Ambient technologies are emerging all around us. Whether we like it or not, homo sapiens and technology in the built environment are slowly blending together. Groups like the graduates of School of the Arts Tisch in New York (originally posted here & here) are pushing new boundaries in design; making us rethink the borders of the human / technology relationship. We are are on the brink of an exciting transition into "smart" products that respond to the living human environment creating new design possibilities beyond our imagination. Creative groups like Tisch are definitely starting to take us there. JGB

+ itp.tisch.nyu.edu



M. Sallin, Presence Frames, networked picture frames that indicate presence of the person in the picture using motion detection.



Michael Jefferson, Slumberlights, are glowing picture blocks for ambient, distant communication a luminescent cube containing a photograph of a distant friend or family member that glows when that person is asleep.



L. Hines, A. Wright, Turf Dreams, like a field of grass is a tactile platform for nighttime play and imagination.



M. Buccheri, Visual Heart Music, is an art installation which receives the viewer's heart rate and uses it to generate images and sounds.



A. Ota, S. Kato, Wind Flowers, are flower-shaped swinging lights located at the entrance to ITP to create a peaceful and quiet moment.

Ambient spirograph; lost in space produces a 10 minute film for Addictive TV's Mixmasters Series. "Every year Addictive TV invites visual artists and musicians to team up to create short films for their Mixmasters TV series. For the 4th series for British TV, lost in space's Christian Hogue directs and animates a film with soundscapes by Jesper Norda.". Thanks Xian!

+ lostinspace.com
+ Download .mov

Here's part 2 of our conversation with Peter Saville. Read Part 1 here. For the record, Peter Saville is one of the artists featured on By Design, a DVD produced by our partner Colorcalm. We should have made that clear yesterday.

ML: How does music affect what we see?

PS: I had an argument with Martha Ladly, my girlfriend twenty years ago. We argued which was the more emotive of the arts – music or image, and Martha argued that music was more emotive and I always argued that image was. Eventually I had to concede that she was right. Music has a far more embracing influence than imagery. Music functions as an amazing network between people, pulling on your emotional responses more assuredly than visual material.

ML: What interests you at the moment?

PS: Activities outside of the mainstream, and popular culture’s advance towards contemporary fine art.

ML: What do you think of today’s creative climate?

PS: Straight-jacketed by a commercial remit.

ML: You’ve said that design is the new marketing. What do you mean by that?

PS: I mean that persuasion by design is superseding the more familiar modes of advertising.

ML: How are graphic design and object design related, if it all?

PS: Not at all really. Graphic design is communications design, which means that primarily it’s for others to others. Object design has the capacity to be personally motivated, very rarely does graphic design provide that opportunity. It is a communications medium, so if you’re expressing yourself you need initially to be the author of that which you wish to express – therefore you will be a writer, a storyteller, or an image maker first - then you may use the medium of graphic design to express that which you intend.

ML: You’ve seen it all from X-acto’s to Illustrator, how does the Internet intersect with what you do?

PS: From my personal point of view I can access unusual and unexpected material, and it moves things around quicker.

ML: What will Peter Saville be doing in five years?

PS: Publishing more of his own material, I hope....

Peter Saville is a designer whose twenty-five year practice spans the fields of graphics, creative direction and art. He was a founding partner of the landmark independent record label Factory Records where he created some of the most recognizable album covers for Joy Division and New Order. Saville’s many clients have included Roxy Music, Ultravox, Peter Gabriel, Pulp, The Pompidou Centre, Yohji Yamamoto, Alexander McQueen, Stella McCartney, and Mandarina Duck. He has exhibited internationally, with a recent major retrospective staged at London’s Design Museum and a first show in a contemporary art museum scheduled for November 2005 at the Migros Museum, Zurich. We talked to him about ambient...

ML: What is ambient?

PS: I used the term ‘atmosphere’ in my Colorcalm statement and I think that one way to quantify ambience, as one’s immediate atmosphere - whether it’s in a room or in a car or on a beach, it’s a quality of the space that you create around yourself.

ML: How will it evolve?

PS: I think it’s one of those things that have to be idiosyncratic, in that it’s very personal to each individual. For example I have a favorite piece of ambient sound that I love, but I don’t necessarily expect everyone else to love it. I think ambience is a selective issue - one of those things that appeal to one and not the other. So ambient has to go towards personal idiosyncrasy - it can only go where individuals want it to go. It’s something that has potential for customization and that’s perhaps an interesting way for it to develop. A product might provide some basic elements that an individual can then customize to their own peace of mind.

ML: Atmosphere, personal to each individual... explain your inspiration for the Renaissance colors on By Design

PS: It’s about colors that are different to those that we immediately associate with television. There is a kind of hard richness with television and we very rarely see a simple field of color. We always experience color on television as part of a composition and it was interesting to imagine what would happen when you had only color on the screen and then, what colors would be unusual to experience in the medium. There are certain colors that we are very familiar with on television and we were hoping to find a less media familiar palette. Our Renaissance palette is what we could call a pre-media palette and this seemed an interesting idea to explore.

ML: You’re a judge of the International Design contest. What will you be looking for?

PS: Sensitivity to the medium, in that there are so may things that aren’t appropriate to screens. Thinking within the realities and context of the medium, but in this instance not about narrative – more about an abstract exploration of the medium which is the screen. It’s important to work within the medium of the screen rather than the medium of film or video.

ML: What do you think the challenges are for design for the screen?

PS: The biggest challenge is that whenever someone sits down in front of a screen they instinctively expect narrative. We’ve been in a way conditioned to expect a narrative engagement when things move or happen on screen. In fact just the presence of a screen alone suggests narrative engagement unlike a piece of paper for example where we expect the piece of paper to stay the same as it was five minutes ago. When we sit in front of a screen, we expect something to happen and when something happens we intuitively expect a narrative engagement and the interesting challenge is how can you make the medium work without entering into that narrative engagement.

Part II tomorrow.

Not that long ago, if you were a designer or decorator, 'ambient' meant ambient lighting; the use of light to evoke a mood or emotion. It still does. But now there's ambient music that evokes a mood, and ambient objects that do likewise and ambient video that merges art and sound to... evoke a mood. We're quite fond of ambient in all its forms, so when ambient DVD producer Colorcalm approached us to do an ambient video blog to help them promote their international design contest, we said, aha! MoCo Ambient. It's our newest category, and like the others, we'll be posting regularly. If you have suggestions for MoCo Ambient, please send them to editor@mocoloco.com. If you've made some ambient video, enter it in the contest here. Coming up; "Merely an existence on the TV screen, in a hotel room anywhere, I don’t want it to attract my attention. I don’t want to watch it. I just like the idea of it being there." (more tomorrow).

We wrote about the new By Design ColorCalm DVD a month ago, now see it here first. Robert at ColorCalm sent us a 90 second long MPEG video file featuring selections from Irma Boom, Peter Saville and John Maeda. Be forewarned, it's a big file, 10.5 Mb to be exact: ColorCalmWeb.mpg
Thanks Robert!

+ ColorCalmWeb.mpg
+ colorcalm.com

Ambient video producer colorcalm gave us a sneak peek at their upcoming DVD called by Design. It features video art by John Maeda, Food Coloring above right, with music by Ryuichi Sakamoto, Irma Boom's Barcodes (left) with music by Michael Nyman and Peter Saville's Colour Wheel with music by New Order/Terranova. The next DVD is already in development and will feature submissions by... you. A contest will determine the featured video art. Details to follow.

+ colorcalm.com