In the sheer number of typologies (architecture, narrative, film/video, music, and interactivity) rolled up within it, HBO’s recent Voyeur project is truly, and spectacularly, ‘multimedic.’

Derived as a promotional campaign for HBO by its ad agency, BBDO, Voyeur integrates eight unfolding stories within the conceit of a single New York apartment complex, which, with its walls laid transparent, privies us to an omniscient, dollhouse view of the proceedings. The eight stories interweave and points of intersection occur throughout, both spatially and chronologically. Part of the delight in experiencing Voyeur is the intricacy of this orchestration (director Jake Scott does an impressive job knitting the pieces together); the other pleasure is purely sensual. The textures, colors, and the archetypical purity of the stories themselves (a murder in one apartment, comic hijinks in another, and two apartments linked by opposite sides of an imploding romantic affair) are intoxicating.

The multithreaded film has been done before, with Mike Figgis’ Timecode, in which the viewing screen is divided into quadrants, each one engaged in separate but realtime exposition. Set in L.A., scenes from one quadrant occasionally lazily drift into one another, but all storylines immediately synchronize and respond in unison to ‘global’ events, i.e. random earthquakes ripple through the city of L.A.; when these quakes take place, all the characters in all four quadrants hit the deck together. It’s clever, but the summary effect of the movie is baroque and distancing. Longform cinema is a commitment, and in lacking a narrative hold on the viewer, Timecode’s conceit quickly wears out its welcome. It comes off as a precious exercise in form.

The scenarios in Voyeur, on the other hand, are iconic; they are narrative shorthands that don’t require elaborate exposition, nor even dialogue. They are told, elegantly and efficiently, in broad but communicative gestures by the actors. They are hard not to watch … These vignettes are then deposited within the framework of the apartment building (the flash/video site was handsomely put together by the indefatigable Brooklyn-based boutique agency Big Spaceship), and given a new axis over which to unfold — the spatial. The filmmaker Chris Marker made a similar move with his CD-ROM project Immemory, evolving his traditionally medium of film into the interactive. He wrote in its preface:

In our moments of megalomaniacal reverie, we tend to see our memory as a kind of history book: we have won and lost battles, discovered empires and abandoned them. At the very lease we are the characters of an epic novel (“Quel roman que ma vie!” said Napoleon). A more modest and perhaps more fruitful approach might be to consider the fragments of memory in terms of geography. In every life we would find continents, islands, deserts, swamps, overpopulated territories and terrae incognitae. We could draw on the map of such a memory and extract images from it with greater ease (and truthfulness) than from tales and legends.

The little stories and tiny figures in Voyeur, bound together in the geography of the apt building, yet freed from typology and linearity, gain even more power.

 

I had come across this animation before, but infosthetics recently posted on it so it got foregrounded for me again. It’s a charming Maya visualization of John Coltrane’s short jazz sketch, Giant Steps, rendered and animated using an appropriate architecture metaphor. Writes the author of the piece, Michal Levy:

Coltrane made a major break through with his album “Giant Steps” in the year 1959. It was the first time in the history of Jazz music that someone based his music on symmetrical patterns, which stemmed from a mathematical division of the musical scale.

The structural approach of John Coltrane to music is associated with architectural thinking. The musical theme defines a space and the musical improvisation is like someone drifting in that imaginary space.

Hi-res flash version can be view on Levy’s site here.

 

Infosthetics also linked to a more diagrammatic illustration of the Giant Step’s tonal structure here.

A nice post today on Motionographer likening the experiential and technological melding of web / interactive with motion graphics design as Kid Convergence, the unformed but quickly maturing love child between two distinct (at least until recently) but lovingly compatible mediums.

The post offers up two recent examples to underscore the convergence: Designgraphik’s (designer Mike Young’s — one half of the excellent YWFT – ongoing web experiment) — a mostly linear flash and video clickthru experience – and the Nike Air campaign minisite (a showcase of Nike’s upcoming line of 180 and 360 performance kicks), employing a VJ-like keyboard interface to activate psychedelic video effects, produced by DUMBO-based Big Spaceship.

San Francisco web agency Odopod’s new site is unreal …

The site contains an in-screen CMS — click on the upper right icon, and login as guest, to activate it. From there, elements on the screen become editable — change colors around with color picker (the full-on color wheel, with tint and alpha settings, is a first as far as I know) right-click on text to rewrite text blocks, scale/move/rotate graphical elements, etc. A built-in file browser system lets the user look through remote directories and drag assets directly onto the stage. Most fun of all is the sketch feature, which allows you draw on the screen using an uncannily real and satisfying brush system.

These features are mere proof-of-concept for the guest user, but for an xml-allergic client with full login privileges, for example, this site is a god-send. He could edit the page directly, playing with layouts, background accents (his sketch is not only saved, but the process of its production is stored as well, allowing the sketch to build on the page as it was drawn) and text entries with zero fuss.

This takes WYSIWYG and kicks its ass into next week …

Developed, at least in part, by this talented fellow, Steve Mason.

This site by Fallon for Travelers, a home insurance company, takes a structurally bland premise — a web-based quiz on home security — and significantly sexifies it with a seamlessly integrated flash, 3D, and auditory experience. The art direction and technical execution are top shelf. Beautiful stuff.

For those Overheard In New York-obsessives, add a spatial fever to your flavor …

Here is Overplot, a clever Overheard in New York / Google Maps mashup. Arguably, the best Google Maps mashup out there …

[via Curbed]

It’s a tad gnarly getting shots to line up — how about a bigger hit area? And what happened to your shields/bases from the original game? But, still. Dope!

[link via Neatorama]

 

Here’s a site that points to the future by remixing bits of the past — in this case, old, Victorian lithographic images from Dover Publishing (at least that’s whom the designer/programmer/animator Caleb Johnston credits for the illustrators).

The site’s navigation scheme is fairly straightforward and idiot-proof. In a nutshell, roll over something clickable and then click on it. The meat of the experience, moreover, is what happens upon the click, which is per usual a swirling, spinning, throbbing, flashing rush of animal parts, plant matter, calligraphic type, women in petticoats, and Olde English gentlemen under tophats. The experience pretty deftly evokes the obsessive thematic delirium that grips you in depths of a drug trip. Speaking theoretically, of course. Ha.

The compositional and motion work are really astonishing, both aesthetically vivid and technical seamless. Given Flash 8’s video alpha and clip blurring cabilities, it’s difficult — and probably pointless, really – to tell, in several transitory instances, whether Johnston is employing some expert tweening or playing pre-rendered video. That ambiguity, however, belies a clear trend towards the convergence of rendered and pre-rendered animation on the web (currently represented by the respective capabilities of After Effects and Flash), a convergence which will be realized soon enough. The two factors that determine how soon that is are 1) how well Macromedia will integrate with Adobe’s mother borg, and 2) how that integration aligns with the rate of advance in home computing processing power. What say you, Moore?

Anyway, strong, strong work!

(ps. and the sound design — by Dallas Johnston — is boss too)

Some recent scrapes from Newstoday … 

 

Partizan, the French production company of music videos and television spots, recently launched a new site. Its motion graphics sister company, Partizan Lab, has done likewise. You can view videos and animations from Partizan’s extensive roster of artist / directors. You may have to set aside a spare afternoon to do it with, though …

 

The FWA has conveniently listed its Top Twenty list of photography websites since 2000. When cold-browsing flickr doesn’t cut it … Sometimes you need a sexy interface to get you in the mood.

 

The new campaign to get people to drink the cow includes two fun and outrageous flash sites, based on the notion of extraterrestrial civilizations running low on milk, and suspiciously, the corresponding phenomenon of cow abductions here on earth. This is a positive development for the dairy folks, if only because their erstwhile Got Milk? milk-on-upper-lip was a little disturbing and off-putting, at least me. After all, if you really think about it, drinking milk (I’m not talking about eating ice cream or cheese, but drinking milk) is a fairly revolting act. Better to market liquid animal product by wrapping some high-flying concepts and flashy interactivity at it, rather than emphasizing the physical consumption of it.

Attik launched a new portfolio site documenting their thoroughly beautiful body of work. The site is a little annoying to navigate, and the copy is client-directed and adver-speaky (then again, who reads these kinds of sites anymore?), but nuggets of goodness can be found throughout. Perhaps my favorite feature is the context-appropriate wallpapers, a smart and uncommon idea, and which are gorgeously rendered.

Some web-magic to rub your belly late into the night …

1. Justin Swindle’s Soulwire is possibly one of my favorite portfolio sites of all-time, with a few qualifications. Some aspects of the interface sacrifice usability in favor of slickness — for example, the text-cycling gets a little old, and mousing over constantly scrolling, 10-pixel high buttons (you are essentially chasing small, moving targets) requires a little too much dexterity and coordination when it really needs to be about a buttery-smooth browsing process – but there are simply too many flourishes here that endear my own stylistic predilections, such as the creamy motion design, the sweet, crispy rollover sounds, and ahh, that wallpaper background (ooo, that changes color!).

If anything, a good incentive to get my shit together and update diametrik, now approaching 1.5 years of age, which is practically geriatric in web years …

2. I get the Schoolhouse Rock reference (I think …), but that’s really where my understanding begins and ends. In terms of its WTF?-bonafides, Kid America Club might properly belong in the webzen category per the previous post, but it’s too heavy on art direction and production to qualify as ‘zen.’ Prepare to be befuddled.

3. So dry, it’s parched; Lifelong Friendship Society, where commercial motion graphics meets Dada.

A bewitching list of anti-blogs, from chaoskitty, via BoingBoing.

Of course, who could forget rrrrrrrrrrrrrnnnnnnnnnnhhhh.

And yet another favorite Saturday night headtrip: hell dot com.

Ahh, this is a refreshing, super-simple site showcasing the new line of ‘mid-couture’ sportswear that Stella McCartney designed for Adidas. It’s low on content, but its real allure is purely sensual.

 

I knew Blaine Brownell from architecture school — I was an undergrad and he was a grad student working on his thesis. He’s in Seattle now, and a Seattle friend of mine, recently sent a link to his blog Transstudio to me. A couple of weeks later, Archinect posted this interview with Blaine in Business Week (be sure look through the slide show section). So in a short amount of time, the Blaine Brownell alarm has been sounding, and thus a closer examination was in order.

It appears that Blaine has just published a book called Transmaterial: A Catalog of Materials that Redefine our Physical Environment (a description of the book, published by PAP, can be found here) that documents innovations in materials and their potential uses, aesthetic and practical, in architectural design. It’s not always easy for architecture to get press for innovation; after all, construction methods haven’t significantly changed in thousands of years (the Romans invented concrete, and not much about it has changed about concrete except that we now have big trucks with rotating cylindrical barrels to haul it around in. Oh, and maybe rebar). Architectural ‘innovation’ is invariably of a formal or stylistic nature, and that esoteric criteria — which float above the pablum in an aesthetic cloud-world, populated and described by the crispy, airless, sometimes bloviated phonemes of archispeak – tend to leave most people cold. Compare that to technological innovation, which gives rise to new ontologies with each OS or software launch (how would you explain Google to someone in 1980? Or the internet?) and whose outcomes affect and are immediately recognizable to millions of people – to anyone who has a desktop computer, for instance, who can practically feel the difference between the dreadful OS9 and the elegant OSX kicking them in the head.

That is perhaps the nature of things. But at least the snail’s pace of physical material can now ride the blogosphere at the speed of dsl, thanks to Transstudio. Architects, contractors, fabricators, vendors, interior descecrators and you stingy sheetrock-loving clients, bookmark now.

In any case, let me know if something gets built with transparent concrete anytime soon — the architect in me needs some old school materials porn every once in a while. Oh, and whisper sweet archispeak in my ear while you’re at it.

In somewhat related news (and onto a topic that’s dear to my heart and a bone that can never quite be tickled enough), check out the always-entertaining Peter Hall’s self-evidently named essay Living Skins: Architecture as Interface, published in the Adobe Design Center.

[from Core77]

 

Spore is the upcoming ‘god’ game designed by Will Wright (of Sims fame), and ‘god’ — as in oh my fucking * — is right; its procedural gaming engine takes emergent AI to another level. As this paradigm-busting demo video (of Wright’s presentation of the game at the recent Game Developer’s Conference) progresses, the edges of gameplay leap continuously outwards, past every conceivable boundary of expectation. To be released sometime this fall, Spore displays a complexity and plasticity beyond pretty much anything you thought possible for a computer game today.

The tingling you are feeling is the Shock of the New …

 

Holy crap! A great adventure in DiY fuzzy logic here (and a terrific application of flash 8’s Bitmap class — long overdue, imho).

You make a rough sketch, and then retrievr scrapes the flickr database for corresponding images.

Check out retrievr here.

[from Newstoday]

Adidas’ web-presence seems to grow more and more seductive all the time …

Their ‘What’s Next’ site pushes flash 8 to the limit — how they manage to get so many video-animated sprites on the stage at the same time boggles the mind …

Adidas’ Adicolor campaign, featuring kicks that have a paintable surface (Adidas also supplies the paint, natch), is intriguing. Beyond the playful art direction, this site is poignant for me because I have been working on the thematically related NIKEiD site (Nike is Adidas’ largest North American competitor) – both of these sites employ the mass customization principle (that Dell, of course, pioneered) though in qualitatively different ways.

Taking Adicolor as a comparison study against iD, the immediate difference is that Adicolor has an artisanal character that the iD experience doesn’t — a user doesn’t merely choose materials and color swatches through an on-line interface, the results of which are then fed through and delivered via an unseen, global manufacturing supply chain. Adicolor involves direct, and distinct, contact with the product itself during the customization process — you paint on the shoe with your hands. One act is closer to design (iterative, limited kit-of-parts, manufactured), the other is closer to art (one-shot, individuated, hand-made — and no UNDO button!); two identical NIKEiD-designed products may be produced as a result of limited permutations, but no two Adicolors ever will.

Truly, Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction is in need of an update.

Well, Thursday afternoon 2.5 days ago — low work volume, spot something cool on somebody’s screen, walk over and inquire – you know the drill. These were culled from DH’s bookmarks …

The portfolio site of a Belgian designer named Thibaud. It incorporates the ‘flash card’ presentation and physics engine that Yugop used so effectively with the Intentionallies site, and adds a rotating, paint color chip element to the metaphor. The icing on the cake is the mouse-wheel- and keyboard-compatible interface …

A promo minisite for Mercedes, essentially a series of engaging interactive vignettes. There is a lovely tactile quality to many of the interactions (conjured by creative masking effects and mouse delays), and I was impressed by the programming muscle – the fluid dynamics, for example, are no small potatoes. The audio toggle button is very clever – when you click to mute, the iconic finger plugs the iconic ear.

And lastly, a very bizarre and decidedly un-user-friendly e-commerce (??) site. The impossibility of finding anything on the site twice is offset by the sheer cojones of the products on display — like the gold-plated cocaine spoon (shaped like a Bic ballpoint pen cap) and this $3000 table made of solid ice. The site offers up these luxe objects for sale, but it also clearly extends an ironic appraisal and critique of their fetishism as well.

A Processing-written, data-viz joint for Valentine’s by Golan Levin, Kamal Nigam, and Jonathan Feinberg. From the site:

‘The Dumpster is an interactive online visualization that attempts to depict a slice through the romantic lives of American teenagers. Using real postings extracted from millions of online blogs, visitors to the project can surf through tens of thousands of specific romantic relationships in which one person has “dumped” another. The project’s graphical tools reveal the astonishing similarities, unique differences, and underlying patterns of these failed relationships, providing both peculiarly analytic and sympathetically intimate perspectives onto the diversity of global romantic pain.

… The breakup data for the Dumpster was kindly provided by Intelliseek, the company behind BlogPulse. Blog posts were collected by issuing queries to BlogPulse’s search engine using words and phrases indicative of breakups. For example, posts containing phrases such as “broke up” or “dumped me” were considered likely initial candidates. The resulting several hundred thousand posts were scored by a machine learning classifier trained to recognize posts about specifically romantic breakups, in an effort to eliminate (for example) posts about rock bands breaking up. From the remainder, the twenty thousand posts with the highest classification scores were selected for inclusion in the interactive visualization.’

Also check out new media theorist superhero Lev Manovich’s essay about the project, entitled ‘Social Data Browsing.’

[via Infosthetics]

I saw these two at AIGANY’s MOVE Conference last spring, and they are clowns. Whereas most of the designers on hand (which included Golan Levin and MK12) sat, presented, and actually discussed their work, Friends With You appeared on stage in Gumby-like costumes, ran and jumped around in circles, threw t-shirts into the audience, shouted into voxcoders (annoying after the third — no, first – time), lit firecrackers (which almost got them kicked out by security for obvious fire hazard reasons), and generally behaved like total freaks. I think they were going for a psychedelic, neo-hippie, groovy, ’Happening’-ish vibe, but their presentation/performance came off instead as a bad caffeine buzz.

It’s hard, and probably irrelevant, to describe what it is they do, but based on their MOVE spectacle my guess is it’s somewhere inside the fuzzy locus described by sculpture, graphic/web/motion design, toy-making, and performance art.

For me the jury may be out on whether the loudness and insanity translate to brilliance, but they certainly get marks for effort. In any case, this goofy video, from their recent Cloud City exhibit in Miami, is pretty charming, and it gets at their whacked out M.O. well enough.

[via Newstoday]

A profile of Bob Greenberg and R/GA (which happens to be my current bread and butter).

The article lives here.