WORK FOR FREE is an online magazine that displays original work by creative people seeking an alternative outlet for their projects. Work featured in the magazine has either been commissioned for the issue or submitted by the artist, under the stipulation that it has not been exhibited elsewhere and that there is no monetary compensation. We make no profit from our publication, but offer support and encourage exposure and promotion for the people we work with, as they are active and compelling members of the creative work force.
WORK FOR FREE believes in all the artists it features; that they are making the most interesting contributions to the visual and literary conversation, out of the goodness in their hearts and the passion of their actions.
PRESS RELEASE — Mosquitoes, Elephants, Mountains & Molehills, a publication by Bart de Baets, published by Onomatopee
In the second issue of Mosquitoes, Elephants, Mountains & Molehills Bart de Baets continues to bombard us with his fascination for trivial information. It’s a collection of casually written short stories, observations, lists and rumors, starring family, friends and lovers, the dead and the living, the gorgeous and the not so gorgeous. And though it’s hard to tell the difference between what’s fiction and what’s fact, it’s clear the author is not afraid to share his private life and his fascination for what is known as ‘bad taste’. Although the content sometimes seems shallow, unimportant almost, it reads as if one is peeping into another person’s diary. Don’t we all just crave for gossip in the end?
Parts of this issue of Mosquitoes, Elephants, Mountains & Molehills have been published before in fanzines made by the artist, and are edited and re-used in this publication. Recycling older material is a remarkable feature of de Baets’s work. It exaggerates both the importance and the insignificance of the content. Just as in the first issue of Mosquitoes, Elephants, Mountains & Molehills, it is important for him to force the viewers to enjoy the banality of the so preciously collected footage.
I AM YOU, a book by Ellen Zhao, talks about the relationship between the book and the reader. While documenting its own process from conception to realization, the book contemplates about the identity of the reader.
Limited edition of 500.
Collected by the the New York Public Library Artist Books, Getty Artist books, Cabinet du livre d’artiste, galerie immanence, and the bnf.
I AM YOU is sold at Printed Matter in New York, Librairie Galerie Anatome and Librairie Yvonne Lambert in Paris, and nijhof and lee in Amsterdam.
Or you can write directly here to acquire your own copy. $25 or 20 euros, plus shipping and handling.
Book published to document The Power of Color, the Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art Handspan Gallery Health Center Project, Ansan: Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art & Seoul: Specter Press, 2009. Flapped paperback, 180 x 240 mm, 144 pp. This book was made as part of the first realized work of the collective SMSM: Sasa [44], MeeNa Park, and Sulki & Min. See also the mural and the booklet.
The Health Center Project, which was inspired by the ‘color therapy’ theory of Dr. Morton Walker, is documented in the first 32 pages with essays by Hong-hee Kim, Geun-jun Lim and Kyung-hwan Yeo. The rest of the book is made simply of different kinds of colored paper, with no information except brief quotations from Dr. Walker’s book The Power of Color (1991) on alleged physiological effects of each color. The cover pays homage to both Dr. Walker’s book and Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon (1973). Do not ask why – we just want to believe.
VosBrenner is a design studio located in Rotterdam founded by Nele Vos (GER) and Michael Brenner (USA). Their work primarily focuses on Environmental, books and publications, information architecture and identity. We particularly enjoy developing these projects with clients in the cultural and educational fields.
Research is key in our investigations when approaching a communication problem. Often in this process we try to de- and re-contextualize ideas to to create inspiring and unexpected results. Always conscious about a projects historical and cultural reference as a starting point for a new vocabulary including it’s media.
The birth of Fuego, issue one, gets off to an unabashedly self-referential start. For example, one of the projects in this, the I Want To Believe issue, takes the fact that one of the maker’s fathers worked on an experimental 8mm movie about UFO’s in the 1970’s as a prompt to make their own photos of faked UFO’s. This kind of re-enactment – and yes, it’s not outside of the realms of certain contemporary art practices- produces a series of photos that at once resonate on numerous levels. Perhaps the most lucid of these is just how familiar fake UFO photos now are in the collective consciousness. Perhaps more poetically, they capture the tension that many of us feel between knowing that they are fakes – as taught to us by hundreds of television programmes- and wanting to believe in some other form of life out there. Referencing the cult 1990’s X-Files series’ catchphrase, this tension between belief and empirical knowledge seems to be the main theme present in the issue. Carefully realised with an aesthetic that entirely denies the Photoshop and After Effects filters that now permeate everything from mainstream Sci-Fi films to sneaker adverts, this is a precise meditation on the topic.
The 2011 Typographic Wall Calendar is a project to construct a large calendar from 2011 keyboard keys. The keys are arranged manually in a grid. If you read them, they read each day of the year in sequence: January Sat 01 Sun 02 Mon 03 etc. http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/107717342/2011-typographic-wall-calendar
«For us becoming designers was a way to build a workshop, an atelier, at the size of the world. A kind of workshop that would produce utopias, fantasies or dreams.»
Founded in 1992 by Mathias Augustyniak and Michael Amzalag, M/M (Paris) definitely is one of the most interesting team in contemporary graphic design.
After meeting at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, and after some personal experiences – Augustyniak studying at the Royal College of Art in London and Amzalag working as art director of “Les Inrockuptibles” – the two French designers have started to work together, motivated by the willingness to be part of the world, to produce signs for the world, by experimenting the different media made available by technological, social, cultural change.
Driven by a quasi-ethnographic attitude towards the multifarious dimensions of contemporary culture, from pop music to fashion and art, M/M has used its “office” in Paris – as they call it – as a base from which to explore an increasingly larger territory, and from which to work at different scales and through different disciplines, building a series of significant international collaborations – such as with Björk, Yohji Yamamoto, Pierre Huyghe and Philippe Parreno, just to name a few.
The result is a varied but consistent catalog of signs, which are distributed in their different works – posters, publications, album covers, advertising etc. – and for which the world itself is a form of archive in real scale.
Watch the answer to the first question of the interview with Augustyniak, that we have made in Paris, in the office of M/M. The full interview will be featured on show. Other interviews may be read on M/M’s website.
Investment Futures Strategy, Ltd. is pleased to announce The Book Trust, a site specific collaboration and publication to be presented at the NY Art Book Fair, 5-7 November, 2010. The semi-fictional IFS, Ltd., comprised of five graduate students from the Department of Graphic Design at the Yale University School of Art, will offer an original publication for trade in a series of barters executed by its authors during the three days of the Fair.
The Trust and the accompanying Book Trust Prospectus speak to matters of micro-economies and distribution, as well as prescribed and perceived value. The project suggests a new currency specific to the setting of the Book Fair, a context in which a distinct set of commodities is exchanged by like-minded vendors in a finite space and time. It is only in this setting that a book could be posited as capital—a literal stand-in for the money that commonly exchanges hands at the Fair. Perceived worth is no longer dictated by edition or price, but instead by a potential traders’ subjective notion of the values they assign to each book.
The book, produced in a fixed quantity of 500, will vary in value as each negotiation determines and redetermines its worth in the marketplace. With each transaction, the Prospectus will assume the value of the book for which it was exchanged. The traded commodities will ultimately comprise The Book Trust, a value-appreciating book bank. By trading with IFS, Ltd. participants acquire a single theoretical share of the bank, the Prospectus a document of the transaction.
At the close of the trading day, 5PM on 7 November, IFS, Ltd. will assess and catalogue the contents of the Trust with the intention of circulating its holdings in appropriate domestic and international venues, at which point new editions of the Prospectus may be issued in context-specific reenactments of the initial trading period.
In framing the project in a format similar to that of a stock exchange, the performance emphasizes the tenuous and abstract value of the book as a designed object, as a medium for content, as a traded commodity, and as a symbol of participation in the project itself.
To announce Karel Marten’s lecture at the Yale School of Art I asked Karel to respond to the Proust Questionnaire. Collaborating with Inva Cota and Jaewon Seok, we created a modular, 28 part ‘performance’ poster that would be updated every 2 hours with a new answer from the questionnaire.
At the 2010 New York Art Book Fair multiple exhibitors proposed that books can be a type of currency, and would only exchange their book or their goods for another book. As a form of intervention we proposed a loop-hole currency — a book meant only for trading. Using guerrilla strategies, my collaborator Keri Bronk and I sat on the PS1 steps and distributed our book for free explaining it was a type of voucher that could be traded for another book inside.
The black spot alludes to Treasure island, where a page of the bible is delivered with a large black mark indicating future misfortune. In the case of our book we reversed this and suggested the spot as a predictive mark— a foreshadowing of good fortune in the form of a new book.
Launched in 2003, Myspace — capitalized as MySpace at the time — became the de facto social networking platform for youngsters attracting 1 million users in its first year, 5 million a few months later, and over 100 million users amassed to this day. With the ability to customize their profile pages, users unleashed a fury of apocalyptic, senses-attacking, browser-crashing designs laden with unicorns and party pictures that eventually became a user interface punchline. No Myspace story is complete without the mention of Facebook which took on the reigns of the social network kingdom and became the Myspace Killer. More than killed, it wounded. And it has taken Myspace three or four years to recover, or at least attempt a recovery. And it starts this week. Myspace announced a complete redesign of its platform with new features, interactivity, and bells and whistles for its users along with a new identity.
The Myspace logo was first seen earlier this month when their VP of User Experience, Mike Macadaan, showed the logo at the Warm Gun Design conference in San Francisco. The image of the logo, photographed at a weird angle and cleaned up, quickly circulated the internet to much dismay. This was right after the Gap incident so bloggers were out for blood and the Myspace logo received a premature kicking in the ass. I tried to get some actual files from Myspace at the time, but they told me they preferred to wait until the identity was rolled out. It has. And they still didn’t send me anything, but at least they have a decent page with media assets.
I contacted the media person listed to find out if this was an inside job or if the identity was given to an outside firm. Unfortunately there was no answer. (Note to corporations: Don’t list media contacts if they are going to be useless. They have one duty when an identity rolls out — or with any kind of news — and that is to answer questions from the media.)
Myspace has also introduced a new logo that captures its revamped brand identity and values. The bracket in the logo represents a space where people can express themselves, enabling users to personalize the logo and make it their own — just as they can throughout Myspace.
— Press Release
A couple of variations presented by Myspace.
The unveiling officially proves that the Myspace logo is not crooked nor its letters oddly squished. When seen in detail, however, it does prove that something weird was done to Helvetica, where the outside edges of the characters were given rounded corners. A very, very strange thing to do. Especially for a logo that is typically rendered small, it’s a detail that gets lost and only adds a weird fuzziness to the characters. The logo comes in two versions, one with the full name and the bracket, and another with just “my” and the bracket. The former probably a safe net for those that just don’t get it. The latter is where I think the concept is quite bold and actually pretty fantastic. Myspace has enough history and equity as well as the ability to present the new logo in front of its users that the leap from verbally saying Myspace to visually reading the new logo as the same is not far-fetched. It’s very commendable that Myspace went with this approach as it’s a risk. Risk of being misunderstood. Of being misread. Of being mocked. But they still did it. And that’s not an easy thing to do these days.
Logo animation. If you can’t see the animation or would like to view bigger, click here.
Sample Myspace profile page.
The real challenge of this identity is whether its users will take advantage of its open bracket and actually trick it out with unicorns and other apocalyptic designs. From the user profile sample above, it seems as the Myspace logo at the top will always be the official “corporate” logo. I would love to see that space being user generated and letting each profile add to the visual language of the new identity. There should be a logo generator in Myspace that allows users to easily customize it and implement into their profile, otherwise they are just relying on the users that know how to use Photoshop.
Myspace needed something drastic to signal change. This does the trick. And it does it conceptually well. The execution is not perfect but it’s not terrible either and in being a little less slick it might feel more accessible and like something you can tamper with.
Peep-Hole Sheet is a quarterly of writings by artists.
Each issue is dedicated solely to one artist, who is invited to contribute with an unpublished text whose content is completely free in terms both of subject and format.
The texts are published in their original language, with accompanying translations in English and Italian. All images are deliberately avoided. Peep-Hole Sheet is meant for those who believe artists are catalysts for ideas all around us, and who want to read their words without any filter.
Over time it aspires to build up an anthology of writings that might open new perspectives for interpreting and understanding our times.
The online portfolio and some kind of digital sketch-
book of Misha Shyukin. He is 23. Studying design in Germany. He does like cats, dusty cameras and videos.
A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction by Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa and Murray Silverstein of the Center for Environmental Structure of Berkeley, California and its accompanying website serve as a companion to our inquiry.Pattern Language describes a collection of 253 highly structured patterns divided into three broad categories: towns, buildings, and construction, and suggests that the same set of laws can be applied to structures at any scale. As a practical guide to help citizens understand their environment (and even build their own houses), this book encourages a democratisation of information that relieves the architect of his/her role as the exclusive idea-provider. In turn, Alexander advises architects to consider new projects in a global, everyday and political context, emphasising their obligation to shape society in a responsible manner.Task Newsletter uses Alexander’s ‘Green-Making Sequence’ pattern as a starting point. The author clearly outlines the steps needed to turn an unused neighbourhood site into a green, cooperative meeting space, starting by identifying local flora and ending with petitioning the city for future subsidies. As with all of his patterns, it should be appreciated first and foremost for what it is: a deceptively simple and literal strategy for improving one’s environment. At the same time, the knowledge that his patterns are applicable to any endeavour encourages the reader to simultaneously translate them into any personally relevant context — in our case, the structure of a publication venture: a newsletter.
Maybe, The Catcher in The Rye, 2009 — in search of ambiguity, a series of phrases with
‘maybe’ was selected from the book The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger.
