I whish you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! Enjoy 2010!

Also take a look at the website, you can operate the electronic devices in the room all with the remote controls even the fireplace! Tip: try ‘make atmosphere’ with the harmony 1100. There is also a great game, you can win all the electronic devices you saw in the movie, even signed by Alex himself!

Hello everyone,
Xantifee is back from a very wet but amazing trip to Scotland, I’ve explored the mighty highlands and many mysterious castles, counted the sheep on the Isle of Skye, relaxed in the lovely countryside and cheered at the highland games in Edinburgh. So now I just want to say ‘thanks’ to the many friendly Scottish people I’ve met, it was great!

Aaron Koblin

‘Aaron Koblin is an artist specializing in data visualization. His work takes social and infrastructural data and uses it to examine cultural trends and emergent patterns.’ (bron: aaronkoblin.com)

I couldn’t say it better. At OFFF Aaron showed his research in which he uses the Internet as a collective work force. A really funny project is ‘a bicyle built for 2000’ ’ where people were asked to imitate a little sound. Played together this makes a very interesting soundscape of the song “Daisy Bell”, the first example of computer-synthesized vocals.

Click here to view the embedded video.

But besides these collective experiments Aaron also made a videoclip for Radiohead’s song ‘House of Card’s’.
‘Lasers and sensors are used to scan the band Radiohead into a three-dimensional particle-driven data experience. The code and data are launched on Google Code as an open source “music video without video” project.’ (bron: aaronkoblin.com)

Click here to view the embedded video.

If you visit the website you can even turn the 3D models around.

A MUST SEE is his visualisation of the air traffic in Nord America! (project info page)

“The things you don’t expect are more interesting.” (Aaron Koblin)

(live presentation@offf)

(Aaron @ vimeo)

_________________________

Campagne Valentine

Showreel

Click here to view the embedded video.

This rather excentric duo could not convince me with there visual style, but I do want to give you their  website & blog.

(Picture by the OFFF team)

_________________________

Robert L. Peters

Robert L. Peters was (together with Neville Brody and Paula Scher) one of the most experienced designers at the OFFF festival. I thought his lecture about the design process was very inspiring and very helpful. Especially his manifest:

“I have not falied 10.000 times, i found 10 000 ways of work that doesn’t work” (Thomas Edison)

“Be a surrogate, dream for your clients” (Robert L. Peters)

_________________________

ONESIZE

These Dutch dudes made the ‘Sponsor titles’ for this years OFFF. The result is an amazing combination of live video and CG effects. Step by step they explained the progress of making this movie.

Click here to view the embedded video.

(live presentation @ offf)

_________________________

PEZ

And then there was PEZ, the one man’s show of lovely stop motion short films. All do Pez never intended to become an animator, he now is one of the best stop motion directors on the field (after Tim Burton that is!).

He made his debut online with his Youtube movie called ‘Sex on the roof’ about two old chairs that have sex on the roof. The anecdote behind the movie is actually that he got the chairs from his parents and when he was little he wasn’t aloud to touch them because they were only used at Sundays and holydays. So when he got them as a gift he thought ‘What would these two chairs would like to do after years of isolation?’

Click here to view the embedded video.

Now many company’s ask him to make commercials for them and with a fairly big film cru he made many different commercials. These are my favourites:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

more fun commercials: Bacardi, Tiktak, sprint, etc…

Of course PEZ doesn’t only make commercials. His most recent shortmovie is called ‘Western Spaghetti’:

Click here to view the embedded video.

More of he’s very entertaining work on his website.

“I try to make people look at objects in a different way” (PEZ)

(live presentation@offf)

_________________________

Paula Scher

I heard so much about her but this was the first time I saw her, Paula Scher. This graphic designer is bin around for a very long time, I was still in my diapers when she became a big influence to the graphic industry. The cool thing about her design is  that she didn’t like the clean, Dutch design from her time and started to make images that didn’t have one strait line in them. I just love that philosophy, all do I like the Helvetica, I can’t use it al the time. It is just to sterile.

Of course Paula is one of the old style graphic designer, she likes to paint and she does not have much affection for the computer. But still she has very up to date work and she showed some great examples of that in her presentation:

This project was kind of funny because, they asked her  (Pentagram) to make a new city logo. But they wanted the logo for al the wrong reasons. What they wanted achieve was getting people to go walking, shopping, etc. to a part of town that was on the other side of the highways. You could walk under the highways by using the bridges but those looked absolutely not attractive. So they wanted a new logo but what they got was a painted bridge, but they loved it and the bridges will all soon look like this:

“Citybank was more honest than the art gallery” (Paula Scher)

(live presentatie @ offf)

(TED talk Paula Scher)

_________________________

Joshua Davis

Click here to view the embedded video.

Anyone who doesn’t know this dude should look him up online. This true showman can rock a crowd! Few years back Joshua became famous in the multimedia subculture for his random computer generated illustrations. He was and is a big influence and inspiration to many developers and designers. That fact is proven again this year at OFFF because almost every guest speaker has experimented with computer generated designs. You could say that he showed us how to let programming and design flow in to each other.

(foto ©offf-team)

And also this year the charismatic American inspires the overflowing room of 3 to 4 thousant people with new illustrative computer experiments. In the exhibition room there was an installation he made in collaboration with ‘Float 4 interactive’ in which he plays with code, design and interactivity.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Vooral het offf thema lag Joshua blijkbaar nauw aan het hart, in dit fragment heeft hij het dan ook over failing gracefully.

(live presentation @ offf)

-

Neville Brody

The first speaker of the day was Neville Brody. This guru of graphic/type/magazine design opened this year’s seminar and this year’s theme ‘Fail Gracefully’ by telling us to free yourself and our projects.  “Damn the consequences!”

Personally I was pleasantly surprised to hear that his studio was behind The beautiful Kenzo campaigns.

(portfolio website)

(live presentation @ offf)

_________________________

Multitouch Barcelona

Multitouch Barcelona made a pleading for bringing people and technology closer to each other. By adding some human warmth to their installations they not only make people interact with the screen but also bring people closer to each other. Here you can read the full report on their talk at OFFF 2009. In the main exebition hall you could play a game they made.

In de tentoonstellingsruimte van OFFF kon je ook een door hen ontwikkeld _nogal onconventioneel_ spelletje SPACE INVADERS spelen:

Click here to view the embedded video.

(Photo’s by Red Bull Music Academy Team, via:Multitouch Barcelona )

“Multitouch Space Invaders searches a new way to interact besides the classical multitouch applications that we’re familiarized to. We wanted to change the vision of typical finger based application to another concept that increases the collaboration with other users. Using balls as inputs versus fingers, the players could play in a totally collaborative environment.” (bron: Multitouch Barcelona)

Demo:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Similar interactief work:

“Designed for the Red Bull Music Academy 08, Guten Touch is an interactive art installation that involves people into a natural relationship with technology. A two projected displays system plus a 3m x 2m multitouch wall showcase applications designed to engage us into human friendly experiences rather than flashy and jaw-dropping visualizations. … Guten Touch is our enthusiastic good morning to natural interaction.” (bron: Multitouch Barcelona)

Click here to view the embedded video.

(live presentation @ offf)

_________________________

Karsten Schmidt – Toxic

Karsten Schmidt from ‘Toxic’ took us into his beautiful computer generated world. This designer/programmer frequently teams up with Matt Pyke from ‘Universal everything’ (Concept and Art direction) and together they make many different code generated designs like the wind tunnel for Audi and the monster postcards.

But we already saw those at OFFF 2007 and I was more interested in their new work.
So they repeated their unique postcards idea but this time with colourful computer simulated clothes. The idea was to hang a virtual piece of wire and move the lowest point around. Than they filled in the space the wire passed by with this cloth-like surface.

And of course like I expected someone would do, Karsten and Sascha Pohflepp made the ‘Social Collider’ commissioned by Google for their Chrome Experiments collection, to visualise how memes are created and how they propagate.

An other amazing graphic of a very different kind was this cover he made for Print Magazine. This typographic visual is a picture of a 3D print! After some trial and error trying to fail gracefully they managed to print this extremely detailed sculpture from a computer generated 3D model. I was really pleased to see that 3D printing is becoming a fully integrated medium in our visual culture. This looks like the future to me!

_________________________

Eva Vermandel

Eva Vermandel the lady from Sint-Niklaas (in Belgium) who lives and works in London had a very well prepared speech about her photographic work.

Eva Vermandel: “Mijn werk draait om de zoektocht het lineaire terug te vinden in een wereld die zwaar gefragmenteerd is door digitalisering en globalisering. Ik ga tegen het idee van ‘momenten’ in en probeer de onderliggende, doorlopende golfbeweging die tussen mensen onderling en mensen en hun omgeving ligt.”

All do she spoke perfect English I had a hard time understanding her. Probably because I was sitting in a bad spot and the eco in the room was really bad. On top of that she had a rather soft voice, so I can only recommend you to go to her website and let her work speak for itself.

_________________________

Jason Bruges Studio

Anyone who likes light, interactivity and architecture should see the amazing portfolio of the Jason Bruges Studio. Jason and his colleague are masters in ‘Visualising the invisible’ in their studio they are constantly experimenting with all kinds of electronics. But besides electronic devices they always use an interactive element to create their installations. This interactive element can of course be the actions or even reactions of people (for example: 02 Memory project, Recall) but for me their most moving installations were the ‘wind tower’ and the ‘moving chandelier’ because they use an invisible force and make it visual in the most unexpected and  a very esthetical way.
The  ‘Aeolian Tower’ installation is actually a building covered by little wind mills. Every mill has a red let light inside that only burns when the wind blows into the mill. So without using any extra electricity the tower lights up like a red northern light.

A similar installation was build commissioned by a law firm who wanted to do something special inside the 8 story high atrium of there building. So Jason and his colleagues made this gouge chandelier of little balls with blue let lights inside. When the wind on the roof blows in to the atrium and the balls in the chandelier start to shake they turn from deep blue to bright white. So if the wind blows harder the balls shine brighter.

The same wind trick was also used in a different installation in the museum for … where big tubes where hanged from the sailing. In every tube there was a ball and when the wind blows over the roof of the building inside the balls go up and down like waves.

I strongly recommend you to visit there website where you can check out all of there work.
Jason Bruges: “We make people think, we don’t give it on a plate”

_________________________

U.V.A. (United Visual Artists)

Just after the lecture of Jason Bruges we continued to play with light, interactivity and architecture because next in line there was U.V.A. (United Visual Artists)

_________________________

InsertSilence (James Patterson & Amit Pitaru)

Time for something else, InsertSilence did not insert silence! This is what you get if you put a graphic designer and a musician together for to long. This is a story of an idea going musical and visual. After experimenting with James Patterson ‘s illustrations to make code based animations Amit Pitaru felt the need to go back to making music. And because the music he wanted to make was impossible to create with conventional instruments he wanted to make his own instrument. So he created a little but very cool flash tool that make music just by drawing lines on the white screen. How higher your line in the screen how higher the note you get.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Of course if you don’t know how to play the instrument you find yourself in a dilemma, is this music or is this a drawing? Amit put the tool in different exhibitions around the world and people just draw pictures with it and made horrible sounds. So thinking about these facts made the boys of InsertSilence realise that this tool had an other great potential. So Amit modified it and made a quite unconventional 3D drawing tool out of it. James on the other hand had a great time with it because the tool was the perfect extension for his personal illustration style. After playing around with it and animating his 3D drawings the duo made a very extraordinary looking computer game.

_________________________

Chris Milk

The last speaker of this day was Chris Milk.

I have to say that he is just as peculiar, ironic and funny as his work suggests. Chris Milk has a trouble speaking for a big crowd so a staff member interviewed him about his life and work. But during this interview the most bold comments came out of the man’s mouth.
I think he’s work speaks for itself.

This weekend (from 13 to 15 March 2009) me and my fellow college’s from Markee whent to Colophon 2009 in Luxembourg a biennial symposium for magazine makers, experts, advertisers, readers and all creatives involved in the world of the independent magazine.

http://magculture.com/blog/

A big thanks go’s out to the PostrMagazine Boys for sending out great party vibes! Here is there picture report and party report.

Last year there 4 fashion designers showed there work on the catwalk, this year there where only 2 but Viona: http://www.viona-art.com had a big surprise for us, she presented a brand-new corset line that evening, and of course Vecona: http://www.vecona.de was present and filled the catwalk with some crazy-Tim-Burton-style girl dolls. Again it was a bizarre mix of historic, fantastic en modern styles. A true pleasure to see, so a big thanks to Viona and Dirk for the invitation and keep up the good work guys!

see more pictures @ the Gala Nocturna photo gallery