Archived entries for Their Work
Indecipherable custom license plate.
Please, somebody help me out here.
Fill Donkers?
Flonkers?
Field Knockers?
Papercraft Theo Jansen
Must (attempt to) make!
Honda EV-N Concept Car
Introducing the new Honda EV-N. I don’t normally get off on cars bu C’MON! Look at that thing! If you’ve ever wanted to hug a car before this is it. It’s like Honda hired Playmobil to collaborate on a design with them. Or maybe Jay Ryan? Not only that, Honda also includes their insane new gyroscopic unicycle inside the drive side door. Witness:
New York City’s High Line
Photo: Iwan Baan, 2009, Courtesy of Friends of the High Line
NYC’s High Line park, an abandoned stretch of railroad trestle rebuilt into a public park, is now open. I’d seen the progression at a few different times so I’ve been excited to see the final form. It seems like the city is really proud of the new public space and they should be. The park looks beautiful and tasteful and it is just an amazing story all around; two guys at a neighborhood meeting discover they are both trying to save an abandoned stretch of rail and end up creating an experience that brings the entire city together.
Here’s the park’s blog and here’s a great NYT review from today that (of course) already reveals a hint of fear that developers may swing in and ruin the whole texture of the place.
Miranda July “The Hallway”
I really respect the amazing simplicity and beauty of Miranda July’s work.
via.
Objectified
Gary Hustwit’s new film ‘Objectified’ screened last week at the Walker Art Center. Sort of a of a quasi-follow-up to his previous film Helvetica, Objectified is a film devoted to contemporary product design. Sadly, I think the title says it all. To me, the film is unable to really effectively illustrate the importance that the designed object plays in our lives and instead focuses on the cult of “rock star” designers and the objects of desire that they create.
I don’t have any problem with the design rock star talking heads. The work they produce is amazing. But the film lacks any history or context. With Hustwit’s Helvetica we were able to track the life and the history of Helvetica, building a personal relationship with this important and ubiquitous underdog of a typeface. Objectified instead seems to run more like South Park’s Underpants Gnomes’ business plan:
Phase 1: Talk to Jonathan Ive.
Phase 2: ?
Phase 3: Product Design!
There is no mention of early 20th century designers, early modernist influences, philosophies, or even a brief history of product design itself. The only designer in the entire film with any real product design history that predates the 80’s is Dieter Rams. Seriously, not even Raymond Loewy?! (You can put any early deceased important designer’s name in that last sentence. No, they weren’t in the film either.) It seems like the film intends on convincing us that amazing intelligent product design is solely the invention of the last 20 years, that we have only technology to thank for giving us this opportunity to design our lives and that there are only a select few that can actually do it for us.
That empowering concept that design is something inherently human is mostly swept under the rug for the sake of another great shot of people ogling over objects in display cases. There is one shot, a single moment where we see a cork holding a door open. The interview overdub suggests that democratization of design is redundant and that all good design is inherently democratic. I couldn’t agree more, but this film is not at all about the democratization of design, it’s about the objects that we have defined our lives with, applied our own identities to and lived vicariously through. This film is a love letter to conspicuous consumption. We rest on the cork for second then move on to more beautiful objects.
In the end I feel like the film really does a dishonor to design in general. It is beautiful and well-made but leaves you with a sense of desire to redesign your living room in Karim Rashid and believe that his name, and the other contributors to the film, are the sole proprietors of product design. I would have much preferred a film that was half as beautiful but empowered anyone who saw it with the idea that our lives are only what we design them to be. That we don’t need our designed objects blessed by the right designer but that we can empower ourselves with our own decisions on how our life should work. That’s the real power of design.
ANVIL! The Story of Anvil
An amazing new documentary making it’s twin cities premiere next week. God bless you documentaries!
Yes, a Shepard Fairey post.
So legal action is in “progress” between Shepard Fairey and the AP. The discussion of these proceedings and whether or not Fairey’s HOPE poster is fair-use or not has been fucking fascinating me for months now. I’ve forced friends into repetitive drunken conversations about the legalities of this image, wanting to hear their thoughts. Mostly because for the longest time I felt that it did not constitute fair-use. My feeling on the matter came down to the simple concept of “advancing the image”, a term employed numerous times to legally assess fair-use. I feel that anyone debating fair-use must ask: “Does the new use of a copyrighted artwork express a new or different idea than the original image?” My opinion for a long time was that I didn’t feel that Fairey’s HOPE relayed any different meaning than Garcia’s photograph. A photograph Obama already invokes hope and a brighter future as these were Obama’s campaign ideals. So to use a photograph of Obama for the purpose of stylized interpretation to invoke the image of “hope” felt to me redundant and not necessarily an advancement of Obama’s image.
But recently I came to the conclusion that even though I couldn’t critically defend it, there is a power to that poster that the photo does not have. There is something larger going on emotionally in that poster that is difficult to substantiate and quantify. Some “magic.” Although this intangible power may not hold up in court (although, who knows. Even the US government admits that the”… distinction between ‘fair use’ and infringement may be unclear and not easily defined”) it seems to me that the poster does emotionally advance the image beyond the original photograph.
But now I’ve come across this, an additional Obey/Obama poster from last March.
It seems that in the shadow of the notoriety of the original poster this second “CHANGE” poster has been forgotten about. But I think this poster is important. It brings up a really important question for me. Although this poster is stylistically similar to Fairey’s original HOPE poster (since it comes from the same artist and was most likely created in the same manner) it doesn’t seem to me to carry the same power. It seems to me that the power of the original HOPE poster still rests on the photo itself, and if this is so I’m not sure anymore that Fairey HAS advanced that original image. That original image may be as powerful as it is purely because of the photograph. Or else this other CHANGE poster should contain that same power, right? Or am I just expecting too much from the consistency of an artist’s vision? Is there another obvious reason that this image is not as powerful that does NOT stem from the photo itself that I’m just not thinking of?
Stay tuned to find out how I feel about this next week…