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…
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?
