I think Nurri and I have managed to fall a little bit in love with Helsinki - which is admittedly easy to do, this being the height of glorious midsummer and us just having come off of the splendid Aula Movement conference.
Willy-nilly, I've become something of a connoisseur of the art of the conference over the last few years, but I've got to say that in Movement Marko Ahtisaari and Jyri Engeström really managed to put something special together. There were, of course, some fascinating talks:
- Not only has Ulla-Maaria Mutanen refined the (brilliant) Thinglink presentation she gave at Design Engaged in Berlin last year, the site itself has gone live and gathered to itself something that looks an awful lot like an emerging community.
In Everyware, I described Thinglinks as "a free equivalent of the familiar UPC or ISBN codes, specifically designed for the 'invisible tail' of short-run, amateur or folk productions previously denied a place in the grand electronic souk of late late capitalism." This is an idea to watch.
- I greatly enjoyed Aditya Dev Sood's tour of the place where Indian folk ingenuity intersects with religious devotion, cheap production technology, and digital media to produce (among other things) the "Indian iPod," a gaily-painted box that plays 45-count-'em-45 digital mantras at the touch of a finger.
- Having spawned the original wallpaper* - a magazine that once upon a time did more than anything to help me define my personal design aesthetic and understand its relationship to the way I wanted to live my life - I'm inclined to trust that anything Tyler Brûlé sets his hand to will be of particular interest to me.
- If an idea quite simply blew my mind the last few days - from the reality of medichines that are injected into a body in solution and self-assemble at the "worksite," to an estimate of the percentage of the world's annual energy usage devoted to computation - there's a better-than-likely chance it tumbled from the lips of Saul Griffith.
- Though I am honorbound to disagree with Joshua Cooper Ramo's sunny conclusions, his notion of "personal velocity" (i.e. the amount one travels in a year, expressed as a speed in miles per hour) and its relationship with the potential for enlightment is one I find quite haunting. This is one I'll be turning over in my mind for awhile.
One could, at least theoretically, have partaken of these pleasures at any other design conference. What clearly makes Aula Aula, though, is the stimulation on hand which has so much to do with the particular delights of Helsinki and which would be mighty hard to come by anywhere else:
- Sitting in the dimly-lit lower half of the sleek Ahjo bar for crisp G&T;'s and the wellnigh hypnotic tripjazz offered up by saxophonist Jukka Perko. ("On a personal note," as the broadcast journalists like to say, there can be no better person to sit next to at such a moment than Dan Hill.)
- I like me some modern dance, now - H ART CHAOS, Molissa Fenley, and like that - but you know I'd never claim any particular expertise in the field. (I have actually uttered that forlorn sentence that ends "...but I know what I like.") That said, Gruppen Fyra's tenderly brutal "Pendulum" was one of the best-choreographed and -danced pieces I can remember seeing, kinetic poetry of a very high order.
- Our evening at the Finnish Sauna Society was truly something to savor. If I committed the elementary gaijin parvenu blunder of asking after membership fees, it was only because the pleasure of (a) relaxing into a series of mellow, birch-scented heatboxes, (b) plunging into the shriveling Baltic, (c) iterating three or four times (d) at midsummer sunset - i.e., just north of 23.30 - and above all (e) sharing the experience with friends old and new, is nearly impossible to overstate.
- Though not on the Aula agenda proper, the bar atop the Torni hotel is my kinda spot.
My heartfelt congratulations to Marko, Jyri, Andreea, Fred, Arabella and all of the hard-working staff for putting together such a top-shelf event. In Movement, you assembled the kind of living brochure for a place and a local stance that most Chamber of Commerce types only achieve in the last moment before waking, and I just know we'll be back.
For now, I honestly have utterly no idea what time it is, at a disturbingly deep somatic level. I'm well and truly travelfucked, and this is only the very first leg of my summer business travel orgy. But as for how I feel? You wouldn't be wrong if you simply called me happy.
Originally
from v-2 Organisation | Adam Greenfield
reBlogged
on Dec 31, 1969, 6:59PM
Frederic Rouzaud indicated to The Economist magazine that he was less than pleased by Cristal's association with the so-called "bling" lifestyle of the rap world -- leading Jay-Z to announce Thursday he will no longer serve Cristal in his 40/40 chain of clubs and will "lead a boycott in the world of hip-hop".
In the latest edition of the Marvel comic "Civil War" on sale, Spiderman does the unthinkable and removes his Spidey mask to publicly reveal his hidden identity.
The final advert in Nike's World Cup campaign pays tribute to the skills of Ronaldo, just as the star has been barraged by criticism that he is no longer worth his place in the Brazil team. The 60-second ad, created by Wieden & Kennedy Amsterdam, features a series of clips of the star's career highlights.
Rappers have long proclaimed their love for Cristal, frequently mentioning the high-end champagne in songs and popping the corks of the clear, gold-labeled bottles in music videos and at nightclubs. But the makers of Cristal don’t seem to feel the same way about hip-hop — at least that’s one rapper-turned-record executive Jay-Z sees it.
