THE CULTURAL JACKDAW

Damien Hirst

I was lucky enough to go to the private view of the new Damien Hirst exhibition at the Tate Modern on Tuesday evening, it's his largest retrospective in the UK and will be on at the Tate for five months.

Unsurprisingly for someone like Hirst it's had mixed reviews. But love or hate him there's no denying his importance and influence on contemporary art. On a personal level one thing his work does achieve is that it gets fully planted in your head, it's the kind of art that stays with you for a long time.

Walking around the exhibition also made me realise how many iconic pieces he has created and the amount of controversy that has accompanied some of those over the years.

I've always thought that as long as people are talking about your work then it's playing an important role in culture. Hirst has definitely provoked debate throughout his career and I respect him for that.

As Oscar Wilde once said:"Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, and vital."

Here's a few photos I took on the night:

 

The Tech Philosophers

Technology companies are becoming the most influential brands on the planet, they impact our daily lives and are inventing the future.

So it's good to know that some of the people behind these businesses have good intentions. This a great article about Reid Hoffman - the billionaire co-founder of Linkedin, early investor in Friendster and Flickr and a board memer of Zynga, Airbnb and Mozilla - who always dreamt of becoming a philosopher:

" I won a Marshall scholarship to read philosophy at Oxford, and what I most wanted to do was strengthen public intellectual culture - I'd write books and essays to help us figure out who we wanted to be." Within months of starting his course, however, Hoffman concluded that "spending one or two decades answering a professional philosphical question" might not impact sufficiently on the world. "I realised that academia wasn't the right platform - it didn't have enough scale," he says. "So I decided I would be a software entrepreneur."

Then I was reading about 16 year old Nick D'Aloisio who created Summly, he said "I'm interested in app design and where the business is going, but philosophy is my thing."

I think if the world's technology companies are increasingly being run by inventors / investors who have a passion for philosophy that can only be a positive for all of us.

Karl Lagerfield

"I'm an advertising photographer and delighted to be so. I've always loved advertising. If I wasn't in fashion that's what I'd be in." 

 

Michael Jordan

"Talent wins games, but teamwork and intelligence win championships."

The Streets

Street Style has hit the mainstream in the last few years with famous blogs attracting millions of daily readers.

Big brands have been pulled in by the lure of street style's cred appeal amongst the young fashion obsessed.

But documenting street style is nothing new.

Bill Cunningham (now in his 80s) is a New Yorker who for the past 50 years has been cycling around Manhatten taking pictures of fashion on the streets for magaiznes and papers including the New York Times, for which he provides two popular weekly colums called "On the Street" and "Evening Hours."

Last year a documentary looking at Bill's passion was released in the US and it's been getting reviews here in the UK in the last few weeks. Here's the trailer:

 

 

Pirate Time

In May last year I started to spot a few Pirate inspired cultural events.

The Pirates of the Caribbean - On Stranger Tides launched:

There was  National Pirate Day in Marlow:

The Museum of London Docklands hosted a Pirates exhibition to mark the anniversary of the execution of Captain Kidd, the exhibition explored the history of pirates in London. It told tales of the high seas and the corruption of London's East India Company and the show revealed how close the links between the city and piracy really were:

Then flash-forward to this year and I've recently heard about the great work that these guys are doing in East London to help young people develop literacy and creativity. 

This is a play that is now on tour across the country:

And the new animation from Aardman called The Pirates - In an Adventure with Scientists, a film it took five years to put together, launches later next month. 

A while ago I wrote that Zombies may be the new Vampires but now there's no doubt that Pirates are the hottest fantasy characters capturing people's imagination.

I'm looking forward to the rest of this year to see what other cultural ideas they inspire.

 

Sir David Hare

Francis Ford Coppola

If you're stuck creatively, how do you get unsuck?

If my intuition doesn't give me an answer, I have a little exercise: What is the theme in a word or two? In The Conversation, it was privacy. In The Godfather, it was succession. I encourage my children to do the same, to break it down. If you have that word, then when you reach an impasse, you just say, "Well, what does the theme tell me?" And usually that will suggest to you which way to go and break the roadblock.

Smart Cities

There's little denying that urban life is the future.

This huge shift is driving a fascinating change in the way cities are being built. The last great burst of city design was naturally inspired by the car, but in today's digital world city planners and architects are increasingly designing cities with the mobile phone and other technology as inspiration.

All of this is leading to the emergence of 'smart cities' being built where the live organism of that city can be accessed and viewed by the public. I've noticed a few interesting projects lately that have looked at this growing social trend.

Sense and the City was a recent exhibition at the London Transport Museum that explored how emerging technologies are changing the way we access and experience London and compares this with past visions of the future.

This is an interesting short documentary called 'Thinking Cities' that looks at the challenges and opportunities of urbanization in the Networked Society:

 

And (unsurprisingly I think) Amsterdam and Stockholm are leading the way as new models for smart cities of the future.

The Age of Access

Over the last few years there's been a wealth of new businesses / ideas that have changed our view of ownership.

These prove that people are increasingly valuing access to something rather than the hassle and stress of the ownership experience. People can now pay on demand to get access to everything from luxury handbags to city bikes and classic cars to music.

Boris's bikes

Classic Car Club

Bag Borrow or Steal

Spotify

Cultural Brainfood - February 2012 issue

This is a newspaper I've just written (with the help of @sophiesimmons) that looks at some of the cultural themes that may be influential this year.

The Brooklyn Brothers Brainfood Newsletter - February 2012 issue

View more documents from culturaljackdaw

If you like this, check out my other 'Cultural Brainfood' presentations on the link above.

Indian Winter

There's been a lot of justified talk recently about China's growing cultural influence on the West. But hot on its heels is India. This amazing and colourful country (I should admit that's it's my favourite place I've travelled to) is inspiring new films, music, fashion and architecture.

In the UK recently we've had the release of two new films, including Michael Winterbottom's latest, that shine the spotlight on Indian culture and M.I.A's new video for her track Bad Girls was filmed in the country that feeds the soul like no other place on earth.

Michael Winterbottom's Trishna played by Freida Pinto

 

Maradona's dream

"I have two dreams: to play in the World Cup and to be a champion."

 

Make the Most of Now

Making Data Entertaining

Hans Rosling proves that data doesn't have to be dull.

He's well known for experimenting and presentating data in new and remarkable ways.

This clip from BBC Four shows him presenting visual data in a real space.

Amazing.

 

 

On Your Bike

Bike culture has exploded in London.

Places like this and this have popped up all over the capital.

More and more people are wearing the hottest bike brands like they wear fashion labels.

Film festivals dedicated to (and celebrating) bike culture have sprung up:

(From the film Life Cycles 2 shown at the Banff Mountain Film Festival).

And now big brands have entered the fray, this idea from Red Bull is fun:

 

Cockney Cash Machine

Love this.

Jeff Bridges

The dude is a legend and his blog is one of my favourites.

Good mix of art / writing / thoughts.

I love his tone; gentle, humble. human and heartfelt.

 

Standing For Something

The most ground-breaking cultural movements of the last 100 years have all stood for something.

Pioneers, misfits and leaders use manifestos to inspire action and explain their vision and worldview.

This amazing book collects the manifestos from the movements that have changed our world; from communism to dadaism. It's an important cultural legacy all bound in the pages of one book.

'The Manifesto is remarkable for its imaginative power . . . it is the first great modernist work of art.'

Marshall Berman

And here is the fascinating manifesto for the Internet called A Declaration of the Independece of Cyberspace by John Perry Barlow, written in 1996.

Age of Innovation

 "Everybody right now in the 21st century is orientated towards innovation and creativity, as never before. Apple is a design company, an innovator, not a technology company."

Professor David Kirsh, University of California, San Diego

Dancing with Science

Since 2003 Wayne McGregor has been collaborating with cognitive scientists to generate new understandings of creativity.

Whilst scientists have studied the visual arts, very little work has been done in the field of dance.

McGregor has been working with Dr Philip Barnard (MRC Cognition and Brain Unit at Cambridge) to understand, amongst other things, how to disrupt the messages in the brain to make someone discoordinated.

During this creative collaboration process he's learnt that before the body can move, the brain has to generate imagery. Dr Barnard has identified that we can build three types of imagery; verbal/auditory, visual or deep schemer (from instinct, emotion and experience).

Each of these are created through a different mental loop. McGregor is passionate about understanding the brain so he can unlock a new way to create dance:

"If you're always imagining in the same way, you're always moving in the same way."

He's applying this knowledge to generate unusal imagery and is creating beautiful and ground-breaking dance in the process.

His latest work is FAR.

Technology x Music x Art

These three ingredients are "coming together to produce radical new interactive forms" (Dazed & Confused).

Led by a new school of directors from Warp Films.

"The uneasy marriage between art and technology has gone from strength to strength since the birth of the net. Armed with a grab-bag of raw data and lines of code, creative technologists have developed a range of artistic forms - from image patterns that grow organically on screen, to repurposed video game engines. The impulse is subversive and playful - a digital decoupage that revisits early web design and drags it kicking and screaming into the here and now."

Aaron Meyers (the guy who did Radiohead's awesome House of Cards video):

David McCandles

Daniels

Saman Keshavarz

Tron's Legacy

"Without Tron there would be no Toy Story"

John Lasseter, PIXAR.

Robot Opera

Tod Machover has been dubbed "America's most wired composer."

A renowned musician and forward-thinking inventor of music technology, he is Head of the Hyperinstruments/Opera of the Future group at MIT Media Lab and has collaborated on projects with Peter Gabriel and Prince. He also invented the interactive Brain Opera which set the technological template for Guitar Hero and twenty three years ago he created an opera called VALIS based on the Philip K Dick novel of the same name.

He's currently working on a robotic opera (that's been ten years in the making) called Death And The Powers.

Machover is naturally restless and experimental. He's always finding new ways to mix technology and music together.

In the same vein, and at the same time, Daft Punk are combining Classical music with Electronic sounds to create an Orchestral score for the year's biggest Sci-fi spectacular Tron: Legacy.

Not long until that drops. Can't wait.

Summer Shots

Peter Dench travelled the country this summer to capture the colourful and quirky images of a 21st Century English summer.

Rhys Ifans

Me, Me, Me

Interesting art project that explores our growing obsession with beauty and the things that define people's personal identity in the modern world.

"Love Me explores the insidious power of the global beauty industry and our collective insecurity, vanity and fear of ageing."

Sex-Factor

Old People Rock

 

Rave Generator

Takes me back.