Polaroid : the Impossible Project becomes reality.
Not long ago, Polaroid announced that it was discontinuing it’s entire Polaroid line of film, much to the chagrin of it’s die-hard fans. Out of the ashes emerged the Impossible Project, a band of believers who promised to deliver the goods to the Polaroid disciples. It looked to be an impossible dream, but according to the AP : A group of engineers and enthusiasts who leased an old Polaroid film factory in the Netherlands announced Monday that they had successfully reinvented instant film and will start selling packs this week.
The film will be released starting this Thursday, March 25th. Dreams do come true.
via : Fast Company
image : tod brilliant
Highbrow fashion meets tattoos?
Tattoo-inspired body art was shown by fashion houses as different as Rodarte and Jean Paul Gautier on their Spring 2010 runways. And, Chanel presented its spring 2010 collection taking a much cheekier route than its usual sleek, highbrow runway show, with some temporary tattoos.
Called Les Trompe L’Oeil de CHANEL Temporary Skin Art, these limited edition designs are based on the temporary tattoos that global creative director Peter Philips designed for the Paris runway show.
Some like it, some hate it… but it’s only an accessory, that, like art, can be hung or placed according to your whims. Sounds good, not risky, and fun…
Visual collaboration : Nike + Turlan
Marc Turlan for Nike
Love it when we see creative collaboration… Artist Marc Turlan, in collaboration with Nike, commissioned by Riccardo Tisci, is a beautiful visual manifestation of this.
Artist Marc Turlan works with magazine imagery; tearing, cutting, and decontextualising paper to create disrupted works with flattened elements of the sculptural.
In collaboration with Nike and commissioned by Riccardo Tisci, Turlan turned his scalpel on two intense faces in A#8, removing everything but their confrontational glares for a figurative take on Nike Air.
12.31.09 + 1 = 2010 : a decade’s rating
Here we are on the eve of a new year, after a decade that started a new millennium, and what a decade it was. According to the The Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, for roughly two-to-one Americans, more say they have a generally negative (50%) rather than a generally positive (27%) impression of the past 10 years. Though the overall feeling about the oughts may be less than positive, the decade did prove to move us into cultural and technological integration in ways that stun.
The chart above (see others here) lends insight into opinions of tech and social change, and possibly where opportunity lies : green products, diversity, the internet have all emerged as changes for the better in the minds of Pew’s subjects. That reality shows are overwhelmingly seen as a negative, is perhaps a call to action : that we embrace our own lives, tell our own stories, and harness the potential the last decade has handed to us, and make these next 10 years, the ones for the record.
Augmented Reality & Ray Ban
Ray Ban offers up an augmented reality app that makes this concept make sense… Getting beyond the gimmick and the spam, one can expand this idea out, and really begin to see the possibilities…
Steve Jobs on design in 1996
Ironic that this quote was found on a Microsoft design blog, making it even more significant, perhaps…
“To design something really well you have to get it. You have to really grok what it’s all about. It takes a passionate commitment to thoroughly understand something — chew it up, not just quickly swallow it .. .. A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. They don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions, without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better designs we will have.”
Steve Jobs, Wired (March, 1996)
Likemind : and how it inspired Mixing Reality
Our friends Piers Fawkes and Noah Brier successful bloggers in New York decided that meeting for coffee would be a meeting of their like minds….they mentioned it on their respective blogs, set a date, and 20 people showed up they had never met before….Now likemind takes place all over the world, in over 65 locations on the same date every month : the third Friday.
We think this is a fascinating phenomenon. The online reality allows us to find each other all the time, whether we know each other beforehand or not. Real time experiences are a direct result of how we use the long tail to enhance our lives, deepen our relationships in our off line world and identify likeminded situations and community.
December will be our one year anniversary, and what we’ve discovered in our tiny little town of 7800 people is that we can generate 18 to 30 new likeminded souls every month. Sometimes they reappear, sometimes they don’t…. but its always interesting.
So what difference does this make? People ask us why we do this. It’s simple – we always say “let’s see what happens” and something always does. As Piers says, “everything is important”. We’ve created business opportunities, collaborations, friendships, created small changes that have big effects and introduced our own community to each other.
And so its inspired us to take it into a global community, but the hyper-local nature of this global connection inspires us to amplify the message: to work, play and live with likeminds. What we’ve discovered is there is a lot of untapped creativity in interesting people who may be to too busy creating to step out of their own reality. We like that, and we want you to experience it too. So we’ll keep sharing our discoveries and they can be as simple as the local honey company increasing their volume because they do it organically, or one of our locals winning the Macarthur genius award. It’s all interesting, it’s all relevant and its mixing reality. Stay tuned.
Mixing Reality Brand by Michele Lott
Michele Lott is a wonderful graphic designer, having worked in Hollywood in the movie industry for years, she moved to Sonoma County, much to my delight. Here are her treatments for my new business cards.
Mixing Reality to Launch Soon
In the coming days I’ll be launching my new blog Mixing Reality, and riffing on just. Those of you who know me, know, I’m interested in the intersection of eco, social media, art, trends and how they affect culture. Stay tuned. In the meantime, enjoy this little video that reminds me there is always a more creative solution.
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We’ve been watching street art and graffiti gain recognition, even respect, in recent years. Now the ‘street’ is moving inside next month to Geffen Contemporary at MOCA.
Barry McGee, Houston Street and the Bowery, New York, 2010, photo by Farzad Owrang
“Art in the Streets will be the first exhibition to position the work 
Some loveliness after a week of the other.
Easy to follow, do it in your living room and don’t be afraid…let yourself go!
It’s been a day for the record books, an 8.9 earthquake, huge tsunamis, volcanic eruptions and now the threat of nuclear pollution. So in honor of Friday, and some de-stressing goodness, here is a lesson in yoga from someone who
