About a year ago while perusing random DJ Myspaces, I noticed in a particularly remarkable photo a turntable desk that seemed to be floating in mid air. I took it to be a Photoshop trick and moved on with my day, but thanks to a friend I now know that it was the geniuses at Berlin based design firm Metrofarm.
Their work ranges creating innovative furniture, designing attention grabbing retail displays and packages, design consulting, and curating for galleries and individual clients. Needless to say their high-end DJ desks are my favorite, especially the one that is built directly into the wall (!!!) but their site (www.metrofarm.net) showcases their talent including projects they’ve done for Nike, Absolut Vodka, and Pioneer. Make sure you check ‘em out, these guys are pretty good.
As the latest addition to the Mediated Media writing staff I wanna thank James for allowing me to collaborate with him on this. I’ve always been technologically unsavvy so having something like this site to move with is a small blessing.
For those of you wondering 21/M/Ann Arbor, MI. For everyone else, my name is Bryan D. Davila, I’m a senior at the University of Michigan but am originally from Los Angeles, CA (Alhambra to be specific). I’ve been a music enthusiast since I can remember; thanks to my sister, some early favorites of mine include Weezer “Blue”, RATM’s “Battle of Los Angeles”, and Beck “Odelay” to name a few. However, my biggest life regret to date is making Limp Bizkit “Significant Other” the first album I ever purchased.
I’m a DJ on campus playing parties, small clubs, and on a radio show on 88.3 WCBN FM Ann Arbor (www.wcbn.org). I enjoy dance music when it comes to mixing so if you happen to catch my show (Sunday mornings 3-6am EST) you’ll notice that I often go from electro to house to disco to minimal and back. For a more laidback feel, check me out on WCBN Sunday nights from 11pm-1am where I host while my friend DJ Teddy Ruck-spin plays hip-hop to ease you into the week.
I’m excited to contribute to Mediated Media; hopefully within the next few weeks you will get to know me a little better through my posts and the mixes I hope to put together for the site. For now I’ll leave you all with a small gift:
Yesterday, the production team Special Problems released a video that they did for Flying Lotus’ track off of Cosmogramma title “Mmmhmm”. Featuring Thundercat, “Mmmhmm” is great in itself, but the video takes soothing vocals and an atmospheric melody to another level. Moving between distant astral planes and NES game worlds, Special Problems did well in producing this video for Fly Lo. I trust you won’t be disappointed.
If you couldn’t get enough of it the first time on Frank Chan’s This Summer Vibes mixtape on the post before this, here you go. Great video for a great song.
This video is absolutely hypnotizing (and for all the right reasons) as Sebastien Tellier’s track “Look” gets a nice moving visual touch. Sebastien Tellier is a French artists, writer, and producer extraordinaire and has collaborated with many of the rest of fellow French electro pioneers like on his third studio album Sexuality which was produced by Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo of Daft Punk.
Whoever said public schools in NYC weren’t up to par hasn’t been to PS 22. Public School 22 has recently gone viral on Youtube and the web as their rendition of one of 2009’s hottest songs “Liztosmania” began to circulate. This is an unbelievable rendition of Phoenix, one which literally gave me chills. Think about these kids next time your politics sway to cut arts programs in our public schools as their has never been a more important time to support the arts. The arts an exceedingly important part of school curriculum and an overemphasis on math and science threatens to rob an entire generation of the creativity and potential they no doubt have, this video is proof. Touching stuff.
Ok, so this is going to seem a little, perhaps even a LOT, weird but this Nick Jr. show Yo Gabba Gabba! is legitttt. Yo Gabba Gabba! originally aired in 2007 and is now in it’s 3rd season and the show is aimed to be a musically themed educational show. Man, I wish I had show like this when I was growing up over Sesame Stree any day with musicians like Of Montreal and MGMT doing segments. Oh yea, and did I mention Biz Markie practically hosts the show and does “Biz’ Beat of the Day”?
This article was written in response to a recent lecture give by Alec Soth at the University of Michigan Museum of Art (UMMA) on January 30th. Make sure to check out Alec’s work in full at his website http://www.alecsoth.com/.
“A Paralyzed Cylcops in The Democratic Jungle”; this was Alec Soth’s self-introduction to photography. A challenging and questioning expression which, when unpacked of all it’s meaning in a seemingly vacuous wrapper, is quite profound. A fitting phrase, for this is exactly what Alec Soth’s documentary photography invokes; on the outside a dead-pan straight photography giving the viewer nothing but the reality at hand in the photograph, yet on the inside a multiplicity of layers of meaning in dialogue with a hundreds of years old tradition of defining what is “photography”. Soth’s photography is so ‘straight’ in style and so unassuming yet so much is to be found beneath the surface that it at once becomes an undeniably great case study on the limits of photography of which photography both transcends and is hemmed in by.
I’ve recently come across this unbelievable art think tank/collective/advertising agency via Wooster Collective called Friends With You. They should be popping up on your T.V.’s any day now as they’ve recently done ads for such advertising big-hitters as Match.Com, Target, and art/fashion/cool shit pioneers Kid Robot. The amazing thing is though, it doesn’t just stop there with advertising; FWY has done some of the sickest art installations/public works I’ve seen in some time, often reminding me of the aesthetic of Takashi Murakami with the postmodernist commodity culture awareness of Jeff Koons. They also remind of a real life incarnation of the Japanese Play Station sensationKatamari Damarcy where you control rolling a magical, highly adhesive ball called a katamari around various locations, collecting increasingly greater objects, ranging from thumbtacks to people to mountains, until the ball has grown great enough to become a star.
I think it’s collectives like FWY that are the future of both art and advertising, which have dialectically almost reached an entropy in which one completely embodies the other and vice versa. This is what artist’s for decades attempting to push art out of the museum into real life (Allan Kaprow, Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Claes Oldensburg, among so many others) have slowly, whether knowingly or not, pushed this dialectic forward to. So far forward that some of contemporary art’s most celebrated Heros produce art which is at one and the same time completely presented as ‘art work’ and commodity.
Just thought this pic was completely bad-ass as I get amped up to see Major Lazer w/ Bassnectar April 9th. Oh yea, and remember that track I put up two days ago by Busy Signal feat. M.I.A, that was a collabo w/ Major Lazer EP coming out this April. Be excited, be VERY excited…
Here’s the Diplo/Major Lazer version, its pretty much the same but with a few DJ sound effect touches:
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A resounding ‘wow’. I recently came across this stunning UK artist Nick Gentry courtesy of Wooster Collective. This man’s artistic insight is absolutely genius and just makes me yearn for those undergrad days when I could spend my days studying contemporary art constantly having my worldview shaken one image/video/installation/sculpture (basically any media possible) at a time. I love art. I love art because art constantly makes me rethink how I view the world, how I interact with it, and the role I play within it.
I remember not too long ago (February 12th, 2009 to be exact) one of my favorite artists Anne Pasternak came to Ann Arbor and gave a terrific lecture “Public Art Then & Now: From the Strange to Spectacular and Back Again”. Pasternak was an integral piece of Creative Time, an organization that has been commissioning and presenting innovative art in New York City since 1972, as President and Artist Director. Creative Time, if you are unfamiliar, was an organization that essentially mediated all the red tape so artists could do really significant and huge public works. One of my favorite artists was a key contributor to Creative Time, Jenny Holzer, who would do public intrusions on digital billboards, signs, and digital projections onto buildings displaying truisms that provoke the viewer, not much different than the art of Barbara Kruger (“I Shop Therefore I Am”). One of my most vivid memories of that lecture over a year ago was when a person in the audience asked her the completely innocuous yet complex question “why art?”, “why did you want to be an artist”, to which she replied, “well, art is constantly showing me the world in a new way, just when I think I get it and see things for what they are, art exposes a new reality”. Pasternak completely nailed it down, and although I always had some vague understanding of what art is/does for me, that statement in itself was like a good work of art; Pasternak’s statement itself re-framed my perception of myself, the outside world, and what mediates it.
About a year ago while perusing random DJ Myspaces, I noticed in a particularly remarkable photo a turntable desk that seemed to be floating in mid air. I took it to be a Photoshop trick and moved on with my day, but thanks to a friend I now know that it was the geniuses at Berlin based design firm Metrofarm.
