Art about Digital

I have been coming across few artists/designers lately who are using the internet/search engines/social media data as subjects for their work and I find this really interesting.

Julius Popp - has created a few pieces based on live interenet searches and the words that we type into search engines. Below is a waterfall, called Bit fall, where the words appear only for a second in the falling water, but it's pretty amazing I would have loved to see it for real! There's a video here of the artist talking about his work where you can see the piece in action.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AICq53U3dl8

This is the first piece I came across called Web Bit.code. It is a similar idea, the piece is a large mechanically operated ‘screen’ consisting of identical rotating black and white tracks made up of the 1s and 0s of basic binary digital code. Controlled by a specially designed software, the tracks will rotate individually, pausing at regular intervals to display the most frequently used key words taken from recent web feeds of current news sites. It's on display in the V&A in a new show Decode:digital design installations which opens this month. Think it might be time for a trip back to London!

''UXUS followed up the Home Reflections presentation with “Interaction”, an installation celebrating H&M Home’s transition from an online and catalogue retailer, to a physical showroom where one can indulge all the senses, especially touch. With the dominance of digital systems in our world, we explore the possibility of discovering through direct interaction. A large wooden display unit presents a series of pulleys and levers that are attached to various products. An action causes a reaction, pull and push, discovering through the physical exploration of an analog search engine. The display sits within 34m2.''

About UXUS

''Founded in Amsterdam in 2003, UXUS is an independent award wining design consultancy specializing in strategic design solutions for Retail, Communication, Hospitality, Architecture and Interiors. UXUS creates “Brand Poetry”, fusing together art and design, and creating new brand experiences for its clients worldwide. We define “Brand Poetry” as an artistic solution for commercial needs. Artistic solutions target emotions; emotions connect people in a meaningful way. Design gives function, art gives meaning, poetry expresses the essence.''

I am blown away by this piece of work I love it so much. It is so inspiring that a design can really be anything you want it to be - it is problem solving, and these problems are always changing. Bringing H&M back to the store and away from the internet is an interesting idea in itself and they have approached it in a fresh and unique way!

Randomers

Here's some more, not really related but lovely never the less, things that I found on my library day. I read every issue of Flux, Creative Review and ID, a lot D&AD annuals and numerous other books about graphic design and advertising. I'm not sure what directly influenced me, but I came away with a lot of new ideas so it was a day well spent!

Bad Typography is everywhere/good typography is invisible

A campaign by JWT Singapore for WWF. i'm not sure how well you can see this but the tagline is 'it's your turn now', this has inspired me a lot for my personal project.

Another one by JWT, India. Campaign for Levi's low rise jeans... Love it, this is exactly the kind of stuff I adore - its so simple, bold and clever, no over doing it, no trying to hard, just here's a clever way of showing you our product.

Garbarz and Patner, Hamburg, never heard of them before but I like this ad it reminds me of Jessica Haggy's work.

random book cover, don't know who designed it.

poster by Paul Sahr - exercises in futility

random again

Posters by Big Ant International - very nice! won a gold pencil for design apparently.

I like the style of these posters for sunsilk, very different from the normal glossy hair ads it would certainly cut through the shiny, fake, photoshopped women plastered all over most magazines for me!

Some nice posters for the museum of childhood in London.

Research: Personal project

I spent the whole day in the library on Monday desperately trying to get some inspiration for my personal project. As I am very poor (and environmentally conscious ;) ) I thought it would be a much better idea to put stuff like this on here so I don't waste ink paper and money printing it out. I'm not substituting my sketchbook, there's still plenty of work in there but I despise cutting and sticking and typing is quicker than writing so this way I get the best of both worlds. I put so much stuff on here I am sure no reads it, but really it's just for me - it's a good way to store all the images I find so they're not clogging up my memory and I can organise them and look back at them easily. Plus I hope when it comes to the journal it will seriously cut down the amount of work I have to do! =)

This stuff is some previous political campaigns I found - judge for yourself!

These are some nice posters for an exhibition that was on at the British Library about voting. It's interesting that they've gone for a pretty harsh angle - I think this was probably great for an exhibition, attracting people who are interested to go and look, but I don't think such a directly negative approach would stop most young people in the street. I am a firm believer that the best campaigns let the reader come to the negative conclusion in their own mind and time and allow them to choose to act, just planting the seed, rather than shoving shock, angry, parent like messages down their throats. Add a little bit of wit or cleverness and you've got the perfect campaign in my mind!

Interesting!

This is the Conservatives new motif at the moment. Not much to say really, it's pretty generic and generally awful.

The conservatives certainly like to kick up a controversial fuss don't they! this is truly terrible, do people actually take notice of these things? Scare tactics to get people to vote is pretty low in my opinion.

At least this ad suggests they're trying to try something new and there is some style behind the idea.

This is probably one of the most recognised political adverts of all time... it's a great play on words, but it still doesn't say anything about the conservatives and you wouldn't get away with that overlapping these days! Or then again, maybe you would on political advertising!