BigShinyThing

[Picture credit: most images from Tim [thx!]. The feed is from the Tranny Talent pool on Flickr. If you’ve got more, add ‘em in]

Playstation Portable has collaborated with Showstudio.com — Nick Knight’s ambitious online fashion/art/photography lab — to hold Amaze Me. Using webcams and photobooths, the event will be staged at London’s Dover Street Market [see previous post re 'Anti-Chic' ]. Anyone and everyone is invited to present themselves for 30 seconds - dancing, singing, hawking designs whatever. The presentations will then be uploaded onto the Showstudio site for the public and the judges to scrutinise. The one that simply amazes the most will win. The PSP blurb reads:

AMAZE ME is inspired by the brief issued by art director Alexi Brodovitch to photographer Richard Avedon — simply to ‘amaze him’.

The challenge asks you, the public, to respond to a brief set by a panel of six leading creative industry figures. Come along to one of our micro-studio booths and make a 30 second video pitch.

The best six entries will win a Sony PSP Playstation Portable, plus an exclusive opportunity to connect with the panel member of your choice.

Brands trying to buy their way into youth/fashion/whatever culture is nothing new. Only this week, Coke announced that it had briefed Warp Record’s design agency (Designers Republic) to come up with packaging ideas.

What is interesting about Playstation is that they have started with relatively niche — but increasingly important and radical — cultural properties right on the edge of the mainstream. Perfectly in tune with their brand and right on the money in terms of audience as well. Sister brand PS2 (notice the extremely subtle branding) also hosts the stage that Hackney’s weekly ‘Tranny Talent Night’ is held on at Bistrotheque. Very ‘out there’. Very cunning. Very right.