Culturally informed advertising makes advertising that informs culture. This is where the HP planning team at GOODBY, SILVERSTEIN & PARTNERS explore the peripheries of the world to find inspiration.
Japanese industrial designer Naoto Fukasawa decided to create juice box packaging that looked and felt like the flavor of the drink. Why not right? The visual and feel of the packaging would certainly help the experience of drinking it. And maybe it could go as far as getting us to forget that the box only contains 5% actual fruit juice.
NYC based photographer Dulce Pinzon has an interest set of photos titled "Superheroes" which document Mexican immigrant workers at their jobs while donning superhero costumes. Visually, it's satirical and very engaging. However, story behind it is just as interesting, especially right now as humility and earnestness seem to be the qualities we relate better to right now. Find more photos here.
faberNovel, a French innovation company, has released an analysis on the threats and weaknesses that could present some problems to Google down the road. It's an interesting analysis because we've always thought of Google as one that can do no wrong.
Some of the surprises in there were: the inability to hire and retain key people, inability to scale operational process and development of innovative disruption on Google's markets. It seems as though what made them strong and unique before are starting to become liabilities as the company becomes larger and more corporate.
Evan Roth from the Graffiti Research Lab released a self published book created entirely in Linux using open source software and fonts called "Available Online for Free." You can get it here.
This painting represented the breaking of the shackles of womanhood. The woman has just killed a missionary (if you look closely you can see the missionary’s skull sitting on a pole behind her). In addition, she has just taken a bite of a banana, even though women are forbidden to eat bananas on her island. She is waving the banana above her head to represent her new-found freedom. (Text from the artist of the painting)
In 1924, a LA-based novelist (Paul Jordan Smith) pulled a fast one on the art world by deliberately creating terrible art under a false (yet exotic and trendy) identity. He also created a fake art movement called "Disumbrationism" to give his works some sense of academic heft. He later revealed the hoax, but not after producing a few more paintings.
When your field of study or profession is based on abstract thinking and broad concepts, nobody really knows what they're doing. It's more about who has the strongest opinion about their own work. That's important because it keeps everyone honest and encourages you to call people out when you smell BS. But more importantly, if it's just about opinions, presentation and such, then anyone has the chance to be a thought leader as well. Maybe I'm devaluing this type of thinking too much. But it's exciting to think that something that we think of as almost exclusively upper class is actually not that exclusive and in fact, quite open to all.
A guy from the Happy Corp started a blog featuring the cross sections of sandwiches called Scanwiches. This probably falls in the "why not" section. But it's a fun and interesting treatment of something familiar.
One man art collective, Matti Miinimaki created a DJing system that uses a blender as the interface. The little fruits that he's dropping into the blender are RFID tagged to cue a beat. The blender buttons add effects.
Korean artist U-Ram Choe creates moving sculptures that are sci-fi inspired. He gives them Latin names and creates back stories about where they live, what they eat, etc. The mashup of technology and organics is interesting - especially since he is applying it to create more primitive creatures. It's almost the antithesis of the movement where people are trying to humanize robots. Check out the rest of this stuff here.
Japanese artist Daito Manabe is using the face as a way to visualize music. In the clip above, he attached electrodes to his friends' face, each electrode stimulates a reaction to that part of the face.
I was hoping there would be some link to emotions and expressions with this project. But what it comes down to is some uncomfortable twitching. The execution is interesting though.
China's internet sensation is a music video about a mythical mud grass horse. Check out the video and you'll see the captions reveal otherwise. Mud grass horse is actually "f--- your mom" in Mandarin. Written out, the words are completely different, but when it's spoken it sounds very similar.
The New York Times was right on with the conclusion that this was a protest against censorship in China. It's interesting they haven't banned the video outright because the government is pretty efficient about blocking everything else. I think the creator found an interesting gray area that the government doesn't want to deal with. One because the the delivery method is so subversive - packaged in a candy coat, hiding the poison. But secondly, it could be argued either way, couldn't it?
Also on a side note: Slate noticed that every culture uses insults based on the following themes: "your opponent's family, your opponent's religion, sex, and scatology." Just something to think about.
Ju from hip hop group D4L shot a promo/teaser video to hype up his mixtape. Check out the video above to see how he’s trying to get our attention. Now check out the video response below:
This friendly feud has gotten out of hand and turned into a little meme of sorts as people are recording their own “been had” videos. Watch out for a “Been Had Ramen” video from me in the near future. Haha.
A guy named Kutiman mixed a bunch of sounds and songs off you Youtube into brand new songs. The first track, “The mother of all funk chords” is the best at demonstrating the concept. This is really fun. We’ve already seen that this generation approaches creativity in through mashups and exploring the tension or “synergy” between the ideas. Check out the entire set of songs here.
Another way to think about mashups is on the benefits on distribution end. Usually these are made from everyday people looking to be famous. And one of the keys to getting famous is reach and how many times your video is shared. By using mashups and tagging everyone you borrowed from, you're not really increasing the amount of people you can send it to (not by much anyways), but you might be getting more influential people to help you share it.
Those lucky enough to be in LA have the pleasure of eating from Kogi BBQ – a traveling taco truck that let’s their fans know about their whereabouts through Twitter. The idea for the truck was conceived via a drunken epiphany, but the social media tie-in was purely through need as the owner Mark Manguera asked his friends to help hype the truck through their own blogs, Facebook and Twitter profiles. Now, social media is the the metaphorical store front as that's where fans learn about the stops as well as new menu items.
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