A bespoke season of film dedicated to Marc Jacobs at ACMI

Drag queens, porn stars, washed-up rock stars, A-list fashion personnel and D-list celebrities - Marc Jacobs has a coterie of followers that hang onto him tightly, despite his insistence that he’s not cool. The designer who brought grunge to the catwalk is celebrating 25 years in the fashion biz, and continues to successfully operate mostly on intuition, Moxie soft drink and a dose of self-induced terror.

To applaud the man behind the superbrand ACMI has hooked up with Melbourne Spring Fashion Week 2009 to weave together Marc Jacobs on Film,  dedicated to the designer’s career, creations and collaborations. The season kicks off with the Australian premiere of Marc Jacobs & Louis Vuitton. Director Loïc Prigent turns his camera lens towards the designer extraordinaire and Creative Director of luxury fashion house Louis Vuitton just in time for the birth of the handbag to beat all handbags – made up entirely of earlier Vuitton handbags!

The four screenings of this film will be introduced by festival guest Bryanboy who came to notoriety for his cybermusings on all things fashion. The internationally-adored superblogger is here to brag about the ‘BB Bag’ created in his honour for the Fall 2008-09 Collection by Marc Jacobs.

Saturday 29 August – Sunday 6 September 2009
Full $13 Concession $10
3 Session Package: Full $30 Concession $24

Full film program at ACMI.

Freeplay Independent Games Festival August 14th to 15th at the State Library of Victoria in Melbourne

First held in 2004 and supported by the Victorian government, Freeplay aims to help Australian indie games developers as well as educators, game players and industry representatives to interact with each other, share ideas and explore the potential of interactive entertainment.

With the ever-growing interest in the indie sector, and the plethora of easy-to-use development tools for creating games, this year’s Freeplay is certain to be well attended.

Screen Play interview with festival co-director Paul Callaghan explains why you should attend, and why the indie scene is worth supporting.

The Digital Fringe Festival

The Digital Fringe Festival is seeking all sorts of screens across Australia and the world! Do you have a public screen, projector, TV or old computer monitor that you would like to play free digital art on?

Digital Fringe is seeking a plethora of public screening venues to participate in September/October 2009 – urban screens, galleries, shopping centers, bars, cafes, pubs, retail venues, libraries, salons and even swimming pools who have a screen of any size, to show our curated collection of screen based art. Help us to bring cutting edge digital artworks by local and international artists to the public.

No screen is too large or small – it may be in a back corner of a library on a computer monitor, part of a shop’s window display, a wall of TV’s in an electrical goods shop, a projector in a foyer, or a huge public screen. We simply want to get this artistic content into as many nooks and crannies of public space as possible.

What is Digital Fringe?
Digital Fringe is an open access public arts festival that places contemporary screen based media in public locations.  It provides artists with access to an extensive network of hundreds of public screens and non-traditional audiences throughout Australia and the world. Screening venues receive a playlist curated from the diverse visual works of animation, abstract, video art, short film, machinima, motion graphics, photography and stills submitted to the Digital Fringe festival via our website.

In keeping with the Fringe Festival charter, Digital Fringe is open access and accessible to emerging and established artists, particularly those working in screen based and new media.  Submissions are received from all around the world: from professional artists to bedroom doodlers and everybody in between. Screening venues range from busy bars and cafes, bustling shopping centres, walls of TV’s in electrical stores, State and regional libraries, art galleries, and cultural institutions, suburban shop fronts and on massive urban screens in public plazas like Melbourne’s Federation Square.

All submissions also play on the Digital Fringe website

Digital Fringe started in 2006 and runs on the cultural capital of Horse Bazaar and the contributions of numerous artists, screen operators and audiences. It has been put together with generous support from Film Victoria, Melbourne Fringe Festival and other sponsors.

If you are interested or would like some further information please contact Simeon Moran on:screens@digitalfringe.com.au

Barry by 3 exhibition and performance

“no such thing as over-adornment” – in Canberra,
a glorious intersection of three artists’ work

Barry by 3 is an extraordinary exhibition in late August bringing together three artists. Harriet Barry works with glass; Zoë Barry, her daughter, is a cellist and composer and London-based daughter Emily Barry is a shoe designer and maker.

Harriet Barry is a thrillingly precocious glass worker and jeweller: she first worked with glass in 2001, had her own studio in 2002, and had sold out an exhibition in Luxembourg by 2003. And it’s been full steam ahead since then!

Zoë Barry is a cellist, plays piano accordion, and composes for theatre and dance.  Zoë played cello in St Petersburg for Rostropovich’s 80th birthday, and has been featured more than once by the ABC as a composer to keep an eye on.

Since winning a place to the prestigious London College of Fashion, Emily Barry has continued to succeed in the tough field of shoe design.  After working on four London Fashion weeks, Emily has now taken her shoes to millions.  Working predominately for film, she is shoemaker to Russell Crowe, Hagrid the Giant (Harry Potter), and the new Dr Who.

In addition, a performance, Barry Barry Barry & Bakst is a marvellous mix of “Meet the Artists” with “Show and Tell”. The Barrys will share their fascination with Léon Bakst, the legendary designer for the Ballets Russes.

With music and movement, exotic and dazzling shoes and jewels upon jewels, they will show that there is no such thing as over-adornment.….

Barry by 3 – an exhibition
Saturday and Sunday, 29 and 30 August, 10am – 5pm
Launch by Charles Southwood, Saturday, 4pm.

Barry Barry Barry & Bakst – a performance
Saturday August 29, 6pm – 8pm
$15. Bookings essential at 02 6247 6060

All at: At Pialligo Estate Winery, 18 Kallaroo Road, Pialligo, ACT.

Queries:penelope.ramsay@gmail.com

Victorian Bushfire Appeal Auction check out Nip and Tuck couch by Deborah Kelly

Mixed Media 0.O Deborah Kelly’s Nip & Tuck: Tooth & Claw investigates female agency, complicity …

Deborah Kelly’s Nip & Tuck: Tooth & Claw investigates female agency, complicity and representation by transforming the KLIPPAN into a feminine explosion of hair, skin, painted nails and silk knickers. The work is an extension of her ongoing paper montage series begun in 2007.

Deborah is a Sydney-based artist whose works have been shown in streets, skies and galleries around Australia, in the Singapore and Venice Biennales, and elsewhere. She is a founding member of the art gang boat-people.org, who have been making public work around race, nation, borders and history since 2001. Most recently, she instigated a distributed participatory memorial for the Tiananmen Square massacre on 4 June 2009.

Deborah Kelly gratefully acknowledges the invaluable collaboration of Bec Dean and the production assistance of Aung Phu Ya, Richard Manner and Ada Stanton.

Proceeds from the IKEA Home Project Sofa 2009 Auction will be donated to the Victorian Bushfire Appeal to support the rebuilding of homes. (SN:Deborah Kelly) (120107-17)

Dimensions in cm: 188 (L) x 88 (D) x 66 (H)

Weight: 25kg (approx)

The countdown is on!

Why Does the Best Design of 2009 Still Look Like 2000?

Why Does the Best Design of 2009 Still Look Like 2000? | Fast Company
Article by Valerie Casey

Excerpt: “Cocksure: The Psychology of Overconfidence” is the title of Malcolm Gladwell’s recent piece in the New Yorker, where he investigates the mental-space of decision-making. Gladwell analyzes financial collapse and war, arguing that beyond the conventional explanations of those predicaments (structural mishap and cognitive deficit), there is a psychological dimension at play. In high-stakes situations, we suffer from a more deeply rooted conundrum: a crisis of overconfidence.

Gladwell’s tales of a brazen Bear Sterns’ CEO and a feckless British officer deftly illustrate how confidence misapplied can lead to dire situations. However, it is not overconfidence alone that creates a global financial collapse or failed military operation. Gladwell contends that leaders of all stripes and industries, in war and peace, recessions and booms, base their future behavior on what created past successes. Instead of understanding current situations as ones requiring different and new thinking, leaders often fail to adapt.

In many ways design is the ultimate practice of adaptation. Designers modify their environments by creating objects and systems to promote better behaviors and experiences. But are there times when we resist adaptation? In design, as in business, don’t clients or partners deliberately select us because of our track records of past successes? Because our portfolios give an indicator of future success, are we really encouraged to drift away from what we know? I would answer yes, and yes.

more…
Source: Fast Company

McFarlane Prize for excellence in Australian web design

“Founded in 2006, in memory of the late Nigel McFarlane, The McFarlane Prize is be awarded to an Australian designer or team for a site
launched or significantly upgraded between September 1st 2008 and August 31 2009. Sites may be designed for Australian or non Australian individuals, organisations, companies or governments, but must be  designed and developed by an individual or team which works in Australia for an Australian company, or by Australian citizens or permanent residents. Anyone may nominate a site, and there is no cost for nominating or being nominated for the prize.”

http://www.mcfarlaneprize.com/
Nominations close August 31, 2009.

Len Lye at ACMI

Discover the art of Len Lye (1901 – 1980), one of the most radical creative minds of the modern age. This unforgettably exuberant exhibition surveys his work across film, sculpture, painting, poetry and more. Exploding with kaleidoscopic colour and pulsing with rhythmic beats, the exhibition is the largest survey of Len Lye’s work ever presented.

New Zealand-born Len Lye is a seminal figure in the history of the moving image. In his early twenties, Lye travelled throughout the South Pacific, and lived for extended periods in Australia and Samoa. Moving to London in the twenties, and then New York in the forties, Len Lye’s career unfolded amidst avant garde modernism on the international stage.

Drawing from the Len Lye Foundation Collection and Archive, the exhibition combines artworks with rarely-seen biographical ephemera, concept drawings and other working materials, many on public display for the first time.

Beginning in the 1930s, Len Lye made films without a camera, applying hand-painted imagery directly to the film strip. Combining these vibrant abstractions with rhythmic Cuban jazz, works such as A Colour Box (1935) and Rainbow Dance (1936) have become touchstones for the medium of film as an artistic expression.

Exhibition runs until Sunday 11 October 2009
Open daily 10am – 6pm
Free admission

ACMI has created a workshop called Scratch it, which demonstrates how Len Lye created abstract films – called ‘direct films’ – by scratching patterns and marks directly onto celluloid.

With about 15 seconds of film stock, you’ll create a short sequence in this workshop that, when spliced together with sections created by other participants, will form a large collaborative and abstract film.

SCRATCH IT (workshop)
Sun 23 Aug 2009, 1pm-4pm
location: Studio 1, ACMI, Fed Square, Melbourne, Australia
admission: Free

Rock Paper Lasers digital laser technology to create paper artworks and sculptures

Don’t F with Lasers!

Trinh Vu, Troy Innocent, Jeff Janet and Joel Zika. Exhibiting amazing paper based artworks.

Opening night Friday July 31st – exhibition runs until the 15th of August, 2009

Check:
www.rockpaperlasers.blogspot.com
www.kickgallery.com

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The four artists in Rock, Paper, Lasers – Troy Innocent, Jeff Janet, Trinh Vu & Joel Zika – have used the latest digital laser technology to create paper artworks and sculptures; some of the works mimic industrial design objects while others are representative of mere folly and experimentation.

One of the intentions of the artists in this exhibition is to deride the mass production of iconography, such as that which is so often seen in ‘home wares’ or ‘lifestyle’ shops, to make a series of more unique works. Other works in the show are intended to exemplify the possibilities of these tools for the creation of contemporary art works. While these artists cast a light on the facelessness of the prefabricated object, at the same time, they choose to revel in the machine’s benefits for more unique creative purposes rather than running from them.

Each of the artists in Rock, Paper, Lasers lecture in Art and Design at Monash University and as a part of their own on-going practice set themselves the task to create this exhibition of two and three dimensional artworks collaboratively.

Troy Innocent is represented by Tolarno Galleries, Boutwell Draper Gallery, and Hugo Michell Gallery. Trinh Vu is represented by Christine Abrahams Gallery (Melbourne), ArtsBank and Chika Gallery (Tokyo). Joel Zika first exhibited at Kick Gallery in 2004 and has regularly exhibited at Kick Gallery in various group exhibitions. Rock, Paper, Lasers has been supported by the Monash University Art & Design Faculty.

Host: Kick Gallery
Opening Night: Friday, July 31, 2009
7:00pm – 9:00pm
Location:  Kick Gallery, 239 High St , Northcote, Melbourne, Australia

Email: info@kickgallery.com

Crowd Sourcing free Melbourne seminar for designers

What will changing innovation processes mean for design practitioners?
Wednesday 5 August, 6-7.30pm | Sensis Theatrette, Melbourne

Presented by AIMIA Victoria in partnership with Swinburne University.

Throughout the creativity sector we are seeing more and more calls to ‘the crowd’ for their design ideas. From Smith’s Crisps offering 1% of sales for new flavour ideas to Dorito’s offering $20,000 to the most innovative and crowd-pleasing advertisement, we are seeing clients seek solutions from the crowd rather than the designer.

This shift in the innovation process can be characterised as either user-driven (where the crowd is asked to respond) or open innovation (where clients are creating new partnerships with their ‘problem solvers’). Exciting as this may be for creatives everywhere, what does it mean for design practitioners? What are the implications of user driven and open innovation of interactive media and digital design practices in particular? This session brings together practitioners and academics to explore what the future of innovation will mean to design practice.

Speakers:
99Designs – Adam Schilling
iSpyStyle – Kate Vandermeer
Professor Lyndon Anderson – Swinburne University

Chair:
Angelina Russo – Swinburne University

Venue:
Sensis Theatrette (Level 3, QV Centre), Cnr Swanston St and Lonsdale St, Melbourne, Australia

The seminar will be followed by networking drinks at Three Degrees.

This is a FREE event
More info from AIMIA