BigShinyThing

The rasterized images can be printed and assembled into huge posters up to 20 meters in size, for free and from an A4 printer. So if you have a printer and some blu tac you can make your own posters, like this one of my niece.

Rasterbate your own images here.

BBC obituary is here

As pointed out by Bruce Springsteen a while back, choice is not necessarily a good thing. This article from Admap reflects on how the ability to limit choice is now a luxury – witness the ascent of PVRs, for example.

Joe Klein writes in Time:

“Bush is the ultimate "Blink" President, to use author Malcolm Gladwell’s catchy term, and recent title, for instantaneous, subconscious decision making.

The slogan on Gladwell’s book jacket “Don’t Think?Blink!” is a perfect mantra for an attention- deficit-disordered society, and an apt description of the electric jolt Bush has brought to politics and policy. It certainly was the subtext of the 2004 presidential campaign: Kerry’s thinking seemed tortured, paralytic; Bush’s blinking seemed strong and decisive.”

Klein qualifies his argument:

“Gladwell argues that blinking is best when it is reinforced by a lifetime of study and expertise. Bush’s blinks come in two basic varieties: judgments about people and about broad policy”

In this case, a derelict station master’s house off Brick Lane is transformed with a lick of paint and a huge blue rabbit. The same lovely building has recently turned up the Babyshambles video ‘Fuck Forever’.

If I was a modern-day politician I would be Very Afraid

Los Angeles-based Forkscrew Graphics appropriate the iPod ad campaign to produce a series of posters entitled ‘iRaq’. These replace the silhouettes of youths dancing with the also familiar/iconic silhouettes of Iraqi prisoners being tortured.

See more here

The images are designed by renowned photographers and illustrators and printed on posters, postcards and in publications. The audio that comes with each ad offers a short narrative story and/or sound composition that compliments the image.

According to the blurb …

We want to show that you can do more with mobile phones. Everybody has got one so why not use them for advertising. By addressing people to call in an indirect and intriging way, you have a longer print/customer contact than usual. In the SoundAds campaign we were able to push this contact up to 1.15 minutes.

The campaign ran in various Dutch media during March 2005.

A smalltown teacher in the US has made his own Ipod ad. See it here

See the rest here

Artist Lisa Rave has used stencils to create a flock of light-relective animals throughout Berlin which only came out at night in the glare of headlights.

Surely only a matter of time before this technique is ripped off by the folk at Diabolical Liberties for some ad campaign …

See the work here. Courtesy of the we make money not art blog.

Japanese label Comme des Garcons has pioneered the idea of ‘guerrilla stores’ – temporary retail outlets that occupy a vacant space and rely on word on mouth for advertising. Comme is also behind Dover Street market (pictured) the anti-big brand shopping experience dubbed the ‘most talked about store in London’ and which sells a number of designers in seemingly shambolic surroundings.

According to Vittorio Radice:

Think about it – the jump from being a ‘mono-brand’ store where it’s like going to church .. where no one says a word and you have this over-sophisticated music, just this jump of calling it ‘market’, it’s like bulls crashing around loose, boom! and you could, with time, execute it really like a market. That’s wonderful.

[Tank magazine]

Comme des Garcons’ founder Rei Kawakubo says she wanted to create:

a kind of market where creators from various fields come together and encounter each other in an ongoing atmosphere of beautiful chaos.

The full story is here

In1960 on the Dutch island of Curacao in the West Indies, Alfred Heineken noticed that the native islanders suffered from a chronic housing shortage and a swelling tide of empty beer bottles. Returning and refilling the bottles, the usual practice in 1960, was not economical because Curacao was too far from the bottling plants back in Holland and Heineken had noticed the surplus of beer bottles when he visited the island as part of a world tour of his company’s distribution outlets. Suddenly, he realized that the beer bottle problem and the housing shortage were each other’s solution and decided to design a beer bottle that could be re-used as a housing brick.

Sadly, only 60,000 green-tinted WOBOs were cranked out, but to no one’s surprise the anemic “smart bottle” was a bust. The only thing ever built with it was a small shed with a corrugated iron roof, erected on the Heineken estate near Amsterdam. “Just a hut, really,” said designer John Habraken with a tinge of regret. “That was pretty much the end of it . . . I understood from the start that it was a long shot.”