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Neil Blomkamp is South African and you might therefore expect him to be a chauvinist racist. But Niell is a geek, and that has overridden his social predispositions. Instead he’s followed a band vegan Boers on a notable trail of digitalism and responsibility!
Neill is only 30 years old (born 1979!), and has worked on various ad projects as special effects supervisor, accumulating skills that have allowed him to assemble hand-held analogue with believable digital effects. More recently he has directed some bigger-budget enterprises, including a Halo preview (you are an idiot or a girl if you don't know about this) and District 9 with Peter Jackson. Which old Wacko derived from Blomkamp’s original, 6-minute short ‘Alive in Joburg’. In which I just noticed D9’s protagonist, Shartlo Copley at 3:18. Gr8.
And he did the Citroen C4 advert with the transformer rip-offs (a transformer would never morph into a C4! Don’t mess about. F-16s and Mustangs, son), and David Guetta’s track over them!? Check his filmography on wikipedia.
But anyway, the main point of this post is that Neill has conceptualised and visualised one of the best exo-suits ever, easily among the greats of Matrix’s APU and Aliens’ Powerloader. Enjoy it.
Pomp&Clout is a Brooklyn-based visual communication / brand firm, making film and graphics. How great. They are great, though. They have various corporate clients, including Apple, Nike, Mazda, Visa, Carnegie Mellon and Mad Decent, among others. Particularly 'now' are their recent music video projects, such as the 80's vector-inspired Dre Skull - I want You and analogue-noised Jeffer for Boys Noize. Good work. And as they have the hardware and human resource to create good motion content, they've even made some interesting video-promos for their own party, 'Lovelife'.
And whereas I usually enjoy the assumption that people from decades bygone were lesser intellectuals than our civilised bunch today, I am again proven wrong. Shockingly. Have a look at Len Lye, who scratched and marked frames to achieve comparable patterned distortion, as in the 'Swinging the Lambeth Walk' video. In the 1930's.
Swedish Architect, music producer, programmer and part-time college Erik Levander enthusiastically tipped me off about 'The Tone Generation' podcast. Levander synopsises:
If your knowledge about the origins of electronic music is limited to Kraftwerk, perhaps with a vague connotation of the names Stockhausen, Cage or Varese, this podcast will both make you an expert on early electronic music and give you hours of fascinating listening for free!
Artist Ian Helliwell serves you well chosen bits of music along with dry, but precise information. If there is something like an objective charm, Ian Helliwell's excellent podcast sure has it.'
True that.
Stream or download here
Freitag is a Swiss company run by namesake brothers, using recycled truck tarpaulins and other automotive materials to make bags. The bags are subsequently durable, individual and ‘green’, although veer dangerously close to high school tech class. Reflecting their re-use mantra, their flagship store in Zurich West is made from used shipping containers. Designed by Annette Spillmann and Harald Echsle, the boxes were Gutted, reinforced, piled-up 26 meters high and braced, ranking as Zurich’s tallest structure.
"Optimum use had to be made of the small plot of land right next to Gerold-strasse. The standard 20-foot shipping container was chosen as the basic building block for the construction of an asymmetric tower of 9 containers rising from a 4 x 2 base. Set back from the road, the structural shell of the building emphasizes the size of the adjacent brownfield site. The base is used as a sales outlet, while the tower has become a striking landmark. The circle, from product to building to product, is complete."
Container architecture has a fairly polar spectrum of really bad to pretty good, and I’d ike to vote for this in the latter. Also interesting are LOT-EK and NL Architects efforts.
