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…
Special projects commissioned by Creative Review and our partners
Monitor
Rushes Soho Shorts Festival 2009
is free to enter and open for submissions across six categories: Short Film, Animation, Documentary, Music Video, Newcomer and Broadcast Design
Objectified,
the new documentary film from Gary Hustwit, looks interesting. Marc Newson, Jonathan Ive and Karim Rashid all feature
The Vignelli Canon,
a “little book” – available as a 50 page PDF – “for a better understanding of typography in Graphic Design”
The Wellcome Collection’s
excellent exhibition War and Medicine has a website, Remembering War, which encourages people to post up their own memories of war
Bizarre marketing image of the week:
MillerCoors’ entire 1,200 person sales and marketing team come together to form the brewer’s new Pentagram-designed logo.
Playboy Mexico
says its latest cover is nothing to do with the Virgin Mary, honest
Mojo
is the name of a new software that allows you to share the content of your iTunes with friends…
Santa’s Beard
competition. Download the beard. Cut it out. Take a pic of yourself wearing it and send it to the guys at Un.titled. You could win a prize!
Something’s very wrong
with the cover of January’s Tatler (and not just the subject matter). Clue: count the legs…
Eric Baker’s
“images of the day” is always an intriguing post over at Design Observer
Framestore CFC’s new Christmas game
is based on their forthcoming feature animation, Desperaux. Addictive (be warned!) platform fare starring a little mouse with big ears…
