Influx Insights Tag Feed: art

jr- street art meets photography on a massive scale

Influx Insights — 2008-10-03T17:24:53Z

JR is creating an impact in the street space with such scale and imagination that it puts advertising to shame. His massive portraits are of inhabitants of Brazilian favelas, Parisian ghettos and Palestinian towns. He's a graffiti artist who picked up a camera and the results of his work are extraordinary. He has a show in London at the moment- the first two images are from there and the final image is from the favela project he did in Brazil. He's work blends the best in photography with graffiti and social causes.

Posted by Ed Cotton

more blink- visual perception- faster than a speeding bullet

Influx Insights — 2008-05-23T22:13:37Z

Our minds process visual information at a rapid rate, which makes it tough for designers who need to create both instant impact and depth.

However, if people get the chance to click their mouse and move away because their perception tells them there's no point to going deeper, it means impact is everything.

Recent research conducted by the University of Vienna shows just how fast people process visual information. Its study focused on art and asked subjects to compare similarities and differences in various pieces.

Researchers found that subjects could register content in less than 1/100th of a second.

Within 1/20th of a second subjects had already started to interpret style.

All this happening before recognition of the whole object.

It shows that art directors and designers have less time than we originally thought to capture attention and stop people from clicking away with their remote button or mouse.

Posted by Ed Cotton

red's art heist- 7 reasons why it's brilliant

Influx Insights — 2008-02-15T16:24:43Z

RED, the brand designed and built to raise money for Africa, has been keeping a low profile in the last few months that was until yesterday.

As we all know, money talks.

In a single day, RED raised an incredible $42.6 million to add to the $50 million raised to date through its efforts with brands.

It did it with an auction of contemporary art.

Here's are 7 reasons why its brilliant.

1. Contemporary art is simply the hottest and most valuable product out there- prices have been going through the roof in recent years

2. Big name artists are the hottest brands there are- especially guys like Damien Hirst who had work in the auction

3. Rare and limited editions have a premium value- so art created especially for RED- fitted that criteria

4. RED leveraged its celebrity founders to give the art and the auction cache.

5. Playing to the guilt factor- like the RED brand in general- purchasers can feel good about buying and artists feel like valued contributors

6. Partnering with Sotheby’s added status and value to the event

7. Holding the auction on Valentine's Day, gave the event a theme and an anchor

This piece, a collaboration between Banksy and Damien Hirst was supposed to fetch $200k, but ended up going for $1.8 million!

Economists frequently tell us that we are a time of incredible wealth with a new class of super-rich, RED's strategy of pushing its brand upstream, creating an event to capture this wealth and line its own pockets, is pure genius.

Posted by Ed Cotton

creativity + assignment + crowds + prizes = published work

Influx Insights — 2008-02-13T18:33:33Z

Pixish is a new site from the mind of Derek Powazek that's all about helping creative people get their work published.

The role of the site is to help "clients" connect to a creative community and source the precise images they are looking for.

It's an alternative to the time consuming and expensive process of working with artists and the challenge of using a micro-stock agency.

Pixish also incorporates a voting feature that gets the community to vote on the images that best fit the assignment. The reward for artists is the opportunity to get their work published and there are also some prizes up for grabs.

Clearly this idea flies in the face of the established creative process and its unlikely that professionals are going to want any part of this.

The idea here is to level the playing field and let amateurs and young artists have a shot at the big time and build their portfolios. There are thousands of people out there willing to do this and its likely that the quality of their work is pretty good.

It's another example of the combination of the internet and the crowd weakening the power of the expert. We are just going to see more and more of this in the coming months and years.

Posted by Ed Cotton

data as art

Influx Insights — 2008-01-12T15:46:42Z

The visualization of data is fast becoming the next art form.

This is a nice example that comes from JK Keller

Here's how he creates the visuals.

"This is a program I wrote that reads a source text and looks for words that are used repeatedly. The more the word is used, the larger its cube gets. Red cubes are words that are not unique, blue cubes are. The size of the rings is determined by the size of the paragraphs."

Found by This is That

Posted by Ed Cotton

always read instructions- a trip to the new museum

Influx Insights — 2008-01-10T20:12:55Z

A couple of weeks back, I took a trip to the New Museum in New York.

It’s the latest and greatest designer museum complete with amazingly radical architecture and a gift shop.

The museum was full of hip “global” twentysomethings looking to grab their latest art fix.

I began to feel like the whole museum thing was turning into a giant clich� of itself. A cultural formula that we feel obliged to consume like any other brand, but hopefully one that comes with some rich, intellectual stimulation.

My problem with the main exhibition, Unmonumental, was that I didn’t get it or understand any of the meaning of the works, to me it just looked like a random collection of art from the fringes of the scene.

I became somewhat cynical about the idea of how quickly art gets discovered and placed in museums. To me, the works seemed embryonic and not fully realized, but clearly I am no expert and I was missing the point.

A few days ago, I was looking at a pile of old papers and found a leaflet describing the exhibit. One of its paragraphs immediately stuck a chord, seemed massively insightful, made perfect sense and, of course, helped me see the work in a completely new light.

“The opening of the new century seems defined by the disappearance of monuments and erasure of symbols, marked by the indelible images of destruction and ruin, from the fall of the Twin Towers to the obliteration of the Bamayan Budddhas, and the toppling of the statute of Saddam Hussein. It comes as no surprise that this first decade of the 21st century has produced an artistic language of fragments and of debased, precarious trembling forms, sounds and pictures. This millennium appears more concerned with iconoclasm than with creating new, empty and shiny icons. Like the time we live in “Unmonumental” marks the passage from clarity to complexity. It presents artworks that are violent and delinquent, but also expresses the urgent need to start picking up the pieces and rebuilding this world from scratch.”

What I am taking out of this experience is two-fold; it’s always good to read the instructions and there’s always time to take a second look and to revise your first impressions.

Here are some shots of the exhibits and museum.

Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.

Posted by Ed Cotton

news content re-constituted as art

Influx Insights — 2007-12-21T07:12:57Z

Cool story about the Movable Type art piece in the new New York Times building in New York.

The concept is all about breaking the original content down into small elements and finding connections between the pieces.

Posted by Ed Cotton

proflle of banksy- video

Influx Insights — 2007-09-01T23:02:49Z

Posted by Ed Cotton

in a data-driven world- infographics are the new art

Influx Insights — 2007-08-17T13:19:21Z

Intro from the movie Stanger than Fiction.

Developed by MK12

Original pitch video here

Via Information Aesethetics

Posted by Ed Cotton

schama's power of art

Influx Insights — 2007-08-01T12:44:59Z

PBS has grapped another great series from the BBC with Simon Schama's Power of Art.

The show has is blessed with some great writing.

Here's Schama talking about Rothko.

"One morning in the spring of 1970, I went into the Tate Gallery and took a wrong, right turn and there they were, lying in wait. No it wasn't love at first site. Rothko had insisted that the lighting be kept almost pretentiously low. It was like going into the cinema, expectation in the dimness.

Something in there was throbbing steadily, pulsing like the inside of a body part, all crimson and purple. I felt I was being pulled through those black lines to some mysterious place in the universe.

Rothko said his paintings begin an unknown adventure into an unknown space. I wasn't sure where that was and whether I wanted to go. I only know I had no choice and that the destination might not exactly be a picnic, but I got it all wrong that morning in 1970. I thought a visit to the Seagram Paintings would be like a trip to the cemetary of abstraction - all dutiful reverence, a dead end.

Everything Rothko did to these paintings - the column-like forms suggested rather than drawn and the loose stainings - were all meant to make the surface ambiguous, porous, perhaps softly penetrable. A space that might be where we came from or where we will end up."

They're not meant to keep us out, but to embrace us; from an artist whose highest compliment was to call you a human being."

I watched the Turner and Rothko shows and a couple of facts caught my attention.

1. When Turner's painting, "Hannibal Crossing the Alps" was first shown in public, tens of thousands of people stood in line to see the poltical statement being made about Napoleon and France. What art form has that kind of political power today?

2. Mark Rothko toiled for 20 years before he devised a radical new way to move people with art.

"The fact that people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures shows that I can communicate those basic human emotions.. the people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when painting them. And if you say you are moved only by their color relationships then you miss the point."

Rothko

Posted by Ed Cotton

creativity as a spectator sport

Influx Insights — 2007-07-25T15:32:17Z

A few years ago, the creative career path was characterized by a rigorous process that defined the creative journey; years spent at art school and toiling in a low paying job that could only be gained through access to the right people. Although its become something of a clich�, but the internet has leveled the playing field and spread creative talent far and wide with many of the protagonists being discovered through the well honed process of meritocracy that now rules the web.

What’s interesting is that the same people now want to take the battle onto a different stage, they aren’t content with the satisfaction of YouTube hits of winning Threadless designs, instead they seek the adulation of the crowd. No matter how many YouTube hits you get or t-shirts you sell, you might never here the ripple of applause that comes from your peers recognizing you.

The new movement is all about creativity as a spectator sport; events designed for creatives to battle each other and for legitimate winners to emerge from the process. It’s living proof that you can’t be anonymous and those real life peer connections are all important.

There are probably dozens of examples of these new contests, but I have a couple for starters.

Cut and Paste is a digital design tournament with DJs spinning sounds and graphic designer battles. It started in NYC in 2005 and this year it will host 17 different tournaments around the world.

Sketch 120 a live architectural sketch competition set up by the Architectual League of NYC. This event will take place this Saturday, July 28th at the Old American Can Factory in Brooklyn.

For photographers and other artists, there’s the Slideluckpotshow, an event that’s been running since 2004. It’s not a contest and more of a get together with food, five minute slide shows and conversation.

This is a manifestation of the desire for “real” in a world where you have thousands of virtual friends that you may have never met, there’s nothing can replace the potency of real human interaction and competition.

If anyone is doing anything like this with advertising or has plans to do so, please let Influx know. The live spectacle of teams wrestling real time over a tricky Tide brief would be something to behold.

Posted by Ed Cotton

branding education

Influx Insights — 2007-07-15T23:16:41Z

Educational establishments sometimes find it difficult to bring creativity to their marketing and branding efforts.

Given the increasing desire for everyone to learn a little creativity, I thought it was worth taking a look at the exploits of The Crucible, an institution designed just to do that.

Located in Oakland, The Crucible is a 30,000 sq ft plus space where you can learn how to make stuff, specifically-, welding, blacksmithing, foundry & mold making, glass, jewelry, neon & light, kinetics, machine shop, stone, woodworking, paper works, fire performance and ceramics.

Founded in 1999, for the past seven years its organized a Fire Arts Festival as a fund-raiser. Thousands of people pay $45 a head, some even more, to experience first hand the thrill of fire sculptures and performance.

It’s a great way to raise money, but it’s also a brand experience. You get to see, touch, smell and even taste The Crucible brand first hand.

It’s living, breathing, creative, interesting, edgy and exciting.

How would you create a Cruciblelike experience for your educational institution?

What would Harvard's look like?

What would Cal-Berkeley do?

What about MIT?

VCU-Adcenter?

Here are some shorts from the last day of the Crucible’s Fire Arts Festival.

Created with Paul's flickrSLiDR.

Posted by Ed Cotton

powerpoint turns 20

Influx Insights — 2007-07-12T06:18:11Z

• How

• Many
• Bullet
• Points
• Before
• You
• Lose
• Interest?

It was 20 years ago that Microsoft revolutionized the way we stood in front of a group of people and presented. That's two decades of bullet points and slideshows that have allowed businessmen, musicians, politicians and comedians alike to express themselves with Microsoft Office's visual aid PowerPoint.

Back in the late eighties we laughed at our science teachers when they burned themselves on an overhead projector or fumbled with their clear, handwritten sheets so they weren't projecting their notes upside and backwards. What a relief when Powerpoint came to our rescue... well not exactly.

Powerpoint made it easy to display pictures and graphs but it made presenters lazy. "It celebrated form over content," and became a crux, a way for a speaker to subtitle their speech. Powerpoint is loathed by many because of its effectiveness at turning any decent speech into a bore and putting the audience to sleep.

Google recently gave word that it would be releasing a PowerPoint clone that would complete it's online suite of office software, so it's not exactly an antiquated form of communication, but should it be? Long sentences either create awkward silences or bore the audience with information the presenter should have memorized. The bullet point format has a tendency to move a presenter along without much fluidity or thought and charts and graphs end up looking downright confusing.

Presenting has intimidated even the most confident speaker, so having a tool to help out is understandable. What I'd really like to know is why there is only one option when we want to put together a presentation? Comparing Firefox to Safari shows us how much more functionality is possible when innovation is demanded. It just seems strange that Powerpoint is the only tool available for an art creative as the visual delivery of content.

Possibly the issue with Powerpoint is a user based error. It seems like most problems arise from the presenter who relies too heavily on his slides to deliver a presentation.

David Byrne of the Talking Heads speaks at his Powerpoint art exhibit, " PowerPoint restricts users no more than any other communication platform, he asserted, including a pencil: "When you pick up a pencil you know what you're getting — you don't think, 'I wish this could write in a million colors.'" There is something to be said if a creative individual like Byrne can fill an auditorium to display his Powerpoint based artwork.

Maybe we need a revamped powerpoint curriculum, or maybe it is the tool; but shouldn't we start looking at different ways to use visual aid technology? Has the PowerPoint software outlived it's time and what kind of new technologies and methods of presenting are sprouting up to challenge our seemingly old school technique for visual communication?

Posted by ken fisher

england's national gallery brings its art to the people

Influx Insights — 2007-06-15T13:11:34Z

As a promotion to drive increased visits, England's National Gallery created reproductions of its most famous works and hung them up around the streets of London.

The result is striking.

Created with Paul's flickrSLiDR.

Photos by Fergus Jackson

Posted by Ed Cotton

emerge's european tour

Influx Insights — 2007-06-06T16:36:20Z

James Friedman of our EMERGE unit, has just returned from a whirlwind trip to Europe. He's started to post his findings, including a review of four interesting galleries in Paris and Berlin.

how much is art worth?

Influx Insights — 2007-05-23T04:40:51Z