The next Ephemera Society Bazaar is on this Sunday (3 October), at the Holiday Inn, Coram St, London WC1N 1HT, from 11am until 4pm.
If you’ve not been before, the Ephemera Fairs & Bazaars are rather special events, where traders gather to sell printed ephemera dating from roughly the 1800s to the 1960s. There’s a mix of posters, travel brochures and labels, theatre bills, invoices, and all manner of printed goodness. A bit like a jumble sale crossed with a bookshop. But good.
We made our way across to the Bargehouse at Oxo Tower Wharf yesterday to check out this year’s Designers Block, and figured we’d treat you to a few of our favourite finds.
Just above is Mike Kann’s Muybridge Chair – Gallop 2, part of a series of chairs: “designed to create an animation of movement in a physical object. This range is based on a set of images of a horse walking captured through the pioneering photography/video work of Eadweard Muybridge.” Brilliant.
Sticking with chairs, we loved Hendzel and Hunt’s Made in Peckham range of furniture (below), made from reclaimed and waste materials from the streets and yards of SE15, and without the use of metal fixings, just handmade wooden dowels. Lovely stuff.
As you can see above, the boys from Hendzel and Hunt had bought their dog with them to do some PR; but the gang from Lazerian had made their own dog, in the form of Gerald (below), who comes in various shapes and sizes. We’d love a Gerald for the studio…
And sticking with the animal theme, Sung Kug Kim was showcasing his beautiful Bi-King handlebars:
Designers Block is on at the Oxo Tower Bargehouse until Sunday 26 September.
We nipped across to Trafalgar Square last night to check out Outrace, one of the centrepieces of this year’s London Design Festival.
Outrace is a large scale installation of eight industrial robots (on loan from Audi), each of which has a powerful LED head attached to the end of its arm. If you log on to the Outrace website you can submit a message of up to 70 characters which the robots will then recreate in a 3D cursive graffiti font written in light (assuming they deem your message interesting enough – we quite liked “Bow to your robot overlords puny humans” which someone has already posted). Long exposure cameras placed round the base of the installation then capture these interactive light paintings, and display them on screens just below the robots, as well as sending them to their YouTube channel (it’s 2010, nothing exists unless it’s on YouTube), and emailing them back to you. Here’s ours (with a couple of stray characters, guess those robots aren’t infallible…):
The project was designed by Clemens Weisshaar and Reed Kram, who in the newspaper handed out at the installation are described as being very different from standard ‘professional designers’: ”You will know these genteel people by their office pallor and their dainty Apple iPhones. Reed Kram and Clemens Weisshaar do not fit this mould.”
Well boys, judging by your bio shots on the Outrace site, you fit the mould just fine:
To be fair, the newspaper has a fairly tongue-in-cheek tone (in parts – other parts are dripping with painfully sincere academic analysis of the project) so perhaps us genteel folk shouldn’t get too worked up…
The project is evidently mind-blowingly complex as a piece of software engineering, which is all well and good, but what’s the actual experience like?
Well, it’s kinda groovy to have a gang of beautiful robots girating around in Trafalgar Square – you can check out the live stream to see them doing their thing – they’re like a nest of rhythmic vipers, dancing to some unheard tune (Bjork’s All is Full of Love perhaps?) Very beautiful.
As an interactive text piece though it works far better online than it does as a physical piece – when you’re in the square you can’t see the letterforms left by the light traces (unless you photograph them at night as we did, which means taking an SLR and a tripod along), and the screens below the robots showing the messages don’t feel entirely connected to what’s going on above them. And while we were there they’d run out of the explanatory newspapers, which was leaving people in the dark, as it were. The online films are great though, and the graffiti font works well for the kinds of messages that are being sent in (‘Kirstin, I love you with all of my heart. A xxx’ being one of the latest), pleasantly undercutting the mechanical movements of the robots.
All in all a fine centrepiece to the festival. Outrace continues until tomorrow evening (23 September) so get down there sharpish if you want to take a look.
Larger versions of our shots are on Alistair’s LDF10 Flickr set.
Bit of a last minute one this, but tomorrow evening (Tuesday 21 September) D&AD are having another of their Sharp’ner events, this time looking at The Art of the Fanzine, with Teal Triggs, whose new book Fanzines
Speaking of D&AD, we’re also looking forward to their President’s Lectures, particularly the Pecha Kucha night on 3 November.
So the kids over at Berg have been playing around again, this time for creative communications agency Dentsu, and have produced this beautiful little piece of stop frame animation.
They created wireframe models of words, and then did virtual CAT scans of them, creating thin slivers of the letterforms. Each of these became single frames, which were then played in sequence on an iPad, and photographed with long exposures of between 3 and 6 seconds. The photographs were then spliced back together as stop frame animation, a rather tasty mix of lo-tech and hi-tech. (And reminiscent of the great stuff that the Lichtfaktor gang have been doing.)
Read all about it over on the Berg blog.
Via Catherine Dixon.
Our good buddy Catherine Greig from Make Good has been in touch to tell us about the Awesome Foundation that she’s part of.
The Awesome Foundation was set up by Tim Hwang in Boston (USA) in 2009, as a way for a few friends to fund projects. Each of the trustees contributes a chunk of cash each month from their own pockets, and they then use that as a fund to award to projects that they think are awesome. It’s simple and brilliant.
The London chapter which Catherine’s part of is awarding £1,000 each month to awesome projects, and the September submissions are currently open. So if you’ve got an awesome idea that fits in with their five simple terms (below), give them a shout.
The 5 rules of Awesome – all projects must:
Alex over at the lovely It’s Nice That just dropped us a line to let us know that the fourth issue of their magazine will be available to pre-order from today. The magazine comes out on October 1st, and everyone who orders before then gets a rather splendid James Jarvis two-colour screenprint. Content includes interviews with Nick Knight, Neville Brody, Miranda July, Trokia, and Noma Bar; features by Sara De Bondt, Adam Buxton, Adrian Shaughnessy, and Jez Burrows; as well as tons of work from the likes of Michael Landy, Rui Teneiro, and Peter Grundy.
All yours for just a tenner. Nice indeed.