Thanks a lot for having me. It's great. It's a very different vibe here. I'm going to show
you a little bit of our work later on, but also I wanted to tell you a little bit about
where we're coming from, where our thinking is coming from, and what kind of processes
we're working with. We're a small studio up the road in Dawson. We've been going for
three years now. We've done about 90 projects, so definitely kept ourselves busy. Can you
actually hear me, okay, if I'm at this distance? Cool. Okay, so we're up in Dawson, mainly with
the two of us, but always have a few freelance people in the studio, and a lot of guys from
our team remotely all across Europe, from CG animators to developers, programmers, computational
designers, sound people. We're really focusing on creating digital art pieces and generative
design, which can go together quite nicely. We've done a lot of commercial work for clients
like Deutsche Bank, Geosmith, Paper Manufacturer, HP, AOL, General Electric in Australia, the
recent one that I'm going to show you later. Also, a few really nice self-initiated projects
and cultural clients. We have an installation in the Museum of London. Did a night show
in Paris last year. I'm just going to show you some of it later on. It's sometimes a
little bit difficult to define what it actually is that we do. Essentially, we're really
interested in the digital world around us and everything that influences it. We're really
looking for new kinds of aesthetics that emerge from the things that are around us, driven
by technology and science. There's a line of thought from Jack Schultz from Studio Burk
that describes this very nicely. I wanted to start with that. If you don't know Burk's
work, go and have a look. They're amazing, very conceptual, very futuristic thinking
people, big fan of their work. Jack Schultz, who was one of the founders, said some people,
they are wrong, say design is about solving problems. Obviously, designers do solve problems,
but then so do dentists. Design is about cultural invention. I think this sounds really great.
I would like to be a cultural inventor, but it's probably not as easy as it sounds. This
guy is Bruno Monari. Probably many of you know that book, Design As Art, that he wrote.
He had a very straightforward answer, and that was, culture is the thing that makes life
interesting. It sounds quite simple, but then on a very personal level, what does that mean
for you if you try to get away from this very abstract phrase?
When we were back in art school, we
very quickly realized that our traditional training in visual communication, graphic
design, typography, a bit of animation maybe, wasn't taking us very far with that. We realized
that if we wanted to make images that are different and that have this sound and visual
energy, we needed a completely different approach. Maybe something that would be a little more
like making music, and maybe that's why music met us to us, because we were looking for
a process where you just jam and you shape things on the fly. They're always in flux,
and things are unstable until you actually decide, I'm going to take this snapshot and
put it out as an image. This really brought us to thinking of design as a process rather
than working towards a fixed result. We're always trying to embrace it as a process,
creating systems for design. I'm going to show you a few more examples that just have
been important for us. This is probably the quietest video that you're going to see tonight.
It's not very rock and roll, but it's the Starlings at Ottmore. This is not rendered,
this are real birds, and they're creating these amazing shapes that are just the result
of their flocking behavior. This very fluid and natural behavior, which is completely
emergent, was studied in the 1980s by a computer scientist called Craig Reynolds. He managed
to describe this behavior with just three very simple rules, which are just simply align
with your neighbors, attract towards your neighbors, towards the center of the flock,
don't crush into anybody, basically. If you apply these rules in a computer simulation,
it takes a little bit more, but I'm just going to keep it brief. If you apply them in a computer
simulation, you get the same emergent behavior that you can see in these birds that are not
flying anymore right now. I made it too long. It's really about the beauty of a process
rather than an end result. Another scientist who did some amazing research around the same
time is called Carl Sims, and he created these creatures. Again, this is in the 80s. Quite
amazing. He tried to breed digital creatures from a kind of digital DNA. Again, it was
a set and a system of rules, relatively simple, that are interacting in the system. He's
throwing a generated creature, basically a random creature, into a simulation. It measures
how much of a distance it can make, and then, like in real evolution, the ones that are
most successful are then allowed to have an offspring. In both these examples, code and
technology and computer science, appears as a really powerful tool for creating something
new, for a new type of creating, in a way. It's more about searching for opportunities
for emergence, where something new can come to surface without you actually defining what
it's meant to be. Or, as Will Wright put it, he's the inventor of SimCity and Spore and
all these AI-driven games. He said, the artist and designer is essentially sculpting possibility
space, which can then be filled and used by somebody else, or by a process. Another example
of recontextualization. This is one of our favorite painters. He's called David Schnell
from the so-called Leipzig School of Painting in Germany. I think his work is really striking.
The paintings are just so beautiful and organic, but at the same time, they could also easily
go through as a half-loaded computer game level, where you're not quite sure whether
it's a glitch or not. I'm not sure whether he would confirm that, but it seems quite
obvious that his work is influenced by technology and that it provokes him to find these kind
of looks. It's really interesting to see how everything begins to be connected to everything
else in our world and how that process is slowly also transforming our visual culture.
This is a German tornado plane that has a new kind of camouflage pattern, which is actually
designed to trick cameras rather than human eyes, essentially for robot eyes in a way.
A similar example, a new type of makeup from a guy called Adam Harvey. He called it CV
Dazzle because it's designed to trick face detection algorithms on surveillance cameras.
I'm not sure whether it will become a very widespread trend, but it's definitely something
that is becoming a part of our visual identities in a way. There's a beautiful block also partly
fed into by Burke that's called the new aesthetic. If you want to see more of this stuff, you
can have a look. This is a really old picture from fashion designer Issey Miyake. He's also
quite into technology, I would say. He's quite known for creating new and unthought
types of garments, often by using or turning technological processes upside down. For these
pleat garments, instead of pleating it first and then sewing it, he sewed it first and
then pleated it. Just by doing that, he made these pleats permanent and is reinventing not
only the garment but also its behavior, which I think is really interesting. Finally, this
is a science project that was completely blowing us away in the studio. It's a really cool
example of a functional use of color, a different kind of application of color that we find
really inspiring at field. It's called the human connectome project. It's a research
project that aims to create a complete map of our brains and the way that impulses spread
and dissolve in our brains. It's a really full-on science project, but still these images
are just so beautiful. The color is actually meant to indicate which direction these impulses
dissolve into and which areas of our brains are the highest areas of communication in
a way. It's a functional purpose from a scientist point of view who didn't really have in mind
that it is meant to be beautiful. These pallets just have an inner coherence because they
come from this functional application that we find really, really interesting. Now I'm
going to show you some of our work. It really feels like there is this new kind of aesthetic
emerging around us and a new kind of visual culture that is heavily influenced by technology,
by science, by digital culture. It will have in some kind of way an effect on all of us
how we make design and make art. One of our favorite projects, actually, where many of
these thoughts came together was, surprisingly, a print project.
So, yeah, that's it for this video. Thank you for watching, and I'll see you in the next
video. Yeah, we got a call about a good year ago from Sea Design. I think it was two weeks
before Christmas, and they said, yeah, we have this amazing opportunity. We're working
with GeoSmith to create their kind of annual print test brochures, and they asked us to
generate 10,000 individual abstract illustrations to make each of the sleeves feature a unique
illustration on it. So these were really 10,000 individual views on an abstract sculpture
that we generated from a sound piece, so that's where the basic structure is derived from,
and each copy in this print run had a unique cover. It was quite nice, because bringing
something so digital onto paper, an old medium, actually even underlined the digital nature
of the images, and we really tried to capture the energy of a dynamic process derived from
a sound process, in a way, and capture that in this static medium. We tried to do with
these images something that is completely abstract and that is not metaphorical in any
sense, or referencing something, but it's rather made of pure color, in a way, and still
I've always felt like I've seen something in them as well. Most people say it looks
a bit like a landscape, I sometimes see an ice bear in these pictures, for anybody else
to give me a shout later. They're currently up in the design museum, nominated for the
minds of the year, so that's going to come out in April, and we're really excited about
the results, and they're available as prints on our website. Last year we made a new, really
big, hall-sized installation at a new digital art museum in Paris, which is the other end
of the spectrum of our work, from print and illustration, generative design work, to big
installations. This one was a collaboration with Matt Pike from Universal Everything,
who we've done a number of really nice projects with, for a show called Supercomputer Romantics.
Thank you so much for joining us, and I'll see you in the next one.
Thank you.
Thanks. In this installation, everything that you see is generated in real time by pretty
clever software system. The only thing that's actually fixed is the soundtrack. It's 40
minutes long, and it's a little bit like a stage show, where you're playing a piece,
and every time you put it on stage, you're working with a completely new cast. So we
tried to generate these small digital life forms in the software system that are reacting
to the soundtrack, and each of their bodies, depending on how it's shaped, and how its
skeleton is made, and how its muscles are made, they're reacting differently, and interpreting
their dance choreography slightly differently. So it was quite funny to just keep observing
it, and then find the clumsy ones, and get your favourites. But what we really wanted
to try is to see how minimal you can go, how little detail is enough for our brains and
our hearts to recognise something as a creature, and something that is alive and has its own
kind of heartbeat, and that you feel empathy with, or feel sorry for if they fail with
their dance. Sorry. This is actually, it's a psychological phenomenon. There's a description
about it. It's called pareidolia. There's very popular image collections on Flickr
and other pages where you can see millions of these photos where people recognise something
as a face or as a creature. The same principle can also apply to sound. We actually have
that same psychological reaction when we hear fragments of human voices, and that's something
that accidentally, not on purpose, Simon Pike, who created the soundtrack for this installation,
used a lot as well with vocal snippets in the soundtrack. And actually, it's like the
whole world is full of these things where we recognise something as a tree, as a landscape,
as a house, even no matter how abstract it can get. In communion, we didn't just want
to stick eyes on something because that would have been a bit easy. So we left the eyes
out. They don't have faces. But we wanted to really bring the creatures to life, a bit
like in the Carl Simms example that I showed you earlier from the 80s, and really give
them a character in the literal sense. And if you want to construct something that looks
a bit like a live being, the first starting point is really just symmetry, very simply.
This guy has mastered it, I would say. So there is actually something that is called
the space invader algorithm. When you distribute a few dots randomly on a page and then mirror
them vertically, of course, then the shape immediately gets something that is a bit like
a creature, simply because our faces are vertically symmetric. And this was really the first step
in the software to generate the creatures for communion. We then connected the dots
with lines, again with different rules applying. It kind of gave us a lot of different skeleton
types. That's what we wanted to achieve. So we had a rule for connecting the dots in a
way so that they wouldn't make few but very long limbs, or they could have short but very
many limbs. And that's really the underlying system that their sound reactivity is based
on, because the choreography tells them, now raise your hands. So if a creature doesn't
have hands, then they will just stand there a bit randomly and look clumsy. But then in
the next minute, it might say, shake your hips, and then they can move its body around.
And that's how the movements come about. And it's just the connection of these skeletons
and then also their muscles. Sorry, this is a bit slow. So we then just fleshed out the
body with muscles and gave them different spring connections, dressed them up in different
costumes and sent them out into this amazing space. It was quite cool to work in this space,
because these are not screens. It's really just all projections. But the space that we
worked in already had this acoustic panels on the walls. And it's an amazing gallery.
They have a great program. If you're ever in Paris, go and have a look.
We shot the same installation in Beijing in last December, together with 1.0. They brought
us over there. And it was really amazing to see what happens when you just take this to
a different cultural background, because people started to come up to us and say, I can see
letters in it. I can read it. And I'm like, oh my God, what does it say? But luckily,
it seemed to say or spell only positive Chinese characters like peace or hello. We took a
similar approach, working with abstract patterns for the biggest project that we've done so
far. It was for Deutsche Bank in Hong Kong, a collaboration with Universal Everything,
where we really aim to visualize the complexity of the processes that they deal with in a very
I wanted to show you our latest project, where we don't have a proper documentation
in place yet. It's all coming to our website very, very soon. It's an installation that
is currently traveling through Australia, through different cities. And that was commissioned
by GE in Australia. It's part of a large campaign where Australians are asked for their concerns
and hopes for the future. And we were allowed to take this as a starting point and then
create a digital art piece that turns all these different voices and opinions into one
big stream of ideas and bring all these opinions together on a metaphorical level just to show
the kind of dialogue that's going on there.
Thank you.
Yeah, so we were quite lucky that we had a chance to work with a couple of big
big clients and big brands but we're always trying to find occasions or
opportunities where we can yeah keep keep our work as a little artwork as far as
we can push it even though it's in a branded context or in a commercial
application and that's actually something that is is really fun so just to
wrap up a little bit these are the things that we're thinking about and
discussing about in the studio and that we want to keep ourselves busy with over
the next couple of months at least really to find new metaphors in our
world that is becoming increasingly abstract and where I don't know
everything from our notebook to our phone and everything is happening on
these tiny little digital devices and all the you know many of the metaphors
that we're using are not not remaining valid anymore another thing more on the
design side of our work is we're doing a lot of research and in-house
development into behavioral identity so how how could it be to create visual
identities that really shift shape every second that are constantly in flocks
and that every time that you interact with it it appears in a new new kind of
visual perception. Storytelling is a really interesting part we've we've
often worked on a very abstract level and we're really interested in how we
can use all these tools to tell stories and develop narratives and and find new
ways for it in a world where our perception is really very fragmented
across all the channels that we're consuming in a way and finally a slightly
more practical aspect for us is what happens when you combine the skills of
an artist and designer with an entrepreneurial spirit and try to yeah
maybe a little bit less to wait for commissions and to for opportunities to
come up with but more thinking in a in a proactive way and and try to get our
own ideas into the world and find find ways to apply them and own them before
we maybe selling them and I think there's a lot of movement going on in
this in this whole chain and established networks of agencies and how and roles
and how people work together and we're really keen to kind of find our own way
to yeah just built the things that we would like to see in the world so that's
kind of our plan that was everything for me we're always looking for interesting
people to work with so if you if you're interested in what we do please give us a
shout we're just around the corner and I'm gonna be here for a while so yeah
thanks a lot for listening thanks a lot for having me
