OFFF 2009. Review
On Wednesday, May 6, five members of the Syzygy Deutschland team boarded a plane in high anticipation of things to come. They were headed to this year’s OFFF Festival in Oeiras (Lisbon).
OFFF is a cutting-edge festival exploring the latest in digital aesthetics and software language and therefore THE meeting point for the international scene of digital creation.
Themed Fail gracefully, the three-day festival showcased top digital artists, web, print and interactive designers, motion graphics studios as well as new musical adventourers.
Impressions
Amongst others, we encountered great ideas and presentations by the following speakers: Aaron Koblin, U.V.A. (United Visual Artists), Sagmeister, Paula Scher, TOXI (Karsten Schmidt), JASON Bruges STUDIO, PES and Champage Valentine.
Let’s look at them in detail.
Aaron Koblin | aaronkoblin.com
Ten Thousand Cents
»Ten Thousand Cents« is a digital artwork that creates a representation of a $100 bill. Using a custom drawing tool, thousands of individuals working independently from one another painted a tiny part of the bill without knowledge of the overall task. Workers were paid one cent each via Amazon's Mechanical Turk. $100 is in every way at the centre of the installation: it is the total cost of labour, the artwork itself and reproductions are available for purchase for said amount. The work is presented as an interactive video piece with all 10,000 parts being drawn simultaneously. The project explores the circumstances we live in, a new and uncharted combination of digital labour markets, »crowdsourcing«, »virtual economies«, and digital reproduction.
The Sheep Market
The Sheep Market is a collection of
10,000 sheep made by workers via
Amazon's Mechanical Turk.
Workers were paid 0.02 ($USD) to »draw
a sheep facing to the left«. The individual drawing of each sheep may be viewed at TheSheepMarket.com
»That doesn't matter. Draw me a sheep… .« | Source: »Le Petit Prince«, by Antoine de Saint-Exupery, originally published in 1943
House of Cards, Radiohead
Director James Frost and a couple of other great people created the first interactive »music video without video«. Lasers and sensors were used to scan the band Radiohead into a 3D particle-driven data experience.
The project was launched as an Open Source project on Google Code: code.google.com/p/radiohead/downloads/list
An interactive online viewer (created along with Aaron Meyers) allows for 3D investigation of the data online.
United Visual Artists | uva.co.uk
Massive Attack Tour 2003
From the very smallest (atoms and molecules) to the very largest (star constellations), the show explored digital representations of information, filtering real-time news, stock-market prices, weapon shopping lists, spam emails, virus alerts and weather reports to create a »picture of now« translated into 36 languages, all perfectly synchronised to the band’s computers.
Christmas Light clusters
Regent Street, London
Collaboration between Nokia and Wieden + Kennedy
Nokia has sponsored the Regent Street lights as part of a campaign to advertise the imminent arrival of its flagship store, which opens at 240 Regent Street in January.
The space-age-like Light Clusters were designed by United Visual Artists, who collaborated with the P2 Group.
People‘s united emotion and live weather data control these lights.
Sagmeister | sagmeister.com
Stefan Sagmeister is an Austrian-born typography and design guru. For the past eight years, Sagmeister has been collecting personal maxims extracted from his diary. As the list grew, he decided to turn it into a project. Sagmeister takes one-year-long sabbaticals every 7 years, during which he does not accept work from clients.
So, if a client does call – and, of course, they do, this is Sagmeister after all – he trashes the brief and gives them a piece of art instead. He is resolute about this, even if the work is tempting, and it‘s been said that he even declined an offer to design a poster for Barack Obama‘s presidential campaign. Sagmeister spends the year experimenting with personal work and reinventing himself as a designer.
»Yes, design can make you happy«
Money does not make me happy
Thinking life will be better in the future is stupid, i have to live now
Trying to look good limits my life
The title of this work is among the few things Stefan Sagmeister claims to have learned in his life so far. This piece was broken up into 5 parts: Trying/to look/good/limits/my life and displayed in sequence as typographic billboards in Paris.
Obsessions make my life worse and my work better
In Amsterdam he laid out the sentence »Obsessions make my life worse and my work better« with 250.000 one euro coins, only to then see the installation removed by the authorities. They removed it to protect it, ironically.
»I had expected a certain ebb and flow to take place within the piece, which is of course the point of the entire Urban Play project, but to have the entire thing completely disappear overnight was more than anyone had expected.«
Banana wall
The exhibition will include works that have a
life of their own, transforming throughout the exhibition as viewers engage with them.
At the opening of his exhibition, Sagmeister installed a wall of 10,000 bananas. Green bananas created a pattern against a background of yellow bananas spelling out the sentiment: »Self-confidence produces fine results«.
After a number of days the green bananas turned yellow, too, and the type disappeared.
Paula Scher | paulascher.com
Paula Scher studied at Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia and began her graphic design career as an art diector at CBS, where she designed record covers.
Since 1991 she has been a director at the
New York office of the Pentagram design consultancy. As an artist she is known for her large-scale paintings of maps, covered with dense hand-painted labelling and information.
TOXI | toxi.co.uk
Advanced Beauty: Enerugii, part II
Advanced Beauty is an ongoing collaborative activity initiated and curated by my friend Matt Pyke of Universal Everything and his brother Simon, sound artist extra-ordinaire, active under the monikers Freefarm/Freeform. Started in late 2006, for the first project both have gathered a group of 18 participants to create a collection of sound sculptures, audio-reactive visual pieces further exploring the related themes of synesthesia, mixing the senses to create interference and so improve the quality of perception, the re-mapping and visual re-interpreting audio - all under the overarching direction of “minimalism” (purism) and the application of new & uncommon processes to realize the pieces.
Fid.Gen
Fid.Gen is a general purpose generator for designing and tailoring custom fiducial markers to be used in reacTIVision based projects. The layout of the markers is physics driven and realised by a network of springs. There are numerous parameters to adjust the size & complexity of the markers.
Nokia Friends
»A procession of diverse characters glide by on a travelator – friends, families, kids, lovers, rugby teams, fat couples, thin models – celebrating the diversity of people seen at Heathrow T5. Every character riding the travelator is unique, using generative software to create an ever-growing population.«
Jason Bruges Studio | jasonbruges.com
"We create interactive spaces and surfaces
that sit between the worlds of architecture, interaction design and site-specific
installation art.
Our projects range from large-scale building facades and public art to interactive interior environments and products."
Power up
Integrated artwork that monitors and displays variations in power demand for the local area. The design considers the practical requirements of a substation while creating an unexpected and unusual addition to the landscape, both by day and night. The utilitarian nature of the switchroom and transformers is complemented and contrasted by the soft edges of the illuminated floating spheres. The simple boundary fence forms a bold rectangular envelope, creating a rhythmic, moving view of the illuminated objects from the road for passing motorists.
Pixel cloud
An eight storey tall 3D matrix of light globes suspended in the North Atrium of the new Allen & Overy building and winner of the Workplace Environment category, Design Week Awards, 2009.
Dotty Duveen
Temporary installation commissioned by the Tate, comprising of an array of 40 wands in the main Octagon gallery. Each wand was 2 metres tall, and had a glowing sphere at the top that turned only when the rods were touched and bent.
A second part of the installation was the generation of a “live painting” tracking the interaction throughout the day. The resulting video piece gave a fascinating overview of the different movements occurring within the space.
PES | eatpes.com
PES (born Adam Pespane) is a diector and animator of numberous short films and commercials. Receiving a BA in English Literature at the University of Virginia, PES migrated to film as a storytelling medium.
He creates instantly recognisable original material by using everyday objects in his stop-motion animations.
Game Over
Good old NES transferrered onto real life.
JAMES PATERSON + AMIT PITARU | presstube.com
I Am A Chain Reaction
This is an excerpt from 'I Am A Chain Reaction' which is one of seven works that make up the dance/animation/programming hybrid project, Smashup.
Smashup is the outcome of an ongoing collaboration between artists James Paterson & Amit Pitaru ( Insertsilence ), and dancer/choreographer Dana Gingras ( Animals of Distinction, The Holy Body Tattoo ). Smashup premiered in its complete form, an hour long performance, at the Festival Transamérique in Montreal in the summer of 2008.
The Rotten Fruit Tardis 27/03/2009
'The Rotten Fruit Tardis' is a software environment created by artist James Paterson. It is the latest incarnation of his online space, Presstube.com (founded in 1999). TRFT is being developed and changed on an ongoing basis; significant updates will be recorded in the form of video screen captures and posted here.
Champagne Valentine | champagnevalentine.com
Show visuals for DJ Paul Okenfold
They created an hour long set of original footage for Paul Okenfold's world tour in 2008. This is a 3 minute excerpt.
Aphids Film Festival Sting
Animated sting they created for Aphids Film Festival in Australia, created by Champagne Valentine, Amsterdam
Chris Milk | chrismilk.com
Renascent | renascent.nl
Impressions
Written by Sarah Lillian Winkler & Christina Metzler
