Foodie Flags…

Here are some posters for Sydney International Food Festival.

The posters, which were designed by WHYBIN/TBWA, sydney. They caught my eye because as you can see they are flags of the world made out of the food from that country. Now, some people in my class at uni have chosen to deal with food for their european project and this is a good example of something that they could do, obviously not copying it though! This is what is say’s on the WHYBIN/TBWA website:

The concept visually unites food with one of the most common international symbols – flags. The flexibility of the concept and imagery has allowed the ‘food flags’ to be used across a broad range of event collateral from the event program right through to a 30sec TVC. The campaign will span across TV, press, radio and online. It will continue to run until late October when the festival wraps up.

How could I forget…

Before you make assumptions, I did remember the 11 November, I went to a rememberance service and remembered a distant cousin who was lost in the first world war, he was about the same age as I am now, amongst many other soldiers who died with him and since then, purely for our freedom.

However, this post is about something a little (or a lot) less important. I started writing this blog, this very blog that you are reading now, and year ago. It was one year old just 8 days ago. It really doesn’t feel like it. It’s gone passed so quickly and as I keep repeating, I’ve learned so much in this time, but we all know that. I wonder what would have gone on in my life and in the world between now and next November 3rd when this blog will be two years old!

Lego Quotes

These quotes are going to be featured in my lego book:

“Just play. Have fun. Enjoy the Game.” – Michael Jordan

“There are all sorts of things embodied in the Lego brick – geometry and mathematics and truth and proportion and shape and colour,” – James May

“It is a faintly spiritual activity that everybody connects with” – James May

It has been quite good having to do this project in the year of Lego’s 50th year because there’s a lot of it around. For Example, I’m looking forward to James May’s ‘Toy Stories’ on BBC2. In which he follows the building of a Lego house.

My Lego Book is very almost finished. I don’t know quite how I’ve done it but it’s managed to become about 160+ sides long. I will probably be sending it off in the next few weeks, before the end of the month anyway.

Russell Davies Talk

I’ve just listened to Russell’s talk. It’s on a podcast. I found it really interesting, and will listen to it again over a cup of tea as I wasn’t quite awake the first time. I find it ironic that in the blog part of this talk (Russell put some photos and videos on his blog so that we could read along) he takes photos of his hand-written headings then put them on the blog. I hope you’ll see how this is relevant, I’ll attempt to explain it after a cuppa. It makes me want to hand-write a message on printed letter-headed paper, take a photo of it, print it out, scan it in then upload it onto my blog so that other people can ’save as…’ and print it out for themselves.

Russell’s example:

Alberto Frigo

…is taking a photo of his ‘main hand’ for the rest of his life. This has got to be data collection to the extreme!

His Website is here. I struggled to find an official website but maybe this is the official one. There are all of the photos on there as PDFs. I think there are certain rules to this project, saying what he won’t take photos of but to make a rule which says ‘for the rest of your life’ makes it really extreme, he would never be able to break that rule, ever!

 

Aaron Koblin

In line with my data collection post and talks at the Ffotogallery. I have looked up Aaron Koblin, His work was  on show at the Ffotogallery in Penarth when I went to see it. There is so much more to look at on his website. The following project had 10,000 people all re-creating a part of the 100 dollar bill without knowing it and then all of the pieces were put together.

Ten Thousand Cents

“Ten Thousand Cents” is a digital artwork that creates a representation of a $100 bill. Using a custom drawing tool, thousands of individuals working in isolation from one another painted a tiny part of the bill without knowledge of the overall task. Workers were paid one cent each via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk distributed labor tool. The total labor cost to create the bill, the artwork being created, and the reproductions available for purchase (to charity) are all $100. The work is presented as a video piece with all 10,000 parts being drawn simultaneously. The project explores the circumstances we live in, a new and uncharted combination of digital labor markets, “crowdsourcing,” “virtual economies,” and digital reproduction.

Below are some images of some more more that he’s done – it’s all pretty amazing!

Data Collection // Ellie Harrison

Last night I went to a talk at the Ffotogallery in Penarth, it was called ‘Confessions of a recovering Data Collector.’ Given by Ellie Harrison, who started her almost obssesion with data collecting on her 22nd Birthday by taking a picture of, and recording everything she ate for a year and a day, with over 1000 images she then put them all into an animation, which made it look like she was continuously eating. There have been other projects since, which have been a little more obssesive,  where she recorded what she was doing and when, all day every day for four weeks and put it together in a chart:

Our Next project at Uni is going to be all about portraying information and I’ve been having a think about data collection and the way that I already do it, and think about little projects that I could do. I already write a diary, not every single day but have been doing it since I was 16 and it’s so funny to read back. I look back on it and remember how I was feeling about a certain situation. My language was so different at that time too, well, my London dialect used to come out a lot in my writing back then. I also wanted to take a photo of my hands every day, because I used to bite my nails, a terrible disgusting habit I know, but if I took a photo of my hands every day then I wouldn’t be tempted to bite them because I’d want them to look nice for the photos, I might still do that, as I haven’t completely stopped. Social Networking is almost like an obsession with data collection too, writing statuses, and even blogging can be a version of data collection. Check out her website, there’s some really interesting stuff on there and she’s got a book out too, ‘confessions of a recovering data collector.’

Visualingual // Cincinnati Footprint

Seeing as my current project is all about Europe – well, mine is all about European Capitals etc. I’ve been looking at map-ish things anyway and this came up in my adventures around the internet. It’s from Maya Drozdz and Michael at ‘Visualingual’ who always comes up with some great stuff on her blog.

Giant Lego! // Afrika Burns(let’s burn some art!)

by Retha Ferguson I found this on the ‘it’s nice that’ blog and naturally thought ‘GIANT LEGO!’ as you do!

Postcards…

One of my Ideas for the European projects is to collect postcards from different Capitals in Europe and compose them on a poster. I find postcards a fascinating thing and have been collecting them for a while. I haven’t been fortunate enough to collect postcards from each capital in Europe but have found a way of getting around that. If I get chance I will try and find some authentic postcards on ebay or on market stalls. I’ve been asking around to see if I can create a ’scratch card’ effect on my poster, I wanted to screen print it, and I might still try that but I’ve found some stickers which do the same thing, it’s a little bit of a cheat but it’ll get the idea across and isn’t that what it’s all about – a little bit of communication!

Anyway, here are some of the more interesting postcards I found, well, the ones that I liked: