Seeing all the positive feedback from the OFFF posse on twitter has been great!
We are pleased to say we have a couple more posts to complete the coverage from Oeiras – which include Stagmeister, Gils, Digital Kitchen and a few sound bites from Prologue films. But in the meantime enjoy the lightbox collection of unedited images from OFFF Festival 2009
All images have a creative commons license
Well that’s certainly not what I got as a ‘takeaway’ from the OFFF Festival in Lisbon from the last three days, but I think I know who did…
As I walked out of the Festival hall I over heard ‘…well, I didn’t really get immersed in the festival, I didn’t get much from it…’ thinking well where the fuck have you been for the past three days? Asleep in the corner!
Given this was my first OFFF Festival, hearing people like Joshua Davis, Sagmeister, Peters, Scher, Champagne Valentine, PES, ALVA, UVA and Koblin really change the way you approach, rationalise, realise and formulate ideas and concepts. Its an almost philosophical baptism of an ideology, the immersion into total freedom of expression and creativity for three days.
The OFFF was a way of shaping the way you think not just on a basic creative level but more fundamentally giving you a philosophical grounding in some really fundamental principles. It gave me the time to reflect on the work I have done to date and how I can approach new projects with a fresh pair of eyes and a clearer vision.
In some ways the sentiments left by Stagmeister in his final slides really made me think about not just the creative process, but more on a fundamental level, how you live your life.
With all the speakers, there was probably a combined experience of roughly 700 years spanning visual arts, typography, music, ilustration, animation, motion picture and fine art. The OFFF Festival certainly left its impression irrevocably on media140. We are looking forward to next year…
So what was your takeaway this year from OFFF?
You could not miss Paulo’s graphical work, which was on display just outside the main room – Hangar K7 – it resembled a street scene with an interesting illustration of what looked like several heads fused together with influences of Picasso evident.
We caught up with Paulo, who gave us a few of this thoughts about Offf
Wandering down past the Mercadillo there is a large glass touch screen with a raft of applications on it, some of which I have seen over the past couple of days. But, this one caught my eye, when I saw a couple of children colouring in an airplane using a virtual paint pot.
I remember when I was a kid we used to have these really cheap black and white colouring books with a pot of paints and a really cheap wooden brush – then again, the whole concept of technology when i was a kid consisted of a 1K computer with a tape for storage – heady days!
Watching them colour in make you think just how far innovation in design has come over the past 30 years, from a simple book to a touch screen experience. I wonder what’s coming next…
Its clear we love BluBlu Cafe down on the Oeiras beach front – its a great little place, given we have spent all our time their during the breaks.
Today being the last time, the weather let us down and the skies opened with a heap of rain. Whilst I hid in a door way away from the down pour, four guys sat with their Ensalada de Pollo on the terrace refusing to move after everyone else had run inside!
media140 crew take our hats to you guys!
Hats off to Joshua Davis, who turned what was becoming probably a superb example of ‘Fail Gracefully’ into something a little more successful – having sat through all the panels this morning at Offf the final one, was by far more most entertaining for us and the highlight from Day 3 at Offf.
The acoustics were appalling in the main hall and it was clear that the panel lacked any form of moderation or control in general – may have been a symptom of a European style to chair panels – it certainly didn’t help. Am sure the definition of panel in Portuguese is not a queuing system for speakers to ‘do their turn’ – what started as a farce was rescued by the visceral tones of a New Yorker – Joshua Davis. In full force with tattoo’s and his gritty American accent he kicked some life in the second panel at Offf this morning.
Bringing with him some new ideas in the concept of sharing design and creative once he finds he is unable to take further or develop – this social aspect to design is quite akin to open source from the world of technology, where someone will develop a piece of software and then open it to be improved, fine tuned and developed. We are pondering how this will work with creative ideas, who will own the Intellectual Property if an idea seeded by one designer is developed and grown by another?
He seemed to be a strong advocate of sharing ideas that he wasn’t able to take any further – the ‘Hello Cacti’ being his example, of a typeface potential created that looked like a cactus. Why hoard ideas and watch them go stale? I think his whole philosophy has merit and is worth exploring further, certainly giving the development of social networks – it makes is much easier for designer to share, collaborate and develop ideas.
PES (Adam Pesapane) on the other hand is a director and animator of numerous short films also brought a lot to bear in the panel with analysis of his Roof Sex short film (below) and the work he has been doing with the use of ‘objects’. He delivered his piece in a much more sedate pace when compared to Davis, yet lacked the video delivery – which was a shame given he forte was animation and video.
We almost fell asleep at one point when one of the panelists, started talking about lamp posts – rambling for what seemed like at least 10 minutes – at this point we felt like referring him to ALVA – and a lesson in how to present your self in a fun and whacky way – alas, they didn’t hear us shouting…
One of the final thoughts that we will leave you with is why didn’t the Creative Director of the Agent Provocateur ’showcase’ not realise his exotic video and graphical piece around lingerie on some undoubtedly very attractive young ladies not send out the right message to increase sales? Probably because all of the visitors to the website and video’s were male – now is there a lesson to be learnt here… ensuring the creative meets the commercial needs of the advertiser – rather than just appeasing the ego of the Art Director?
Taking a wander along the beach front of Oeiras down to the marina yersterday (8th May) we thought we may have found the Fail Whale – obviously trying to hide from fellow twitterer’s.
If you get time later today go down to the beach front and take a right and keep walking around the coast line – it may take you around 20 minutes – but you will reach the marina and a few cafe’s and bars.
Day 2 had a plethoria of interesting speakers: Robert L Peters and Aaron Koblin really made our highlights.
Aaron Koblin
Koblin has done so much with data the mind boggles from tracking traffic flights across the US, analysing SMS text usage and tracking TV view habits – the way he visualises the data is amazing.
Having worked with Yahoo, Google and JPL he is a smart cookie – probably to realise that the information which he is garnering from the internet and official sources will be used to track, watch and monitor your behaviour in a multitude of ways. His experiments using crowd sourcing really caught our eye when he used the mechanical turk to automate the creation of art by asking 10,000 ‘workers’ to draw a small piece of the 100 dollar bill – which he later re-constructed – more about the project can be found here at tenthousandcents
Other similar piece’s of work using mechanical turk Koblin has experiment with include asking people to draw sheep and sing ‘daisy’.
On all his mechanical turk project’s he decided to pay the ‘workers’ a small amount to do the work – what’s interesting is would they have done this any better if he had paid them anymore, or in fact paid nothing – given he didn’t tell them what precisely they had to do – its an interesting question to ask.
The Mechanical Turk from Amazon really begins to put automation and human powered machines to the test, utilising large numbers of people to do menial tasks – almost in a slave like fashion for a small reward.
These are indeed changing times. Next up, is…
Robert L Peters
Feeling like I was in an echo chamber sometimes, Robert certainly has a flair for pulling all the stops out and delivering what were clearly political messages to a receptive audience. His approach and style was certainly ‘old school’, in the use of real examples usually relating to war, politics, advertising and hidden agenda’s – filled the session with a real sense of urgency for change and to question everything you see.
Roberts a fifty-something designer and principal of Circle, a design consultancy which he co-founded in 1976 in Winnipeg, Canada – relayed a packed crowd, what felt to me like several chapters from Vance Packard’s, Hidden Persuaders – transformed into slideware and turned into a philosphical mission statement for the young designers scattered across the concrete floor’s of Offf.
There was a very strong political message for change coming from his message – to question everything you do, strive for better, never to stand still and be outspoken and protect your freedom (although, maybe he should have spoken to Brody, before getting in to the freedom piece).
Although the ‘Don’t Sell out’ message did fall on cynical ear’s, having seen Brody at Icograda the mid 90’s say the same message whilst happily working for a Corporate monster like MacDonalds – we found the Peter’s analogy of don’t sell out somewhat hypocritcal in that the very machine which drives the advertising, marketing and hidden messages all need graphic designers, artists and creatives to fuel it.
I really like Peter’s he is like the hippy of the ‘Old School of Design’ – a far more powerful, insightful and thinking designer than others i would care to mention. His use of the quotes from names such as Martin Luther King, Eisenhower and Kennedy really made for a very captivating and compelling session.
this was our favourite
“when small men cast long shadows the sun is going down”
On the opening panel of day 2, I sat and watched what was coined the ‘Portuguese Graphic Design panel’ - which should have been renamed ‘The boring, the slow and the whacky Panel’ – as I couldn’t help but feel for most of it was like being back at university sat in a lecture hall, listening to someone drone on about the importance of X height in the typeface.
The opening 20 minutes were delivered in a dry and monotone approach which differed quite radically from Brody’s opening piece on day one. With a sore backside on what surely were the cheapest set of chairs any festival organiser could have laid their hands on we sat waiting for the second speaker, which by no means was anything different from the first.
Pacifica – the three muskateers from a portugal design studio, did have some interesting video work, but nothing that would have set my world on fire. At this point in the session I was becoming bored and thinking that despite all the creative talent at on the 15 person panel not one of them has mastered the art of delivering an innovative and creative presentation.
But clearly, I had spoken too soon.
One of the guys from ALVA just delivered a few lines ‘erm… we have this video…’ or something to that effect and then this is where everything got seriously whacky and fun.
Totally of the wall and almost akin to something Pythonesque the 10 minute video rocked the packed auditorium – with hoots, cheers and whistles at the end. Three men in pink suits posing in karate positions with a strap line of who the fuck is ALVA – this was certainly a significant change.
UPDATED 15TH MAY: Unfortunately seems the ALVA guys have taken all their video’s off line for some reason – but have some pictures we took instead – we know it doesn’t have the same effect – but you get a sense of the madness behind these guys. One small request, turn it back on please…
Just in case they turn their video back on, we have retained the embedded link.
Refreshing, radical, original and innovative.
We liked it.
UPDATE: 16th May
The guys from MusaWorkLab kindly sent the media140 team a link to one of their videos from the OFFF09 Portuguese Panel – thanks guys, and here’s the video for you lovely OFFF people…
We caught up with Senking, one of many digital musicians here at Offf in the Openroom – Loopita – the experimental electro and digital sounds reverberate around the concrete walls of the room, taking you by surprise as you enter.
Senking is a real visual and aural experience – we captured a little of him here on an AudioBoo - unfortunately the iPhone microphone doesn’t really stand up to much. Take a listen and see what you think.
 | media140 is using Audio Boo to broadcast live audio from the event in Lisbon - you can follow these here on our profile page |