nevermind the bricolage

Creation Stories

Adidas have released the first of three clay-motion films, chronicling the Adidas story.' "Once upon a time..." is how the tale begins, lending a mythic, fairy-tale quality to Adi Dassler's story. Dassler made running shoes for Jesse Owen's for the 1936 Olympics--iconic shoes for an icon. The film itself is a pretty dazzling piece of work, lots of detail, complete with voice over and orchestral score--they are definitely going for the emotional connection. Creation stories, the grand narratives that shape our self-understanding, were once largely the domain of religions, they created the consensual illusions around which societies formed themselves--these days every major company has a shaping story, a way of knowing where the product came from, it's ideology, philosophy etc.--it's an invitation to the consumer to know the companies shaping narrative and 'buy into' the philosophy. Petit Recits are what Lyotard called the new stories that would replace the ideologies of modernity, the grand narratives of the modern era replaced by countless 'little stories' of genesis, emergence, origins--I doubt that even he imagined that this would emerge so forcefully in the consumer sector.

Visualize Your Eventual Demise

I was walking down Beverly Blvd in Beverly Hills the other day to meet someone for lunch and did a little window shopping on the way. I came across a store called, Lululemon, a Canadian based yoga/exercise clothing store and was struck by their window  advertising. In huge letters a slogan read, "visualize your eventual demise," apparently it is one of the statements from the company manifesto--the tag says, "It can have an amazing effect on how you live for the moment." Right there in the heart of Beverly Hills, a meditation on death and dying as a means to live differently in the present.
I realize of course, that Lululemon is a business, selling a lifestyle, in this case a spiritual consciousness clothing business, but nonetheless, it is not everyday a huge store window is devoted to meditations on impending death as a means of adjusting how one lives today. I was thinking about this while I was listening to Deepak Chopra the other night when he talked about the prince of death coming up behind us all, and getting closer everyday and urging people to living passionately because of that.

Fontamentalism

Auto Futures?

The top image reflects the work of Irwin Stambler, it is how he envisioned the future of the automobile in 1966. Below is an image from the Art Center's Transportation department from this years crop of automobile design students. What is interesting of course, is how views have changed over the 40 years or so in between the images. It seems that when we come to the future we are pretty clueless and we are, in fact, heavily reliant on our present to imagine what the future will look like. Stambler's images seem to hold traces of the 'Jetson's' view of the view combined with a little bit of E-type Jaguar, compared with the bulky, 'Minority Report' feel of the newer car, the disparity couldn't be greater really.
       Nassim Nicholas Taleb plays with numbers, and challenges our confidence in long-term projections, his site, fooledbyrandomness, offers some interesting thoughts on the folly of long-term predictions about the future--the longer the time period the more likely that things we didn't anticipate will drop into the equation. We always like to think that we are 'in the know,'  with our fingers firmly on the pulse--this is why I think things like 5-year plans and the like are troubling at best, folly at worst. Great way of justifying my lack of a definable, long-term future!

Gondry Genius

Michel Gondry, one of the most creative filmmakers around has made some magic for Hewlett Packard. You can check it out here.

Sao Paolo Ad Ban

A bold move by the Sao Paolo city mayor has resulted in a complete ban on outdoor advertising--no billboards, no ads on buses or trams, no flyers, posters, even store fronts have been limited to certain amounts of advertising space, all in an effort to combat what the mayor views as "visual pollution." The law went into effect on April 1st and of course there are opposing views on the new reality of life in a post-billboard city. Articles are too numerous to mention, if you are interested I recommend a little 'google time.'(I first read about it here)