When album covers attack...

What can you say? Fun, frivolous, funny.

Just what the doctor ordered on a Friday.

Mini Universes are the new bikini models...

'Hugo?' The first second of this vid is vaguely annoying.

Okay, now this is getting a bit much. The new Hugo Boss campaign (created by Callegari Berville Grey and produced by Stardust TV) features, yet again, an animated mini-universe that shows how the product alters reality and transports the consumer into an amazing new world. Like these ads. And like these.

In the last century, products made you cooler and sexier. Now they make you magical.

Of the two, I much prefer this idea, but still... I think we'll all be sick of these kind of spots in about six months. For the time being though... enjoy. Besides, I will concede that Jonathan Rhys-Meyers is scrumptious. He can play in my mini-universe anytime.


Let me control you with my eyes.


Tagline: It's just a fragrance. The rest is up to you.

Digital time capsule project.

Okay, so in that last post I forgot to mention the project that turned me on to Jonathan Harris in the first place: Yahoo! Time Capsule.

He worked with Yahoo! (How annoying is that exclamation point? Very.) to build a site where users can submit text, images, video and sounds that reflect human nature, based on a few general themes: You; Love; Anger; Fun; Sorrow; Faith; Beauty; Past; Now; Hope.

The cool part? The contributions will be digitalized and beamed with a laser into space on Oct. 25 from the Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacan, now an archeological site near Mexico City.

I'm probably going to submit something... not sure what yet. Probably, I don't know, some quick video I put together chronicling the greatest achievements in the history of mankind or something.


The site - minimalist, responsive, intuitive.

Here is a random selection of the stuff soon to be beamed into space. And please - don't panic. The extraterrestrials will find out about unicorns.


Sorrow: Picture 8373. From a female in CA, United States.
The unicorn has been spotted and will soon succumb to the senseless wrath of ignorant man.


You: Drawing 10260. From a male in his 20's in KL, Malaysia.
I Hope that this fiction will be reality in the future, and modern Holy Grails such as Intellienge Aliens, Time Travels, Anti Gravity Cars will be discovered by then.


Fun: Picture 10265. From a female in Phillipines.
Fun is one lazy afternoon spent talking and laughing with my sisters.


Hope: Words 8653. From someone.
I am from China, now here in UK.

And the best thing, in my opinion, we'll be telling these otherworldly beings?...

Fun: Picture 9881. From someone.
dance. you'll feel so much better.

Jonathan Harris - no, the other one.

Yeah no, you mean the actor from Lost in Space? With the really rubbery skin, right? Yeah, the one with the same birthday as me. No, that's not who I'm talking about.

I'm talking about the other Jonathan Harris, groundbreaking media artist. I've seen projects of his so many times, but never looked into their origin. Bad, bad Beckstar.

You could say his work tries to document and experiment with human experience using the internet. You could call him the world's best data artist. Or you could just check out his stuff:


10x10 uses Reuters, BBC and the NYTimes to create an unregulated snapshot into images and words that are making headlines. As Harris explains:

With no human editors and no regulation, 10x10 is open and free, raw and fresh, and consequently a unique way of following world events. In 10x10, we respond instinctively to patterns in the grid, visual indicators of relevance. When we see a frequently repeated image, we know it’s important. When we see a picture of a movie star next to a picture of dead bodies, we understand the extremes that exist in our world. Scanning a grid of pictures can be more intuitive than reading headlines, for it lets the news come to life, and everything feels a bit less distant, a bit closer to heart, and maybe, if we're lucky, gives us pause to think.

We feel fine is an engine that basically harvests text and image from blog entries containing phrases "I feel" and "I am feeling". Representing each as a tiny coloured ball, the site is a buzzing, living map of authentic human emotion.


More We feel fine. This is from an anorexic girl's blog.


More We feel fine.


WordCount is an interactive presentation of the 86,800 most frequently used English words, ranked and scaled in order of commonness and arranged side by side as a very long sentence (quoted from Harris' site). Star is number 1549, and the 666th most commonly used English word is Easy. A neat interface.


Some of his great information map work.


More of his great information map work.

I love that these moving and though-provoking works of art come from something completely mundane - collecting and representing sets of data. If I was half the interactive artist he is... I would be ready to retire.

Weird Al - mad respect!

Word to god, I pumped my fist in the air and said 'YES!!!!' when I just found out about this.

In retrospect it's no surprise, but Weird Al has a Trapped in the Closet tribute on his new album. Yes, I know. It really, really does rule. The clip below is audio only, but seriously - who wouldn't want to hear the clown prince of parody take on the cokehead stepson of ghettofabulousness? There'll probably be a video for this at some point, so this is a sneak preview.



Of course I know it's pretty fucking lame to like Weird Al. He exists in this weird vortex of celebrity, where he's so self-aware of his ironic so bad it's good appeal that he ruins it for everyone that likes him ironically. And to like him sincerely... well, then you're the kind of person that sincerely likes Weird Al.

But to the progenitor of nerd music; to the mastermind behind the classic film UHF; to yet another comic who's thrown his hat down in front of Trapped in the Closet and said 'shall we dance?'; and finally, to the man who made a video I knew every frame in when I was seven:



Weird Al, I salute you.

Un film pour des révolutionnaires

So I've been going to see some good stuff at the Vancouver International Film Fest this season.

First, a disappointment. I had such high hopes for the Miike Takashi film - Big Bang Love, Juvenile A. The last Miike film I saw, Gozu, was my favourite film that year. One of the strangest and most surreal films I've ever seen, actually. This new one is more art-house, much slower, and more than anything just not exploring themes that matter to me (what kind of man do you want to be?). Not a huge surprise, as it was billed as a homo-erotic prison flick. Meh.

But we went to see a film Saturday that was excellent. Renaissance (or visit le site officiel in French) is an animated film noir set in 2054 Paris. It explores themes of mortality, corporate ownership, politics, individual freedom etc. But the visuals... sigh. Mmmmmm.





It was graphically gorgeous. All black and white in really high contrast. Done using rotoscoping/motion capture (a la Waking Life), it is so architectural, moody and noir. Beautiful. It almost gave Fei a seizure it was so high contrast, but hey, she took one for the team.

Not only that, but how many films highlight design in such a prominent way? Even the website walks you through the design process for the elements/logos/graphics used. This attention to detail (they even had Citroen invent a new car for the film) really creates an integrated and believable future reality. Well played, Christian Volckman, well played.


Studies for the Avalon Logo


Further studies for the Avalon Logo


Avalon Logo as seen in film


Studies for alcohol bottles in film

Dessine moi un mouton...

Okay, so first of all, there were some pretty cool winners in the Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge 2006, or The Seevcees as the awards are known in the business.

Things like the first place Illustration winner, realistic digital still life of five 'well-known mathematical surfaces', by Luc Benard:


From left, clockwise: Klein Bottle; Symmetric 4-noid; Breather Surface; Boy's Surface; Sievert-Enneper Surface;

But the favourite find has to be California media artist Aaron Koeblin. His piece Flight Patterns, below is an ethereal little animation built on air-traffic data.



Then I go to his website and find that he's been doing some way more far out stuff. How about his meat simulator project Eat you up?

Eat you up is an interactive installation in which the user answers a series of questions about their lifestyle. From this information a code is created which contains an approximation of the levels of amino acids present within their system. This code is used to create a synthetic meat flavor which is then presented to the user.

This is completely crazy. I'm sure the actual taste of bbq Beckstar can't be simulated so simply - it's not just amino acid level that determines a meat's tasty flavour is it? Still - a fairly disturbing idea.

And then there's Earworms - a software app that writes little mnemonic songs based on user-generated data (to-do lists and other memorization aids being the likely commercial applications). The video is the height of corporate camp. Watch it just for the scene of the parents writing a goth-techno song to teach their teen to drive. It's teentastic!



One other cool project before Scott gets home and we sit down to chili and homemade cheese bread courtesy of the best roommate ever - The Sheep Market, where Koblin used the online task service Amazon Mechanical Turk. His human itelligence task? Draw a sheep facing left. For 2 cents. 10,000 sheep later, he's got an interesting visual experiment on his hands.

All in all - some cool experiments in technology/art/humanity, and definitely someone to keep an eye on.

Fun with Fei and Friends!

So my really good friend Fei was in town this weekend. Unfortunately there wasn't a camera around to capture the good times of shopping, drinking, movie watching and giggling. Not to mention the tickle fights.

In fact, if our friend Janos hadn't been around to snap a shot while we waited bleary-eyed for breakfast at the Templeton, we'd have no record of the delightful madness.


Contents: 2 sleepy girls. Directions: Add caffeine and eggs. Toss.

Since it was Fei's birthday last weekend (October 1st), I'm going to give a short shout-out to this wild child from the Far East. It was a smoggy afternoon in Beijing when I met this girl, and we turned it out hard.

So to the girl that spent all too many nights on strange Chinese dancefloors by my side; the girl who will always tell you straight; the girl who always has your back; the girl who defies cultural stereotypes on both sides of the Pacific...

Happy Birthday girl - you're totally chou mei but I love you just the same.