Similar to Pantonism, False Arms is another useful website that trawls through images based on their colours.

Useful for designers, presentations and image searchers.

Vanity Fair have a really interesting article about the design rut Fashion, arts, entertainment, popular culture, style etc finds itself in and why.

It’s easy to say “fashion’s cyclical”, but Kurt Anderson’s article nicely reminds us that it didn’t use to be so; and it’s easy to think about the innovations in technology that have driven us forward, leaps and bounds, in the last 20 years (or even 10, as a recent article referred to on TheScrapBook reminded us)… but actually this “progress” is a fallacy – we’ve not moved on. Not in the last 20 years, we havent.

I have long thought about defining recent decades in terms of significant musical innovations. It’s no a hard and fast science, and I wont pretend that my timings are accurate nor specific to the year, but consider these broad moments of decade defining/influencing popular musical history:

1947 – Rock’n'Roll

1957 – Rock music

1967 – Disco

1977 – Punk

1987 – Dance music (even that’s

1997 – ? Sampling culture? Maybe…

2007 – ?? Erm…

Perhaps Hip Hop is 2007+ given its ubiquity today… but it’s surely more 1987+? And that’s part of the point that Anderson’s article makes. Certainly, “Sampling culture” plays into that hand.

This broad decade-defining should cause lots of debate (which I welcome), and I admit I’m brushing over all sorts of sub-genres – New Romantic, Pop, Grunge etc etc etc – to make the point, but to refer to Anderson again, the last 20 years has not been innovative in music, and where it has it’s been exceptions that prove the rule.

Below is an excerpt of Anderson’s article about the stagnation of popular culture over the last 20 years, and I urge you to read the full piece.

Try to spot the big, obvious, defining differences between 2012 and 1992. Movies and literature and music have never changed less over a 20-year period. Lady Gaga has replaced Madonna, Adele has replaced Mariah Carey—both distinctions without a real difference—and Jay-Z and Wilco are still Jay-Z and Wilco. Except for certain details (no Google searches, no e-mail, no cell phones), ambitious fiction from 20 years ago (Doug Coupland’s Generation X, Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow) is in no way dated, and the sensibility and style of Joan Didion’s books from even 20 years before that seem plausibly circa-2012…

If, in 1990 or 1980 or 1970, you’d examined a comparable picture from 27 years earlier—from 1963 and 1953 and 1943, respectively—it would be a glimpse back into an unmistakably different world. A man or woman on the street in any year in the 20th century groomed and dressed in the manner of someone from 27 years earlier would look like a time traveler, an actor in costume, a freak. And until recently it didn’t take even that long for datedness to kick in: by the late 1980s, for instance, less than a decade after the previous decade had ended, the 1970s already looked ridiculous.

There are, of course, a few exceptions today—genuinely new cultural phenomena that aren’t digital phenomena—but so few that they prove the rule. Twenty years ago we had no dark, novelistic, amazing TV dramas, no Sopranos or Deadwood or The Wire or Breaking Bad.Recycling bins weren’t ubiquitous and all lightbulbs were incandescent. Men wore neckties more frequently. Fashionable women exposed less of their breasts and bra straps, and rarely wore ultra-high-heeled shoes. We were thinner, and fewer of us had tattoos or piercings. And that’s about it…

Part of the explanation… is that, in this thrilling but disconcerting time of technological and other disruptions, people are comforted by a world that at least still looks the way it did in the past. But the other part of the explanation is economic: like any lucrative capitalist sector, our massively scaled-up new style industry naturally seeks stability and predictability. Rapid and radical shifts in taste make it more expensive to do business and can even threaten the existence of an enterprise. One reason automobile styling has changed so little these last two decades is because the industry has been struggling to survive, which made the perpetual big annual styling changes of the Golden Age a reducible business expense. Today, Starbucks doesn’t want to have to renovate its thousands of stores every few years. If blue jeans became unfashionable tomorrow, Old Navy would be in trouble. And so on.

Capitalism may depend on perpetual creative destruction, but the last thing anybody wants is their business to be the one creatively destroyed. Now that multi-billion-dollar enterprises have become style businesses and style businesses have become multi-billion-dollar enterprises, a massive damper has been placed on the general impetus for innovation and change.

Music video for the upcoming concert season @ Bellavista Social Pub.
Director: Bante
DOP: L. Semplici
Hero: Moussa Kaba
Producer: Frisca
Dog: Ultimo
Production: Filmatindustriali

Thanks @thekingmob

Forget Banksy, OBEY and the graffiti (sorry, “Street”) artists. Walton Ford’s work is truly thought provoking. I’m lucky enough to own his recently published book but I’d love to know how I might own an original. Truly moving paintings on the struggles of nature and the imposition of man…

Green Ambush by Enzo Henze for Maxalot. (Red Ambush is also good).

Surface View have the rights to some incredible Masters paintings and more, from the collections of the V&A, National Gallery and Getty.

More on the rise and rise of projection mapping here. It’s something that TheScrapBook has been advocating for the past couple of years, but all our briefs that we could have used it on seemed to be held in the Summer… oh well.

Useful reference of “interesting” and “creative” things currently being memed around the internet.  The usual augmented reality, word-clouds, projections and interactive videos are paired with new examples, grouped into areas of Audio, Movies, Visual, Art, Physical, Light, Tech, Politics, Sport, Books, History, and of course straight up, old fashioned, Advertising.

Drawing on LSD.

Amazing “Temple” installation from Faile in Lisbon, Portugal. Integrating their work into the surroundings like never before, the Faile crew have excelled themselves.

They’ve brought to life in mosaic, sculpture, and bas-relief their iconic posters and images to create the Faile Temple. Materials include ceramic, marble, bronze, cast iron, steel, limestone, and mosaic. And it’s massive! Measuring 16ft. width x 30ft. length x 14ft. height.

Find the temple here, between these dates:

Portugal Arte 10 — July 16 – September 5th, 2010
Praça dos Restauradores Square – Lisbon, Portugal

More information, and 43 pictures can be seen at the FaileTemple site.

JJ Cromer