Lost Motion Assembly | Blog

Christian Stoll’s recent photographs of General Electric’s GE-90 – the world’s bigest aircraft engine – are stunningly beautiful. Shot in variously locations for a print campaign led by Atmosphere/BBDO, they transform these massive forms into intricate studies of light and colour. If they ever get released as limited edition prints I already have a space on my wall waiting for them.

- Via Visuelle

Not all design needs to be about creating attention grabbing campaigns for huge corporate brands. Good design lies in the almost invisible; small, subtle details that are noticed only when they are absent. Susan Kare’s seminal work for Apple shows that sometimes design’s goal should be to simply make things easier. To learn more about her work be sure to check out Steve Silberman’s piece over at PLoS Blogs.

- Via Jared Erickson & kotte.org

This is simply amazing; to jazz up their shop windows, German design studio Britpetermann created a series of interactive installations that respond to passer-bys. Constructed out of a Kinect, a projector an Arduino servo and lot’s of magical custom rendering and frameworks, the end result is equal parts impressive and playful.

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I’ve always been much enamoured with marbled patterns; they are firmly fixed in my mind as end papers for family encyclopedias, circa 1982. My first – and only attempt – at marbling was crafting my own end papers for a book binding project in school when I was 10. Evidently it was an interest in theory if not practise. Read the rest of this entry »

We stumbled upon Mappix whilst perusing the mightily impressive portfolio of designer and developer Philipp Oehrlein. The premise is as simple as “one random google maps image a day. That’s it.” As modest as this sounds, it is a surprisingly engaging affair; removing the familiar controls turns the google maps experience into a kind of geographical roulette.

Without the familiar demarcations of borders, roads or any other labels it distils the images to pure topography, stripping away contextualising clues.
This particular shot eschews any indication of scale – it could as well be a slide of some grains of sand. Such images conjure up Baudrillardian ruminations on the nature of maps vs. territories, whilst reinstating the joy of simply looking at the sheer diversity of the earth on a purely visual scale.

It’s not all work with us. In-between projects this week we have mostly been…

… avoiding the cold by curling up on the sofa and watching films all ‘based on true stories’…

… starting with the darkly gripping (but factually questionable) The Last King of Scotland…

… then moving onto the equally sordid City of God…

… before finally taking a respite from all the gritty solemness with The King’s Speech…

LMA favourite Jonny Wan has recently updated his website and added some new work, including this illustration for Russian magazine Sekret Firmy. I’m not entirely sure what Sekret Firmy is about (it is in Russian after all) but a sneaky peek at their flickr page reveals that they do like themselves some purdy illustrations and tasty layouts.

- Via Supersonic Electronic

In between capturing footage of big mountain legend Xavier de la Rue demonstrating the suave levels of bad-assery that we mere mortals shall never possess, freeride filmmaker Guido Perrini managed to turn his lens away long enough to capture some beautiful timelapse footage of the mountains. This bonus footage comes as part of The Timeline Missions; a series of short films following Xavier around the world as he looks for more ways to make the rest of us feel very, very small.

Be sure to check out Guido Perrini’s documentary Ten. At times sombre, it looks behind the scenes at freeride film making, and reveals it to be a world that is part-expedition, part-photoshoot, and filled with equal parts thrills and dangers.

Deutsche Bank / Media Wall / In-Situ from FIELD on Vimeo.

The more astute readers may have noticed that we’re on something of a video art binge at the moment, and it shows no sign of ending anytime soon.

For its brand new building in Hong Kong, Deutsche Bank wanted a dramatic artwork to fit their shiny new foyer. They turned to digital auteur, Matt Pyke of Universal Everything. Working with London based digital art studio FIELD, they created a stunning 12 metre long video wall to display eight dynamic motion artworks by several artists. Amazingly, each video is generated in realtime, so that each viewing remains subtly unique. In order to achieve this technical feat, the wall required a bespoke system of eight networked computers in order to output the generated video works. You can see more of the wall, as well as a short documentary on it’s creation over at FIELD’s Vimeo page.

FIELD also recently produced the video for the single Ariel, by Stateless, out now on Ninja Tune. They will be holding a screening at the Animateka Animation Festival in Slovenia on the 9th of December.

-Via Visuelle

Be Linen 2 is a short film directed by Benoit Millot of Le Potager Design, commissioned by the Linen and Hemp Community. It highlights the advantages of flax fibre as an ecologically sound alternatives to other composite materials. The subtitles are a little hard to read at times, but it’s engaging and beautifully shot, so well worth a watch.

- Via The Strange Attractor