The Meccano Grape

This is amazing https://twitter.com/KimKierkegaard The...

Tue, 14 May 2013 13:02:51 -0400

This is amazing

The philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard mashed with the tweets and observations of Kim Kardashian

"It's so nice to break from reality"

Tue, 14 May 2013 12:18:25 -0400

“Watching Spring Breakers play out to its morally unsatisfactory (in)conclusion, I thought finally of Marcuses’s concept of “repressive desublimation”. Way back in the 1960s the Frankfurt School associate grasped that capitalism had an interest in creating wanton consumers, insatiable and impulsive. External constraints on our appetites for sex and destruction still exist (police, law, social services etc) but they are contradicted and undermined by a consumer capitalism that erodes internal restraints like guilt and inhibition, the ability to deter gratification, even the capacity for linear thought. Stimulating desire and narcissism, the economy’s interests collide with those of other political structures like church, education and family, all of which aim to channel energy into long term projects (‘heaven’ being the longest-term of them all). Capitalism and advertising, as well as their bedfellow pop culture, have harnessed Romanticism not for representative ends (unrepression is precisely the modus operandi) but for the dissipation of energy and the displacement of anger from any kind of political articulation.

When a pop-star as bland as Katy Perry can sing, in her number one hit TGIF about binge drinking past oblivion and menage-a-trois romps, it seems pretty clear that excess is normative and ‘breaking loose’ just another set of chains. Likewise, of Spring Break and Spring Breakers, I found myself wondering: if this is the beach underneath the pavement what, if anything, lies beyond the beach? Pop culture in its present state has exhausted its point; its incitements to poor impulse control and attention-deficit disorder no longer threaten anything”

Simon Reynolds writing about Spring Breakers in Sight & Sound

“Under the shadow of the drone” timelapse video

Mon, 13 May 2013 07:49:41 -0400

“Under the shadow of the drone” timelapse video

“What can we do to make this brand easy to think of, and easy to buy?”

Thu, 09 May 2013 09:03:39 -0400

If as Martin Weigel posits in his recent Canalside View post the question we need to be asking is:

“What can we do to make this brand easy to think of, and easy to buy?”

Then this Yo Yo Bear example may be an answer to the second half of the question.

Photo care of Adam Morgan on his Eat Fish Blog

A wonderful example of making a brand easier to buy.

Punchdrunk: The Drowned Man. Tickets and more info here

Wed, 08 May 2013 10:53:37 -0400

Punchdrunk: The Drowned Man.

Tickets and more info here

"In terms of time, however, the picture seems to be narrowing. Public attention is increasingly..."

Tue, 07 May 2013 11:37:13 -0400

““In terms of time, however, the picture seems to be narrowing. Public attention is increasingly focused on very near futures: businesses live in terror of the bottom line and the quarterly results, while politicians quake at tomorrow’s opinion polls and formulate policy in terms of them. We’ve heard tales of farmers planting olive trees or vineyards for their grandchildren to harvest, or of foresters cultivating groves of oaks to replace a chapel roof hundreds of years in the future, but by and large, we don’t do that anymore. We have less active engagement with our future than our ancestors did.””

- Brian Eno writes to Nicholas Nassim Taleb (author of The Black Swan, Anti-fragility) as part of Jem Finer’s Longplayer project, which is creating a 1,000 year long musical composition.

"When there’s no linear tie, how is a person supposed to figure out what’s going on? There’s no..."

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 11:50:11 -0400

““When there’s no linear tie, how is a person supposed to figure out what’s going on? There’s no story, no narrative to explain why things are the way things are. Previously distinct causes and effects collapse into one another. There’s no time between doing something and seeing the result. Instead the results begin accumulating and influencing us before we’ve even completed an action. And there’s so much information coming in at once from so many different sources that there’s simply no way to trace the plot over time””

- http://www.amazon.co.uk/Present-Shock-When-Everything-Happens/dp/1591844762/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1367336984&sr=8-1&keywords=douglas+rushkoff+present+shock

Blue Ant's latest work: Boards Of Canada and number theory

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 08:52:00 -0400

Last week a mysterious Boards Of Canada 12” was discovered in a record shop in New York called OTHER MUSIC. It contains 20 seconds of music and a spoken number.

Boards Of Canada have a slightly obsessive fanbase not dissimilar to those in William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition that obsess over THE FOOTAGE, a strange collection of short anonymous artistic film clips that have no sense of narrative.

It would appear that Boards Of Canada (or someone at their record label WARP) has decided that they should take inspiration from Pattern Recognition and develop a similarly orchestrated global campaign as it was confirmed that there are 6 records and they are each in a different country. Yesterday a record was ‘found’ in Rough Trade East.

It’s not just limited to record stores though as Zane Lowe on Radio 1 played a different 20 second sample than what had been found with a new number sequence last night.

And there are further number theories floating around various Boards of Canada uploads on Youtube. In fact a similar dash and xxxx sequence was left as a comment on a video several years ago. Which is probably the best bit and has made several fans heads explode.

The whole thing is oblique and interesting and has Twitter fascinated by its scope. It’s not the usual FACEBOOK ANNOUNCEMENT - RADIO 1 EXCLUSIVE - TOUR - ITUNES BLAH BLAH BLAH model of the music industry. Noone even knows where this is leading (maybe a new album unexcitedly) but that is part of the fun. Maybe people are seeing meaning in nothing. Maybe its all apophenia.

You can read about it all in more detail here including the complex number theories.

It all sounds like a William Gibson novel. Where is Cayce when you need her?

I’m always intrigued by the talk of brands needing to be more simple yet sometimes being more complex can have its place. Its the old and/or debate. I’m fascinated by what happens next and where this will end though.

Daft Punk human after all...

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 07:05:46 -0400

Daft Punk human after all...:

“When you drive on the sunset strip and see these billboards [a giant billboard advert for the album greeted those driving down the highway to Coachella this month], it’s more magical than a banner ad”

Thomas Bangalter

Guess what - doing cool shit IRL is more interesting than banner ads. I preferred it when Daft Punk were making blazing techno like this than what appears to be disco lounge vibes (and to be honest Human After All was a massive disappointment) but the campaign for the new album is interesting.

And other people think so including this guy who took the first 15 second loop that debuted in Saturday Night Live and looped it for an hour.

Argos and present shock

Fri, 12 Apr 2013 08:09:12 -0400

http://www.marketingmagazine.co.uk/bulletin/dailynews/article/1178143/?DCMP=EMC-CONBreakingnewsfromMarketing

Argos are apparently plotting the store of the future. Apparently this involves kitting out stores with “web browsers, wi-fi and fast track collection services.” Pretty futuristic. It would appear they’re suffering from present shock and have lost sense of what the future is.

If I was Argos I’d be looking beyond the ‘present’ to re-imagining what their proposition looks like in the near-future and far-future. They should probably read this and think about their core premise of “order and collect” and embrace 3D printing. As nascent as it is they bizarrely are a brand in a prime position to capitalise on it. As home ‘3D printers’ come crashing down in price we may well need bigger more complex 3D printers for larger items. Argos I’d argue should be thinking about this - taking a brand blueprint, customising it and then sending to Argos to print and then collect links perfectly to what they currently do but stretches them into the future.

Argos could be the brand that leads the market in this area. I wonder if they’ll figure it out.

"The only way for a new generation to take control of what comes after this decaying period of pop..."

Tue, 02 Apr 2013 06:10:01 -0400

““The only way for a new generation to take control of what comes after this decaying period of pop culture is to conceive a dazzling cultural hybrid – perhaps involving computer coding, self-branding, comic book abstraction, architecture, a profound reconfiguring of rock’s dissolving moral and social vigilance and a mutating speed of thought – that reverberates from the world as it is now, on the edge of collapse, not as it was then, recovering from collapse.””

- http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/mar/31/rolling-stones-glastonbury-counterculture-morley

Massive Attack vs. Punchdrunk vs. Adam Curtis - A COLLECTIVE...

Mon, 11 Mar 2013 07:22:46 -0400

Massive Attack vs. Punchdrunk vs. Adam Curtis - A COLLECTIVE HALLUCINATION

Inside the mind of the ‘consumer’ (as much as I hate...

Mon, 11 Feb 2013 08:27:44 -0500

Inside the mind of the ‘consumer’ (as much as I hate the word consumer)

"Metaphors “carry explanatory structures from a familiar domain of experiences into an other..."

Mon, 11 Feb 2013 04:35:06 -0500

“Metaphors “carry explanatory structures from a familiar domain of experiences into an other domain in need of understanding or restructuring” Klaus Krippendorff”

- http://www.asc.upenn.edu/usr/krippendorff/metaphor.htm

"Metaphors “must be made use of to illustrate ideas that we already have, not to paint to us..."

Mon, 11 Feb 2013 04:35:00 -0500

“Metaphors “must be made use of to illustrate ideas that we already have, not to paint to us those which we yet have not” John Locke”

From Jim Collins ‘Good To Great’ Turns out the...

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 04:36:00 -0400

From Jim Collins ‘Good To Great’

Turns out the reason I don’t post on here as frequently as other people is because I’m a level 5 leader not focused on my ego…..

…but by writing this I appear to have broken the rule of humility.

Dang.

Game over.

Back to level 4.

Brian Eno - IMAGINARY LANDSCAPES (Documentary from 1989)

Mon, 23 Apr 2012 10:04:52 -0400

Brian Eno - IMAGINARY LANDSCAPES (Documentary from 1989)

Italians Do It Better and Johnny Jewel continue killing it with...

Thu, 29 Mar 2012 04:35:00 -0400

Italians Do It Better and Johnny Jewel continue killing it with the new Chromatics Kill For Love album. Interest already piqued by the youtube uploads of Lady / Kill For Love / Into The Black the full album is now up on Soundcloud to stream and doesn’t disappoint. Liquid synthy 80s ryan gosling drive-y goodness.

Apparently the album was mastered and up on itunes within 24 hours. Respect. Go get it.

The components of creativity? What happens when we run out of...

Mon, 12 Mar 2012 10:18:00 -0400

The components of creativity?

What happens when we run out of things to copy?

Where art thou future shock? [A short rambling inspired by...

Thu, 08 Mar 2012 08:02:00 -0500

Where art thou future shock?

[A short rambling inspired by Simon Reynolds Retromania, The IPA Excellence Diploma and the Critical Beats #3 panel discussion]

I’m currently reading [or should I say flicking through as I have about 10 books on the go at the moment due to my 21st century low attention focus] The Hacker Manifesto by MacKenzie Wark. This passage struck me as I’m currently developing thoughts on creativity for my latest IPA Excellence Diploma assignment.

I’ve been grappling with what creativity is and I was struck by the idea of hacking as “the creation of the possibility of new things entering the world”. It sounds interesting and analogies can be made with DJs and a similar thought of how they create new things from recombination [even improving songs through new context and combinations]. The movement from an analogue / linear song after song mixture of disparate parts approach has evolved into digital synthesis in which everything works beautifully through the Ableton platform. The medium has become the message. And dance musics evolution has mirrored this shift with the 90s being defined by its linearity (think house and how that was just stretched to an end point) vs. the noughties and lateralism (think the shifting order of dubstep and the myriad modular forms from the wobble to post-dubstep to dub-techno).

Brian Eno’s description of artists could be reappropriated here: “An artist is now much more seen as a connector of things, a person who scans the enormous field of possible places for artistic attention, and says, what I am going to do is draw your attention to this sequence of things.”

But this also leaves me thinking about Simon Reynolds recent Retromania treatise and the thought that the future has become about small increments of the present [over William Gibsons contention that the future is already here]. Our obsession with the past [youtube for example essentially makes time and the concept of history flat] could mean that we soon run out of the past. What happens then?

All this makes me wonder whether creativity lies with Reynolds search for the “future shock” as he calls it. The shock of something being so amazing that it knocks you sideways in amazement. Think Donna Summer I Feel Love, think Radiohead Idiotheque, think Rhythm Is Rhythm Strings Of Life etc. He believes that this happens less and less these days (from a musical perspective anyway) but this analogy could be stretched easily across culture.

Modernism as a 20th Century movement also had as a central tenet “the shock of the new” and they had an intrinsic fear of repeating others. They became obsessed with deeming what was passe or obsolete. Indeed Nike could be deemed the ultimate modernist brand rewarding those who do what others haven’t done.

However you look at it using the future shock as a barometer of greatness could lead to more dangerous and interesting thinking. And that can only be a good thing, right?