For this issue of STFW we turn our heads towards the growing desire for us to ‘re-connect’. Not in some hippy, eco, Feather Down farm kind of a way. More of an inert search and a desire to connect that is somehow, well, more real.
Crazy innit. iTunes launched, what, 9 years ago and still we listen to our albums gazing at one static jpeg of the single or artwork of the album. Arcade Fire’s synchronised artwork for their new album The Suburbs looks to change things. Each track on the album has an individual image that appears on your iPod when it’s played, with the lyrics then appearing on the screen as they are sung. Think of it as a sing-a-long analogue MTV video. Oh, the good old days of music packaging. In a similar vein, there’s a new music visualisation piece in our namesake – Mother, that can dynamically load/unload sketches. You can then mix the visual output in a manner not unlike VJing, to accompany both recorded and live music. Music + visuals = happiness.
We’re based on a street (Redchurch) that Vogue once heralded as the coolest on the planet and look, two years later we have a selection of identikit, washed-up shops. The period drama home store that is Labour and Wait is even turning chain by setting up shop down our way. Brands are now embracing this desire for the authentic and non-homogenised. The obvious example of this ‘re-connection’ would be Levi’s We Are the Workers embrace of authenticity. Here we’re invited to roll up our sleeves, get our hands dirty and get down to work at a series of print shops where local people get crafty. Instead we turn to Nike’s Precious campaign that follows on from the success of their post-digital placard Chalk Bot. For Precious we are invited to follow, in exacting detail, the journey of a cyclist’s journey – the data visualisation geeks that caught Newsnight last week, you’re going to love this. David McCandless watch out! And while we’re on our bike, be sure to check Rapha’s new batch of films.
Just as Intel’s Creators Project sort to break the artist out of the gallery, we are seeing the rise of urban interventions which bring art to the masses and help us to reconnect with our everyday surroundings. This isn’t another group of Bansky wannabes, but urban intervention with a certain sophistication. French street artist Arno Piroud is just one who is out there putting fiction into reality. After you see his film, you begin to see the inspiration for the gong-winning Fun Theory Volkswagon campaign. Similarly, the recent Wish Come True Festival over in Toronto by Friends With You, encouraged people to come out and play to bring to life their rainbow city of totems, magical mushrooms, oversized bouncy houses and inflatable characters. Read more about all this here.
Earlier in the year Colombia Road’s finest Rob Ryan, was down at Somerset House. Exhibition, nah, he relocated his whole goddamn studio down there for the run of the Pick Me Up art fair. Paper cutting, printing presses, the works – oh, and you could even stop by and have a natter with Ryan too; a real one-on-one art dialogue. And that’s the point. Biographies are no longer enough; people want the real deal. And not in the Cameron gifting Obama an Eine piece way. Commissioned London graffiti for the President, really?! We want to know the story, the provenance, we want to see it all with our own eyes.
It’s one of those things we’ve all talked about, “Like, we so need to encourage connection in the real world, not in the Facebook world, man.” And we’ve all been beaten to it. Hats off to DDB Düsseldorf for highlighting the ridiculousness of wasting so much of our time on social networks in such a comedy post-social manner. As part of Diesel’s Be Stupid campaign, the agency created FacePark – a one-day only analogue version of FaceBook, complete with cardboard cutout profiles. People could become friends with others by attaching their name to a friend’s cardboard profile and add ‘Like’ stickers to people, groups and comments. Yeah, sounds a bit stupid – but I guess that’s the point, right?
This issue of SFTW was guest-edited by Diana in Heaven, the People’s Princess, now regularly reporting from the afterlife via Twitter. Coming soon – a modern eBook, her celestial diary in full and exclusive. And a Diana In Heaven sitcom is in development.
So, are YOU on Twitter then? To be honest, it doesn’t matter if you are or you aren’t, because you’ll never have as many followers as I’ve got. Unless you’re Stephen Fry or Jonathan Fucking Ross. But that’s another story – they’re rigging it. But now it’s not enough just being on Twitter and being able to scroll down your list of followers (or acolytes, as I know you like to think of them), stroking the screen and congratulating yourself because you’ve got a few made-up friends on the internet. No, now you can get a personalised mug with their frigging faces on it – a permanent reminder of your brilliance and your ability to connect with people you’ve never met. But look – most of them aren’t actually real people but spam bots, machines that have followed you in the hope that you’ll follow back and somehow stupidly click on the links they post to their porn sites. You dick.
Get a load of this so-called ‘tribute’ to my everlasting memory – Eating off the People’s Princess. Some joker has taken one of my beautifully crafted souvenir plates and desecrated it by decorating it with different kinds of food. They probably think they’re making some kind of clever statement about my well-known inability to keep my grub down when I was alive while at the same time making me look like a fucking idiot. What they’re actually doing is breaking the terms and conditions that come with every single piece of merchandise with my mush on it. They won’t be hearing from my lawyers obviously, but once I’ve tracked down the wankers behind this, they’ll be getting a visit from my bad self in the middle of the night, an experience they’ll never forget.
Ever wondered what it’s like hanging around up in Heaven? The bloke in charge of these freaky paintings – “Celestial Soul Paintings”, obviously has. It’s simple stuff – send him a photo of yourself and he’ll fanny about with it, adding rainbows, unicorns and dolphins and making fucking laser beams shoot out of your eyes and stuff. Oh yeah, he’ll probably want a shit-load of your money as well. To be honest, he hasn’t got a frigging clue what it’s like up here. The truth of it is that you can’t even float down the street without being hassled by Jimi Hendrix pulling stunts on his BMX as he tries to impress Yootha Joyce. Don’t see any of that in these shitty paintings.
