at pages, with more potential to rip them.” Students get hands-on experience of rare illustrated books (link: DO)
Ben Terrett’s blog
has lots of good advice for designers on how to cope with the recession, with some intelligent input from industry figures
The Central Illustration Agency
now has an online print shop. Work by Johnny Hardstaff, McFaul, Tom Bagshaw and Sir Peter Blake features.
Shepard Fairey
discusses his Obama poster with the Guardian cartoonist Steve Bell
Annex Films
just posted up a short film, Remembrance Day by David Tennant, commemorating the 90th Anniversary of Armistice Day
Barack Obama
has put up behind-the-scenes photos from his election night up on Flickr
The winner
and two runners-up of Smoke & Mirrors’ 48-hour film competition are now online
“Game over, mmmOK?”
South Park digests the post-election “change” forthcoming in the US
Artists Emily Forgot, Sam Ratcliffe and Elliott Young
have all signed up to new creative consultancy-cum-artist agency, Thick & Thin. All three artists will exhibit work from 7-21 November in London to help launch the startup…
Meat Water
is new range of flavoured water with added protein. Flavours include English Breakfast, Dirty Hot Dog or Beef Jerky. Yummy. It launched at an art event (not a food and beverage event) in Cannes earlier this year…
Keith Schofield’s
video for BPA’s Toejam has been reworked South Park stylee (link: Promo News)
The Guardian
has a list of the top ten magazine covers of 2008. Weirdly CR has been overlooked
