Slow → articles in Creative Culture

Cover the creative class of chaotic cities

After five years of developing trend reports for major brands, agencies and institutions in Europe and Latin America under the eponym wabi-sabi lab, Lucy Rojas and Andres Colmenares have launched a web app named iF / imperfect FUTURE, with the ambition to make it the next generation of trend reports. The debut report covers the capital of Colombia, Bogotá. With iF, Rojas and Colmenares aim to cover the creative class of chaotic cities, the evolution of internet culture and other related topics, using not-obvious thinking offering a wider and better access to the future. [ Continue reading ]

Dawn Mellor

On the 7th of September Galerie Gabriel Rolt opened the exhibition of portraits by the very talented painter Dawn Mellor in which she depicts former members of now defunct not-for-profit collective The Austerians. This is the second solo exhibition at the gallery following "The Conspirators" in 2010. The Manchester-born Mellor is the oldest female artist never to have participated in a group exhibition, nationally or internationally at galleries, museums and public institutions in Europe and the USA or to have collaborated with curators or artists in various media. [ Continue reading ]

Temps Mort by Alex Verhaest

Temps Mort is the first solo exhibition by Alex Verhaest which opened on the 7th of September in the Amsterdam-based gallery Grimm. Roeselare-born Verhaest, who now lives in Amsterdam, investigates contrasts, commonalities and the fusion between man and technology, actor and computer. Her first solo exhibition consists of various video works culminating in one large scale movie scene: the red line connecting all works is the story of a family embroiled in an age-old drama. Divided over several screens and using different techniques, each project depicts a certain element of the final movie scene. There are five ‘Character Studies’ representing a personal analysis of each individual character, as well as five ‘Table Props’ that represent the characters’ inner psychology. [ Continue reading ]

New York City Ballet presents New Beginnings

We are really impressed by this collaboration between DDB New York and the New York City Ballet called New Beginnings. Filmed at sunrise on the 57th floor of 4WTC in lower Manhattan, this short film captures an extraordinary and moving performance of Christopher Wheeldon's After the Rain. It is a testament to the resilience of the human spirit, and a tribute to the future of the city that New York City Ballet calls home. [ Continue reading ]

Choco Nebula: a cloud of chocolate

In collaboration with Amsterdam's number one chocolate store and personal favorite, Chocolátl, Monskin and Reluct created the very fascinating Choco Nebula: a cloud of chocolate. The project focusses on the fragrance which is extracted from single estate chocolate bars. A custom designed nebuliser evaporates chocolate particles in a cloud of supercharged chocolate fragrance giving the user an intense chocolate experience without actually eating it.  [ Continue reading ]

Lapka Diary

The collaboration between the always inspiring Lapka, Jonathan Zawada and Jordana for the Lapka Diary is a lovely one. The project consists of 30 illustrations by renowned graphic designer Zawada and 30 diary notes on a broad field of spaces and objects in which a teenaged girl named Jordana has used her Lapka. The notes by Jordana are sincere and witty and show the broad versatility of the Lapka, combined with the playful black and white designs of Zawada making the project a fascinating hybrid of creativity inspired by Lapka.  [ Continue reading ]

Dewar’s 3B campaign

To celebrate their this year introduced Highlander Honey whiskey Dewar's collaborated with Sid Lee and The Ebeling Group for a campaign in which 80000 Highlander honey bees play the lead role, producing the key ingredient for the new liquor. Dewar’s Highlander Honey is the first modern honey flavoured whisky to come out of Scotland and was created by Dewar's master blender Stephanie Macleod. The campaign is both aesthetically and technically impressive and shows a fascinating variation on the swiftly expanding 3D printing technology as it focusses on the process of bees creating honeycombs in the shape of a whiskey bottle. [ Continue reading ]

Anish Kapoor in Martin-Gropius-Bau

Anish Kapoor is one of the most important of the world’s contemporary artists. Since his first sculptures, simple forms with paint pigments spread out on the floor, Kapoor has developed a multi-faceted oeuvre using various materials, such as stone, steel, glass, wax, PVC skins and high-tech material. In his objects, sculptures and installations the boundaries between painting and sculpture become blurred. For his first major exhibition in Berlin he will use the whole of the ground floor of the Martin-Gropius-Bau, including the magnificent atrium. Some of the works will have been specially designed for this venue. The show, comprising about 70 works, will provide a survey of the abstract poetic work of this winner of the Turner Prize from 1982 to the present. [ Continue reading ]

Sou Fujimoto for Serpentine Gallery

Sou Fujimoto is the latest and youngest architect who designed the prestigious temporary structure in front of the Serpentine Gallery, which this year was opened on the 8th of June. Made out of 20mm steel poles the structure has taken in nearly 3800 square feet of the London gallery’s front lawn. It is designed as a flexible, multi-purpose social space, with a café inside it. Fujimoto and his team designed the building with the ambition to persuade people to enter and interact with the pavilion throughout its four-month presence in London's Kensington Gardens. The official photography of the pavilion was commissioned to my brother Iwan Baan. [ Continue reading ]

Captain Boomer’s Sperm Whale Summer Tour

The Belgian creative collective Captain Boomer is currently engaged in a initiative called the Sperm Whale Summer Tour in which the collective uses a lifelike sculpture of a beached sperm whale as an artistic and educational performance. After the very first beaching in 2008 in Scheveningen and subsequently in Antwerp, Oostende and Venray they landed on the shore of London’s river Thames at Greenwich. Through fake researchers around the whale a seemingly authentic scene is created. And due to the fact of actual scientists on site, the educational dimension is real. Those who are interested in sperm whales and why they beach will get an answer, but it also touches the element of a whale beaching as a societal spectacle.  [ Continue reading ]

The work of Do-Ho Suh

We really like the work of Do-Ho Suh which recently got covered in the Best Contemporary Korean Artists article on Dazed Digital. The Korean artist was born in 1962 in Seoul, Korea, and received a BFA in painting from the Rhode Island School of Design and a MFA in sculpture from Yale University. Interested in the malleability of space in both its physical and metaphorical manifestations, Do-Ho Suh constructs site-specific installations that question the boundaries of identity. His work explores the relation between individuality, collectivity, and anonymity. In 2001, Suh represented Korea at the Venice Biennale and subsequently participated in the 2010 Venice Architecture Biennale, the 2010 Liverpool Biennial, and the 2012 Gwangju Biennial. [ Continue reading ]

Digital Grotesque

We love how there is always a next level to everything. Recently we mentioned the fascinating use of 3D printing technology in the context of food, the designers of the aptly named Digital Grotesque astoundingly so have taken the technology and went way beyond most known earlier usage. The project was shown on a 1:3 scale at the Swiss Art Awards 2013 and will be fully launched early september. It features a fully-enclosed room, made using digital 3D printing techniques, with a mind bending eighty million surfaces which are totally gilded. [ Continue reading ]

Cloche by Lars Beller Fjetland

We really like Lars Beller Fjetland’s new project, the Cloche lamp. The lamp by the Norwegian designer is a lovely hybrid of beauty and balance, which was inspired by the elegant and remarkable eruption solutions one can find in nature. The interesting union of size, shape and material, in combination with the fact that each part is lending its strengths to the other, created a beautifully balanced whole. The Cloche has a cast iron bottom, with a large spun copper lampshade, brought together by a lightweight ash wood stem which can be dissembled into three separate pieces.  [ Continue reading ]

Ad Tempus by Henry Richmond Young

Recent innovations made in the 3D printing technology really inspire us. A field of 3D printing technology that profoundly amazes is the use within the food industry. One of the designers using the technology is the New York-based Henry Richmond V. Young who earned a BFA in Product Design from Parsons the New School for Design and has a transdisciplinary approach in his work. With great interest in music, cuisine, and perfumery, his work grows to focus on experience and ephemera. Young's most recent project, Ad Tempus, is a series of dessert plating arrangements that aims to connect food and design. Young collaborated with chef Veronica Duboise to create the series, which is designed to adapt and evolve. [ Continue reading ]

Post Natural History by Vincent Fournier

We are very inspired by the latest project of French photographer Vincent Fournier named Post Natural History. The marvelous project is based on current research regarding synthetic biology and the reprogramming of stem cells and is being exhibited for the public now at The Ravestijn Gallery in Amsterdam. Since visiting the Palais de la Découverte in Paris as a young boy, Fournier has highly been fascinated by the wonders of the world; such as astronomy, space travel, geology, biology and physics which clearly shows in his work. [ Continue reading ]

Correspondence by JJJJound

We have been following the in 2006 founded blog JJJJound by Justin R. Saunders for quite some years now. The mood board Saunders shares with friends has over the years evolved into a steady destination for all kinds of aesthetic inspiration. One of the friends who collaborates with Saunders on JJJJound is Claudio Marzano, with whom he created the first offline JJJJound exhibition named CORRESPONDENCE supported by adidas originals.  [ Continue reading ]

Maykel Roovers’ Critical Blocks

The interesting work of young designer Maykel Roovers is primarily based on what is happening in society and everything that can be found in it. The designer is mainly attracted to news with an edge: "I always try to approach it lightly so to be not pedantic. Searching for contrasts, playing with contradictions, I try to create marvel and to elicit a smile." Roovers, deservingly so, was granted a lot of media attention with his 2012 ArtEZ Institute of the Arts Arnhem graduation project called Critical Blocks. [ Continue reading ]

Under Black Carpets

Under Black Carpets is an incredible project by Ilona Gaynor, a designer with a critical attitude towards society. Gaynor's work is centred around design as plot and with Under Black Carpets she has taken the role of the masterful architect of a major heist. Raising funds through Kickstarter for the final stage of the project, Under Black Carpets already received a lot of media attention and has gone through an initial two years of research in various stages. The first year was supported and funded by the Ridley Scott Associates Residency award. In it's final stage the project takes the fascinating form of a collection of evidence created around a fictional meticulously calculated bank heist of five banks surrounding the One Wilshire skyscraper in downtown Los Angeles. [ Continue reading ]

Robby Müller at EYE Amsterdam

Robby Müller is one of the greatest Dutch cinematographers ever. Born during the Second World War in Willemstad on Curaçao, the cinematographer has worked all over the globe, making films both in Europe and the USA, but only a few in the Netherlands itself. Now in his seventies and unfortunately bound to a wheelchair, Müller can look back on an highly impressive career working repeatedly with cinematic maestro's Wim Wenders and Jim Jarmusch and twice with enfant terrible Lars von Trier, among others. In March of 2013 Müller was awarded the International Achievement Award by the American Society of Cinematographers (ASC), making him the first Dutchmen to receive this prestigious award. [ Continue reading ]

Narratively – The Past is Present

Based in the city that, supposedly, never sleeps Narratively wanted to slow down the news cycle instead of following (or rather be sucked in) the dominant maelstrom of stories. The project launched in September 2012 by publisher and editor-in-chief, Noah Rosenberg, and managing editor, Brendan Spiegel, is another of those projects adding more and more significance to crowd funding platform Kickstarter. From February 2013 the platform even saw the possibility to broaden their horizon beyond New York City and started sharing stories from places all over the world, offering the platform to an ever-growing audience. The beginning of this month, less then a year after the launch, the platform was named as part of TIME's 50 Best Websites of 2013.  [ Continue reading ]

Color Collision by Kirstie van Noort & Rogier Arents

After having met while studying at the Design Academy Eindhoven, Kirstie van Noort and Rogier Arents each went their own way. Van Noort prefers to do extensive research on materials or processes beforehand, using the information resulting from the research as a fundament for the story behind the end product. Rogier Arents on the other hand is a designer and communicator of scientific research. And although these approaches inhabit their differences, their first joint project distinctively named 'Color Collision' turned out to be very interesting. [ Continue reading ]

The Botanical Sculptures of Hitomi Hosono

We really love the incredible ceramic sculptures designed by Japanese Kanazawa College of Art Bachelor graduate Hitomi Hosono. After complementary studies at The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts and the graduation of a Masters degree at the Royal College of Art in London Hosono has perfected her craft and creates one of a kind botanical ceramic sculptures. The proces of creating her artworks roughly breaks down as follows; firstly it takes one month to create the mold, three intense weeks follow to attach the folliage, and it lastly takes up to five months to let the sculptures dry. The now London-based artist's lifelike depictions of leafage were recently awarded with a Perrier-Jouët Arts Salon Prize, a new award officiated by the producer of Champagne from the French Épernay region. [ Continue reading ]

Lapka

Today we’ve received this lovely new tool called Lapka. Lapka is a tiny, beautifully designed personal environment monitor that connects to your phone to measure, collect and analyse the hidden qualities of your surroundings in a highly aesthetic and playful way. The precise sensors respond to the invisible world… [ Continue reading ]

n°5 Culture Chanel

Chanel n°5 first saw day in 1921 within a highly dynamic creative context. Since the Cubist revolution brought about by Picasso’s Demoiselles d’avignon, in 1907 and the advent of Futurism in italy in 1908, the avant-garde ceaselessly went about writing a particular modernity which would finally triumph at the dawn of the 1920s. From that moment abstraction spanned all forms of creativity, equally inspiring art, poetry, literature and music, and the fragrance of this new perfume which evoked a very mysterious flower, unless of course it didn’t firstly evoke a woman. [ Continue reading ]