dots AND lines

An exhibition called “Illegal Art” was held last July 25 at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Artists Gallery. It was created in order to support the unsuccessful legal challenge to Congress’ latest copyright extension. This whole idea is created by Carrie McLaren, the exhibit’s curator. The artworks being display consist of featuring audio and visual exhibits, a full length CD, and several films, which are recontextualized by certain artists using other people’s artistic creations without permission. The whole idea is, in fact, to create a feasible enviroment for an artist to express himself/herself without any copyright permission.

To know more, check the article about this museum exhibit here.

• For the first time Coca-Cola made change to the design of the shape of their bottle. •
• For the first time Coca-Cola produce their bottles in aluminium. •

This is what happens to Coca-Cola’s new marketing plan, code-named M5, which stands for “Magnificent 5“. This plan gets Coca-Cola to be more involved with design and art with the new bottle designs and cleverly blends each of them with productions of short films. And these films are no Coca-Cola ads gimmick. You may not find any coke at all in them.

This project involves five design groups from five continents to “create and share visions of optimism.” The designers includes Caviar from Japan, The Designers Republic from UK, MK12 from USA, Rex & Tennant McKay (South Africa), and Lobo (Brazil). Each agency created a short video clip with music from some music groups, like Towa Tei, Citizen Bird, Guided by Voices, Fischerspooner, and The Flaming Lips.

This rebranding of Coca-Cola is targeted on clubbing and party events as the bottles have “night mode” where the designs are coated with fluorescent paint to glow in dark.

You can check on them and download the vids/wallpapers at their cool them5 site. You need to complete a simple free sign-ups.

I happens to be reading Creative Review January 2006 issue and at the Seen section there was a review titled "Night of the Human Pixels". It is generally about the superb performance during the opening Mass Games in North Korea. And the highlight of the story is on the 20,000 "highly drilled" school childrens that are trained for 4 years in order to create a massive animated screen that covers the whole half of the stadium. Each of them held a book that has pages with only colors printed them. What they will then do is to open the specific pages at specific time guided by conductor with flags.

I have yet to thoroughly read through the articles but what I know is that the kids throughout the 90-minute performance are impressive and flawless. Here's some links.

• 1stopkorea.com
• www.astateofmind.co.uk

I'll update further in comments later. 

"Once Man and Dragon were one.
Man chose Land and Sea,
Dragon chose Wind and Fire."

This much anticipated upcoming anime movie (at least by me anyway (^_^)) by Goro Miyazaki, son of Hayao Miyazaki is based on the Earthsea series by Ursula K. Le Guin.

From the site nausicaa.net, the literal translation of the Japanese is "GED military history" or "A military history of GED" or (!!!) more sensibly "Ged's war chronicle" or (!?!?!?) "Ged's history of the war". However, the official English title is plainly "Tales from Earthsea".

Directed by Goro MIYAZAKI, script by Goro MIYAZAKI and Keiko NIWA, music by Tamiya TERASHIMA.

The synopsis of the film is quite long… And I don't wish to copy all and paste here so I put the link instead. Here.