think demux

What are the Olympics?

Even in this age of media splintering, they’re a festival of global hypnosis. Each one, in time, becomes a cultural artefact.

Without resorting to a Google, I can’t tell you anything about Mexico ‘68. Apart from the fact it had a great logo.

Beijing 2008 is already crafting its legacy. PR disaster leads the pack. After events in Paris and London (to name just two of the incidents), it’s going to take a spectacular recovery to turn things around. And that’s before we’ve even heard a starter’s gun.

But whatever the political obstacles, for an Olympics to get off on the B of the BANG it needs well-honed branding. Here, notoriously, London 2012 false-started.

You can check out 100 years of high-performance Olympic design if you’re in London this weekend. And wherever you are in the world, events in Beijing this summer will eventually form part of your cultural heritage.

Recommended: What is the World Cup? Eric Hobsbawn’s thoughts on ‘Nations and Nationalism in the New Century’.

ROJO®tv is now switched on. Broadcasting via internet from an HQ in Catalonia.

The “consortium” run visual rackets from Milan, São Paulo and Barcelona.

And with the quality coming out of Spain and Brazil in particular, you could almost shrug at this site for being excellent all over.

But it’s a hot day on the beach.

The video content is beautiful. The sun’s out. It’s worth having a bask. Warmed up a few ideas for me. 

No one cares that Superman’s dead. Did you spot him in Chris Ware’s illustration?

Foot on the ground in big city, there are millions of things you don’t notice. Most are banal. Some incidental. A few, tragic.

But you keep on keeping on. As long as it’s not your tragedy. Tough luck for Icarus (he’s kissing the fishes, bottom right).

No doubt cursing himself on a design oversight. Wax for wings? To the sun?

That’s not the style of a Renaissance man. Gotta see outside the grid to plough on in the big city.

After How to VJ #1, you’ve still not touched any VJ software.

You’re making, animating, filming, researching - one way or another, you’re finding your way to put together material.

But when it comes to a club night, you’ll have to perform. You’ll have to make it dance.

In preparation, you do one of three things:

1.  Nothing. It’s already dancing

If you’ve filmed or sampled moving footage, it’s got its own in-built motion. A life of its own, baby. You gotta dance with it, so learn your steps. It’s leading the dance. Not you.

2. Order a few cocktails

If you’re animating, this is where you turn static into Thriller. Give it some attention, a couple of Long Island Ice Teas and it’ll shake to your moves.

For a strong all-night performance, though, you’ll need to move in the right circles. So keep thinking about loops.

3. Drop a killer beat

If your material’s still not toe-tapping, the show’s not over. As soon as you start editing, whether pre-production or live, you’re supplying a new beat. You can get a booty shimmer out of a photograph if pick the right cuts.

You shouldn’t think about equipment or software until you’ve figured how to make it dance the way you want. You want rhythm, you want style, you want personality.

It can get more meaningful in the right combinations. But I’ll let Alfred Hitchcock march in to finish. He’ll explain the Kuleshov effect better than I could:

Previously: #1 What can you do? Up next: #3 Keep it in time.

George Glencairn Urwin wrote for Sparky comic in the 1970s.

In the 1990s, he made Teenage Mutant Hero Turtle weapons out of wood for me and my brother. He looked striking with a pipe, and was sharp with a pen.

I’m proud of my grandad.

The thumbnails above are his stories (a list at the end, if you want to see every comic he did). I got hold of the old annuals today, and it was a pleasure to see how his creative mind worked.

These little outfits are, in order, Structurosa Script, Xtrude, Letra Libre and Brikd.

All are fonts designed by real-life, non-naked people using FontStruct. A real doll of a site. (via Slashdot.)

I’m prettying up a beautiful Q for the new Chester Draws typeface. Anyone else had a crack at making their own font?

Want to share?

Remember when tagging was something a graffiti artist did?

Here’s something a graffiti artist did at the end of Bethnal Green Rd. He - or she? I’ll finish with their tag so you can decide - made their mark with gold.

Whether you do it to walls, photos on Facebook or blog posts, you’re doing the same thing when you tag. You’re splashing on your own interpretation. You could be daubing shit, or you could add glitter.

What’s the nozzle? Can you add; can you do it with style.

No reason your attitude should be different on or offline. Frederik Samuel clocked Paint That Shit Gold this week. It lets you tag or graf any website you like with a gold spraycan.

Tagging keeps growing and paint gets splashed. You can see why.

We want to add our mark. And we’re getting better at it.

Previously: Brazilians tag Brighton. Who was the artist above? (click thumbnail to see the answer big.)

You can’t take pictures at Spitalfields, a funfair or a Disneyland car park.

You’re on shaky ground if you want to take pictures of children. (Though some are still doing it spectacularly.)

Should I have taken this picture?

I didn’t use a flash - no flash photography on the Underground. Just a straight, clear shot of another solitary person.

But I didn’t ask his permission.

And neither did the CCTV camera up high on his shoulder. Nor did it ask my permission on the way down the escalator.

Still, I could feasibly have been swept off on the grounds of “acting suspiciously and taking pictures“, and I wouldn’t be writing this now. They’re would be CCTV footage if it went to court, and a new government policy to back it up.

What does all this say about us? How does it affect the way we see each other?

When closed?

An item came through on the news-tape yesterday. I thought I’d seen it before.

Most likely I had. Because this year, the mainstream press has been hanging on to what it thinks it does best.

Madeleine still missing; Diana still dead; Amy Winehouse still a mess; footballers still roasting.

It’s like the sad end to a long relationship. The love has gone.

Now in its place, a clingy desperation. Hollow harking to the good old days.

But those days were spontaneous. They were full of wine and desire. Like Serge Gainsbourg when he met Whitney Houston.

However the presenter tries to translate it, you heard what Serge said.

It was mad. It was spontaneous. It was loveably news for one reason: you’d want to talk about it.

What was the last thing you found, or did, and wanted to tell people about?

Because that, my friend, is the news we want. Performance, not repeats.