human._self.brain[‘status’] = "overload";

Alright if a body computes and you would ask my body what the variable is of brain[‘status’] it would simply be stated at overload.

Why… well we were talking about our could-be projects. We all had brilliant ones actually and so thought Kami and Kevin (an South African exchange teacher). Mine will not be revealed for the moment because I’m fine-tuning it right now to work on as a personal project. Anyway I could also explain what the other projects are but it would do them no good, not hearing them from their original creators.

The idea we liked most, had something to do with barcodes. We wanted to make originally the idea of adding a personality to somebody or something in the meaning of barcodes. We could do this with the aid of 2 dimensional barcodes that can store up to 2kb data. The barcodes can be read by software on a mobile and give a visual of the encrypted data of the barcode.

During the further brainstorm on that one, we were curious if we couldn’t put executable data in those barcodes, so people get a poem, a picture or a music piece or something else when they decode the barcode. We started looking up the possibilities and found out that our topic is actually very hot at the moment. So than we tried finding other possibilities but for some strange reason we never cam back to the first thought: adding another identity to people, what I actually liked very much, because I want to be Conan the barbarian that only eats apples when he has to!

The idea is now to come up with a very good feature and we pitched ourselves some good ones: conversation points, “kids play” and offcourse the (best one in my idea:) second identity.

If you look at it it going to be indeed something big the coming days of mobile telephony, the barcodes, because indeed like the most slogans say: it brings interaction to static objects. We saw a demonstration of how an add for a concert for the cardigans had a “shotcode” (special barcodes that are easier decoded by cellphones) send you straight away to a page on your mobile phone to buy tickets. Examples of barcodes that directed you to a wikipedia page, the point was to put those barcodes on the things they were meant for, so a table could “explain” that he was a table and what it is used for with background information.

Unsworn: In the City – The Ballets

You take Erik Sandelin and Magnus Torstensson and you mix ‘em up and you have Unsworn. Both guys studied Interaction Design in K3: Malmö so they knew what we guys were up too. They didn’t spend much time telling what they did or what their projects were, they started with some definitions actually and they were good at giving examples and occasionally one of the examples was from them so we after all we got to see what the chaps were up too after all.

They started immediately by stating what our third and final assignment was and it’s called “In the City – The Ballets”. Simply put; we have to make a choreography and teach it to our fellow students and perform it tomorrow.

They talked about a relative new term for me: “Action Spaces”. Defined it means something like this: “the systems that quietly order us about”. Either that is a very literal translation from Swedish to English or it’s that difficult. Luckily they gave some examples. It are things that are placed to do (or not to do) what you should expect: like traffic lights, skate stoppers (plastic lips so skateboarders can’t grind benches anymore), wikipages,… In fact it can be considered as frameworks to work in with each framework having his own bounderies, limits and rules.

Intresting and Action Spaces is the new upcoming buzzword.

So back to the assignment. To give an example they made a choreography themselves! It was called the slowfox. Basically it was walking a path that took you normally 10 minutes and we had to walk it in 30 minutes. Strange, I didn’t like it actually, it didn’t make sense for me much and people around us totally hadn’t a clue what we were busy with. We should have wondered that we start wondering if we walk slowly through a shopping street.

Afterwards our group gathered to figure out how our choreography will look like. We kept away from the walking ideas and whatever. Now we wanted that people did the same thing all at once. Basically: tomorrow, Malmö will have a bunch of paper airplanes.

NBGNGS: the wall

fotos still have to be linked to this article

Alright as said we were going to build a wall in park, and we did. After some setbacks, we finally managed the trick. With a rope and a ladder we blocked a bridge over the water in one of the parks of Malmö.

When building our “wall” I didn’t expect to much of it, I thought people would just walk over it and they did. But when we were still building it people immediately asked us what the heck we were doing and that this wasn’t a good idea at all. Bikers came and they just crossed it also, young misses with prams had troubles to. But in a way our wall was mostly either not that big an obstacle. However when two people were at the spot on the same time there was some sort of communication although it was only with eye contact saying: “yeah what fool did this”.

What I expected to happen also happened, a lot of Swedes turn their back to it. But when a park watcher came, we expected that he was called to check out the situation. The strange thing was that the guy did jack shit about the obstacle, although his own park was blocked. On the same time an old chap cam from the other side with a bike. He didn’t know what to do: could he enter the park, is this obstacle here due to the park watcher, may I cross it, why isn’t the park watcher saying anything to me,…

NBGNGS: the brainstorm

Okay after Fridays walk, it was up to us to change the space we walked in (a park close to the city library). We agreed on meeting up at nine in school to brainstorm what we could do, a strange brainstorm session if you ask me, we all thought we had too few (good) ideas after the first forty minutes (tested as the longest time you can brainstorm with big groups). So we decided to leave and come back for an afternoon brainstorm session, which ended up in only repeating what we had in the morning, but defining it more. In the end we actually realized we had several good ideas. And indeed NBGNGS and CCREP liked our ideas, because of their fun and theory-behind-it factors.

Not going to give you a full review off all our ideas (I upload the brainstorm scheme tomorrow), just going to discuss the one I’m going to work out with my group.

In theory it’s simple: we build a wall (half a meter high) in the park over a walking pad. Now what will happen that is the main question of the group. People will start interacting to help each other over the obstacle (old ladies, ladies with prams,…). Personally I think, Swedes are very much going to dislike this idea and are just going to turn away, what is also something I want to see: A Swede turning his back to the problem because he is actually very introvert.

Another thing is the fact that a park is actually a manmade area, the only thing is that people don’t fully realize this anymore. So why don’t add a manmade obstacle to let them realize that somebody designed the park with walking ways and made it usable. So actually we are making the park a little bit more “real” towards nature, because in a real forest you also have to find you way through “obstacles”. Will people like their more nature-like park? We’ll find out tomorrow.

Other ideas our big group is making: one group is going to work with a velvet rope to make people walk the grass instead of walking a pathway, another is setting a 2 meters stroke of the park on fire to symbolize renewal.

NBGNGS: New Beginings

Alright today we got our lecture from the guys of New Beginings. In the end a guy of “Collective Creative Descent” joined in to talk about a project of them: “Walk-Talk-Eat-TalkSomeMore”.

In a way what the guys of nbgngs (New Beginings) did wasn’t making a product, but they maid a service. That was the only real thing that intrigued me, because that is what we over in c-md Belgium are actually doing. We don’t make a bunch of pages that form a website for a company, no we create/offer a service for a company.

Now what kind of services did they made than? I’m going to be short on this: communication services: they have some notice boards they hang up around in Stockholm, a free radiomast for everyone to broadcast, radio transmissions serviced to for example: only standing cards informing them on the reason of the traffic jam and additional info. I would say give their portfolio a visit, it has lot’s of information about their projects.

Now the guy from ccred (Collective Creative Descent) talked about in my point of view a strange project. I understood what he said, but I didn’t understood the meaning of it. Anyway he is going to tell us more about it tomorrow because our project will be in a similar line.

In short it all had to do something with talking about things with several groups at the same time (in his case the place to go in a city) and than comparing the thaught, questions and ideas that came up with the other groups and look for common things. We have to do the same but about our projects. Anyway we will see what comes out of it.

Uglycute: the aftermath

Like already mentioned today we had to give in our projects on a A4 paper. And I must say I expected a little more. Not that everything was crap or something, but most things were that inconclusive that you couldn’t know what it was or what it eventually could do. Okay it was indeed a part of the assignment but eventually when you design something, to me, the object should almost reveal his function and way of use. We all had to pin our piece of paper to famous uglycute duplo blox ;) and than it was showtime.

The best ones I saw were: a kind of chin support for looking to a laptop on a table, a strip that let’s you point out the last sentence you read in a book for easy further reading, a sunscreen for working with a lap-top outside, a brilliant design for holding wires, a bonsai tree you can shape yourself,…

Anyway I had fun making shaping mine and it can offcourse be found here. Behold the brain-o-sphere.

Alright let’s see with what the guys of New Beginings will surprise us tomorrow :)

Uglycute: the challenge

Alright as said we had to make something for the guys from uglycute. Yesterday we had to present our ideas and today I finished off with what they liked best and with the extra brainstorming they gave me.

Speaking of brainstorming, that is actually the main concept of my creation. Shortly said I wanted to make a kind of world globe but in whiteboard material. When brainstorming myself I hate to go from the one corner of the room to the other or to twist and turn over papers to see the things I brainstormed five minutes ago. The sphere itself must be rotational in 2 directions and be big enough to write much on it and do it easily standing and sitting.

They liked the idea and came up quickly with some others: why not mount smaller ones in desks, make them inflatable so you can toss them like a beach ball to each other,… Lovely working with a creative team at your table.

An other idea of me where to make a kind of sock to store in your mobile phone, money; keys and entry cards so you can put it easily in your trouser pocket instead of hanging it on a ribbon around your neck.

Uglycute: introduction

Today we got an introduction from of the guys from Uglycute. Uglycute is an art collective of four persons who mainly make spaces for exhibitions and furniture. They started somewhere in 1998/99, in those times the main focus of the media about art was: “what is beautiful”. They started then and chose the name Uglycute, actually a Swedish expression, that stands for something you like personally but it isn’t considered nice in public. They made an amusing note that it’s somewhat similar to politics.

They showed some stuff they made over the years. And I must say most things I liked, they were in the philosophy of uglycute: “it most work for that place, and have use for that place and not deliberately being nice/functional for another place.

A quick overview of some things they showed us:

Purple spaces for exhibiting purposes in Botkyrka Konsthall. They use the purple to draw the attention to what is important. This is because the rooms there have also an administrative an other uses at the same time.

The national museum in Oslo had a book reading area, the only problem was that it was to integrated in the museum, and it couldn’t move easily depending on what they were exposing in the museum. Uglycute made a new book reading section, the nice thing about it, is totally foldable and can be stacked in one piece. Again like already mentioned, it’s a nice piece of art and totally functionable like the way the want it in Oslo (moveable), but therefore it isn’t considered the best and nicest solution for somewhere else.

Interior for konst 2. That’s the title of the exhibition space the made. One thing I like very much they said about it: “It needed to be done with a very low budget and we still wanted to do something creative. (So no black box or white cubes,…)” So they invented the “grey sack”. The old building had lot’s of standing posts and just used these to separate some rooms with the simple use of gray carpets. Where needed they just cut out bits and pieces of the carpets.

Last thing that I liked very much were the almost Duplo like blocks (made in urethane). They use the blocks for everything: dividing exhibition spaces, tables, seats, banks,…

We also got an assignment, in theory as simple as: create a low tech product, with a purpose that nobody knows of, looks not like anything else and in a way must help you with your future career.

First Entry just like Kami asked

Alright this blog is a personall blog to reflect and ponder daily about the classes we get during the Art, Culture & Design courses. The courses are obligatory for the Swedes, but some of the foreign students can choose to do them, and so did I.

What the course content really is, is a bit vague at the moment, but it seems interesting. Actually it's about being creative, being open for new art forms, etc… This all is giving on a very practical base The course lasts 4 weeks. The first two weeks are organized by three Swedish art collectives, being: uglycute, newbeginnings and unsworn. Check out their websites I would say :). The last two weeks a free projects in small groups. I think the last two weeks will more focus on small studies we do at home and present them in the small groups.

Probably I will have lot’s of fun working with the Swedish collectives and working in and with other areas of art like architecture, productdesign,... I’m realy looking forward to it.