think demux

I don’t know where you live. But I live in London. And I’m seeing more colour on the city walls every day.

Street artists are embracing happytalism (no need for a dictionary, just click it). We’re getting Space Invaders and 8-bit written bright. Decayed pillars restructured with Lego bricks. Buildings transformed into cartoon monsters.

It’s happening globally, which is the most exciting thing about it. I’m sure Os Gemeos must have set much of the paint in motion. But bucketloads of what’s happening now is new and transformative - going well beyond “graffiti” and exploring all the senses. Using every material to hand. Even balloons.

These pictures come from Washington D.C. and are the work of D.BILLY. I’m massively impressed.

Puts a whole new, and knowing, spin on a huge visual trend. Are we kids again? Or clowns?

For more on D.BILLY, posts at Designboom, And I Am Not Lying and PSFK.

Plus check out D.BILLY’s Flickr photostream.

And if you’re feeling the artier side of this new wave of street art, Ian Tait’s written a nice post about sculptural graffiti in Brighton.

The three poems Henry Stead performed at the launch night for London Poetry Systems.

In order, they are:

- The Love of Phlebas

- A Visionary’s Visionary Vision

- An Ancient Process

Thanks to Kaara for her design work on Phlebas. All three visual scores were outputted through an Edirol V4 mixer, performed with motion dive .tokyo, and pre-produced in Adobe Premier and Adobe After Effects.

You can watch all of the poets on our Vimeo group site.

Toronto street artist Posterchild went to New York this month and transformed digital ad platforms into stained-glass graffiti installations. Watch the video below. (via)

At the same time, the CutUp Collective are removing London ad posters wholesale, cutting them into thousands of bits, then reconfiguring the display space with their recycled material. (via)

Do corporate identities represent the last big remix taboo? Now that brands are present in social online spaces, will they ever let themselves be personalised?

Or is it left for the street artist to educate them in humanity?

Previously: Brand logos remixed; Skullphone hijacks New York billboards.

Luchadors. Mexican wrestlers. They’ve all got a story - and a logo. Their mask.

Where does the mask come from?

Aztecs, if you’re being dreamy and distant. The need for self-promotion, if you’re being 20th century and consumerist.

But hold that disbelief for one second. There are stories behind those masks. There’s honour and history behind the luchadors, even when they’re fighting werewolves in comic books.

Can the same be said of the WWF (WWE?) loudmouth? The hard-selling capitalist breed of this noble and ridiculous warrior, changing identity and allegiance as the money takes him?

I’m not sure. But I know I prefer the underdog’s story. And it takes good storytelling to get millions transfixed by a single TV second, over and over.

Take it away, Santo…

Related: Brazilian logo mashing.

Event: Lucha Libre in London this July.

Remember: This is just cultural mash-up. But feel free to start a serious discussion if you want one…

After How to VJ # 2, you’re now in the deep groove of pre-production.

Your footage is moving alright. But you’ve got to cut it correct in the edit, or you won’t be able to make it behave on the night.

You look ahead to that future in loops or lines.

Stop for a second. Listen to music you like - the kind of music you want to perform to. You have to understand that music.

Parts of it will be looping in regular and complete patterns. Parts of it won’t feel complete. They’ll be coming in at intervals and fading out, unfinished. They’ll be stabbing in, hard, jagged, irregular.

Your footage should use both if you want your live performance to be subtle and impressive. You’ll rely on loops to create layers and depth. You’ll need lines to give it surprise and character through manual control.

I’ll end this with Zan Lyons. I was lucky enough to work alongside him for London Poetry Systems this week. His layers, loops and lines reverberated through sound and image together and they explain this core thought much better than I can in words. Truly stunning.

Just watch closely what he’s doing, and turn your speakers up…

Bonus thought: Still not sure what’s meant by loops and lines? Look at the next Flash landing page you hit online. Is the load animation linear (like a load bar with a defined end point) or looping (like a circle going round continually until the page loads up)?

Recommended reading: Gilles Deleuze - Cinema 2: The Time-Image.

Previously: #1 What can you do?; #2 How can it dance?

Up next: #4 You know the type?

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 find their place in your cultural memory.

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

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?

It’s September 1973, in Paris. You’re on a connection to catch the Orient Express.

What sound does that train make?

Paul Theroux described it as frseeeeeefronnnng.

Not “woosh”. Not “choo-choo!” It’s 1973. Real trains are noisy. But peer into print and it’s a quiet affair. The letters sit in orderly lines in their allocated pages. Not a boo to a goose. Just the odd capital, hat jutting above the crowd.

BOO! Three types of print noise.

1. The Sneak  

Typical of advertising, because he knows he’s unpopular. He’s probably intruding on your conversation, so he has to do it with finesse or you’ll like him even less. As this sneak looks Brazilian it’s unsurprising that he delivers a fun ”BOO!”

2. The Group BOO!

A book cover chorus here - created by Larry Guess using designs by Barnbrook. There are good nights to be had late at the V&A. And when groups worked together they could bring the noise. Ampliflied.

3. ASBOO!

The anti-social BOO! Disturbs you so much you can’t remember what you were thinking, let alone make sense of the words on the page.

Not fun for you. Maybe a photo opp for someone else.

But that’s not what you want. You want a pleasant surprise. And typographers can give you that whenever they get the the sound, and the timing, just right.

On the same train of thought - The Godfather of Sans: James Brown; Test Your Type Knowledge: The Serif; Expert Ear on Wrong Noise: Leland Maschmeyer.