W+K Gallery Presents Aaron Koblin

Recently, on August 5th, coinciding with the IDSA conference here in Portland, Wieden + Kennedy had a first thursday event featuring the work of Aaron Koblin, an insanely talented artist who uses modern technology, typically not intended for visual arts, to create mindblowing collaborations with crowdsourcing tools such as Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. He’s also the technology lead for Google Chrome experiments. I wasn’t really familiar with his work until getting involved in this project, but it really left an impression on me.

My role was to design the layout of the event in W+K’s gallery space including any signage or promotional materials. So here’s what I did.

A fold out poster that would double as a walkthrough guide of the exhibit.

I did a little bit of copywriting for this one.

Using the building’s support-beams as signage.

Project descriptions.

The most interesting thing, to me, about working on this was thinking through the layout and deciding where each piece goes, being conscious of how the veiwer would experience the work, thinking of the flow of the event and where to put the signage, and in some cases how large some works should be. I’m not sure if galleries usually gets to decide what the dimensions of the work will be, but in our case Aaron had sent us all the files to make prints of his work. I got really excited when upon realizing that we could potentially print his Ten Thousand Cents piece the size of the large gallery wall. HUGE. Made total sense to me, considering the whole piece was created by 10,000 anonomous contributers, that the best visual experience would be had through veiwing it as huge as possible. It really captivated the scale of the collaboration, I thought. Seemed like a stunning way to view this collaboration, since it’s fairly easy to hop on the internet and check it out. Hopefully the experience is something a bit unique and special from seeing it on a screen.

Ten Thousand Cents

Flight Patterns

See more photos of the Gallery event, and the IDSA after party on the deck here and here. Oh, and here. Enjoy.

Noa Emberson + Reaching For Imperfection

A little bit back I came across the Behance Portfolio of Noa Emberson via ffound, I think - which first led me to The Visual Mixtape. For those who may wonder what kind of photography moves me, this is a good example. Grainy, desaturated, moody shots of patterns, textures and lanscapes of nature - or things that are old, and worn down. It’s really beautiful stuff. Makes me want to spend lots of time outside.

This series is called Reaching for Imperfection.

GPS Drawing and Situationism

Multidisciplinary artist Jeremy Wood has been making some interesting work using GPS devices to draw his routes on foot. Interestingly, for the Traverse Me map, Jeremy avoided using roads and paths as much as possible. It brings to mind one of the basic exercises of situationism. The idea is that when you take a new route - one that is off the main drag, so to speak - the “spectacle” is revealed and the experience is supposed to be enlightening, bringing back the spirit of adventure and discovery. So tomorrow, while on your commute to work, or whatever, try taking a new route. Also consider this; if you go by car - try a bike ride, if you go by bike - take a walk, if you walk - try skateboarding. A refreshing situationist exercise.

From the artist:

I responded to the structure of each location and avoided walking along roads and paths when possible.

The route was recorded with GPS technology and was walked in stages over the 300 hectare site.

My shoes turned brown in the dry fields and they turned green in the long grass.

Security was called on me twice on separate occasions and I lost count of how many times I happened to trigger an automatic sliding door.