Blogbook
And following on the heels of our post about spoofed DIY culture, here’s a video from Spike Lee’s ad agency, Spike DDB, that’s pretty much about the commercialisation of hipster culture. From Adweek:
No man has more effectively served as an unofficial spokesperson for the city within a city than director Spike Lee. And so, his ad agency, Spike DDB, which is based in Brooklyn’s Dumbo neighborhood, was the perfect shop to work on a project summarizing lessons marketers can draw from the city’s rise.
Brooklyn Made is an effort by the borough’s Chamber of Commerce to certify goods produced in the area, and Spike DDB collaborated with the group on the 10-minute film.
Growing tired of DIY hipster Maker culture? This video is for you. It’s the latest in a set of videos pushing back against artisanal culture. Some other of our favourites include ‘Bespoke Water’:
The film features the Timmy Brothers, who peddle bespoke drinking water, like Batch #1402, which contains Mississippi River water, Lake Pontchartrain water and a dash of East River water.
When Bill Timmy (played by Mike Mergo) tells us that, “every drop of water has a story to it, it really does,” it’s tempting to believe him. And it’s a reminder of just how easily we justify spending more on a food product if its tale is crafted just right (and we have the dough to spare).
and ‘Artisanal Firewood’:
The pushback against hipster maker culture has been growing over time, particularly with regards to incidents like what happened with the Mast Brothers:
The brothers Mast, Rick and Michael, are chocolate-makers as Wes Anderson might have written them. The Masts incorporated as a chocolate company in 2007, after dabbling in beer- and coffee-making, in their Brooklyn apartment. To their chocolate bars—eccentric, expensive curios—they bring the devotion of priests. They have large ginger beards and a tendency to dress in the dour, high-collared mode of dry-goods purveyors from a century ago. Their product, too, presents austerely, nine dollars’ worth of luxurious restraint: pure cacao and sugar, gorgeously enrobed in paper fit for a powder-room wall.
Last December it was revealed that the Mast brothers were not, as they claimed, bean-to-bar makers, but had started by being re-melters, using couverture chocolate that they bought from Valrhona. To most people the drama that rose up from this can probably be summed as ¯\_(ツ)_/¯, but roped in on that was “pent-up irritation at the self-satisfaction of urban cultural élites”. Hipster culture hasn’t been all bad: learning to watch where your food comes from and your carbon footprint has been good for the world in general. But in all things, restraint.
The Garden of Earthly Delights is a VR experience for Google Cardboard that celebrates one of the most famous Bosch paintings. Via VRScout:
This dream-like first-person Google Cardboard VR experience is the latest app to celebrate the 500th anniversary of one of the world’s great surrealist paintings. Bosch VR explores each panel of The Garden of Earthly Delights through separate virtual reality rides – with the first more tame panel being free to download in the app store. The final panel brings you to hell, so brace yourself for that one.
Bosch VR was developed by creative agency BDH in collaboration with the Bosch 500 festival that takes place in the artist’s Netherlands hometown of ‘s-Hertogenbosch. A public installation of Bosch VR will be setup at the festival starting March 1st for attendees to get the full 360° experience.
What is Google Cardboard?
Google Cardboard allows users to experience VR in an affordable way: people can even fold their own. Called “VR on the cheap”, all you need is an Android or iOS phone, and was unveiled at the 2014 Google I/O. You just need to fold (or buy) your own, and then download the Google Cardboard app. Secure your phone into the app and you’re set!
Papa is an amazing short film by Natalie Labarre. An inventor realizes he’s not a great dad so he decides to invent a better one. About the filmmaker:
Natalie Labarre is a Franco-American animation artist native to NYC. At the end of her studies at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan, she received a BFA in Traditional Animation and went on to produce her first short film, Papa (14), which has screened at several film festivals around the world, including Anima Mundi (Brazil), Seoul International Cartoon and Animation Festival (Korea) and KLIK! (Netherlands).
Inspiration
In making the film, Labarre dug into her own personal experience:
“I wanted to make a film that helped explain the complicated but super close relationship I have with my dad and the compromises we learned to make for each other, especially since at the time he didn’t respect animation and wished I were a painter instead.”
Labarre humorously confided to Short of the Week that her father still doesn’t like the film.
Currently, Labarre works as a 2D artist, and is going to convert her film to a children’s story book. It was recently acquired by MoMA’s department of education for its ongoing film series, targeted at families with children aged 4-10, designed to introduce kids to the world of film.
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Phil Grabsky makes the world’s largest Renoir exhibition available on film to a global audience. In it, he documents the life of the French master painter, looking through the Barnes Foundation’s extensive collection in Philadelphia, and exploring the progression of the artist’s style in his work. The film presents a range of perspectives on the artist’s controversial use of women as a recurring motif in his paintings.
More here.
Who was Renoir?
He was a leading Impressionist painter, and is one of the most famous painters of the early 20th Century. Born on February 25, 1841, Renoir started off as an apprentice to a porcelain painter, studying drawing in his free time. In the 1870s, he helped launch the artistic movement known as Impressionism, eventually becoming one of the most famous artists of his time. Notable for their use of vibrant light and saturated colour, his notable works include Girls at the Piano and Dance at Le Moulin de la Galette.
About the Barnes collection
From Phil Grabsky himself:
It is extraordinary. It is also unique: you can see a photo of a wall in any of its rooms and you know immediately it’s The Barnes. It is arguably the greatest single collection of impressionist and post-impressionist works including Picasso, Matisse, Cézanne, Renoir and many more.
It’s uneven too: 180 Renoirs on show and one Monet. But that’s what is also so interesting – the man who lay behind it – Albert C. Barnes. Those that saw my film on the Impressionists recently will remember the dealer Paul Durand-Ruel and how he almost went bankrupt championing the impressionists. Well, it was dealers like him that Barnes – after he made his fortune – went to for European art. In the process, he created one of the world’s greatest collections. Plus it will never travel. No picture will ever be seen in another gallery’s exhibition. So you have to go there – or, of course, see the film.
The amazing Misty Copeland channels Degas for a new MoMA exhibit:
Copeland says that’s part of the reason she found posing for the images that accompany this story—which were inspired by Edgar Degas’s paintings and sculptures of dancers at the Paris Opéra Ballet—a challenge. “It was interesting to be on a shoot and to not have the freedom to just create like I normally do with my body,” she says. “Trying to re-create what Degas did was really difficult. It was amazing just to notice all of the small details but also how he still allows you to feel like there’s movement. That’s what I think is so beautiful and difficult about dance too. You’re trying to strive for this perfection, but you still want people to get that illusion that your line never ends and that you never stop moving.”
Who is Misty Copeland?
Copeland is the first African American ballerina named to the position of Principal Dancer for the American Ballet Theatre, considered the best American company for classical ballet. A ballet prodigy, she was dancing en pointe within three months of taking her first dance class. An ‘unlikely ballerina‘, she has become one of the most famous ballet stars in the world.
Ok Go has released another incredible one take music video, this time shot in zero gravity:
OK Go and the video’s director Trish Sie (who also worked on “Here it Goes Again”) shot the entire video in one take on an airplane that was making parabolas in the sky, allowing for periods of about 27 seconds of weightlessness. The process of planning and choreographing the video ended up being a complex series of problems with both gravity and the choreographed motion of the song.
The Russian-based S7 Airlines contributed the plane and the pilots it took to film this video during parabolic flight. Basically, the plane climbs to a high altitude, then dives and accelerates into the dive so that the plane is able to match the rate the contents are falling at, messing with the gravity for the people and things inside. The plane could only dive for 27 seconds of weightlessness before having to pull out and re-set for the next parabola (gain in altitude and dive). There’s 20 seconds of double gravity both before and after the weightlessness, think of it like the plane is throwing you into the air and catching you at those moments.
More here.
Creating pottery with music: designer Olivier van Herpt and StudioVanBroekhoven exploring textures made by sound vibration while 3D printing clay. Via Coolhunting:
The “Solid Vibration” project is an ongoing collaboration between Eindhoven, The Netherlands-based sound laboratory Studio van Broekhoven and industrial designer Olivier van Herpt, who built a custom ceramic printer where the extruding clay is influenced by vibrations emitting from a speaker. As the video above makes clear, van Herpt’s printer translates low, rumbling frequencies into textural patterns that resemble weaving. There’s a lot of room for experimentation here and we are curious to see how something like full musical albums could be applied to the printing process, and what “solidified sound” emerges.
3D Printing Pottery
The project began when van Herpt and spatial sound designer Ricky van Broekhoven decided to host Broekhoven’s ‘noisescapes’ as solid objects that were representative of his abstract tones. Ricky specializes in sound design: his projects are often “landscapes of noise that live briefly in the mind”. Specially constructed speaker rigs were built and mounted beneath the printing platforms to emit low sounds that would influence the printing. The result is a set of gorgeous, wave-like textures in pottery that look both organic and faintly alien.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpk8eSpRBnY
Turkish Airlines ties in with the upcoming Batman v Superman film, with faux ads advertising flights to Gotham City and Metropolis. Tying in to large franchises coming to film is nothing new of course (remember: the Star Wars marketingadpocalypse last year), but it’s funny watching Batfleck introducing Gotham in the ad. “There’s never been a better time to visit our great city.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TReIozZ1b10
The Batman vs Superman / DC Comics marketing train has been starting to rev up, as the movie’s positioned to come out in theatres a week before Marvel’s vaguely similar version (this time pitting Iron Man vs Captain America). The BvS film is not part of Nolan’s highly successful Batman reboot, but is a new reboot under Zack Snyder’s helm, following Man of Steel, and apparently is set to address the consequences of MoS (particularly: the part where Superman’s grudge fight ends up trashing Metropolis for a surreal 20 minutes). The film will also introduce Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman, who is surprisingly still wearing her old-fashioned pinup swimsuit-esque gear, even though her male compatriots, Batman and Superman, have received upgraded and more contemporary uniforms. Regardless, it’d probably make decent popcorn material, and will be opening in Australia on 24 March 2016. Enjoy!