JOYENGINE: cause sharing is cool

New illustrations from the cypher13 team working with GTT and MadKast.

For starters, Ben Frost is not dead.  If you’re not familiar with him, Ben’s a Sydney, Australia based artist know for his often controversial pop-art.  His paintings feel like precision pop mash-ups, predominantly media and and advertising centric.  Frost has wicked good compositional skills, an amazing portfolio, and a serious track record of makin’ bold moves in the art world.  Check out his work.  It’s certainly worth a gander.

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The United Kingdom is seen as a pioneer of mass surveillance…as being ‘the most surveilled country’ among the industrialized Western states.

Now Police officers in the UK are to be given head-mouted video cameras to film incidents and arrests, the footage of which can then be used in evidence. The ‘head-cams’ can store up to 400 hours of footage with soundtrack on their hard drive.

A spokesman for the force said: “The clear evidence provided by head camera footage means that offenders have less opportunity to deny their involvement, leading to less paperwork for the police, earlier guilty pleas, less time spent in court and an increase in convictions.”

Big Brother.

Andenken Gallery is pleased to announce their upcoming show “The Group Show” featuring an all-star cast of characters from home and abroad.There are some serious heavy hitters in this show! Just to name a few… Ian Millard has really got some fresh work coming up, Kill Pixie has some super detailed amazing work, Alexone’s paintings always impress and the Magnet Mafia has been gettin up after it. Also, Tom just informed me of a 20×40 Fafi piece that’s on it’s way from France today. So, duh, Come on down to the Block Building at 2990 Larimer Street this Thursday night for another awesome evening of art, drinks, good folks and ping pong! Be sure to check out Beauty And The Street for a preview of the show. See you there!

Our pal Max Kaufman just filled us in regarding a great little art show he recently put together.  Max rallied Chris Huth, Brian Robertson, Moh(from Newspeak), and himself - collectively they’re be dropping Plaid Panda at Icelantic Gallery on July, 11th from 6-10.  Denver’s reppin’ this month on the art front.  Frikin’ rad.

Markham “Shitty Kitten” Maes will be showing a new body of work at The Shoppe during the Super Fresh Block Party!  We’ll try to get a sneak peak of some new paintings before the show!

Mike Graves life involves lots of painting.  Since we met Mike a couple years ago, we’ve never known a time when he wasn’t working on a new series of paintings for a new show.   He blows our minds every time. This go round it’s Lucha Libre at The 400.  The show opens on Thursday, July 17th.  Check it out.

Pixar gets mad points for difficulty in their latest film endeavor, WALL-E.  After watching the trailer the first time, I was intrigued how the technical animation would truly make or break this movie.  With main characters that can’t speak (not much anyway) and have very limited facial expressions, the pressure was on to create lovable, emotional beings out of tiny scraps of metal sans dialogue.  The end result was a beautiful experiment in visual storytelling, made more special by the originality of concept and a timely sociopolitical message.

Lips, eyes and eyebrows become luxuries of on-screen character development when your subjects are little more than spheres and cubes with wheels.  The character design was amazing, with robots of all shapes, sizes, makes, models and personalities truly overshadowing the human characters who dully share an identical pear-shaped physique, and emotionally resemble… well… robots.  in the end, the animators succeed admirably in creating living, breathing, emoting creatures out of those cold spheres and cubes.

The first part of the film is by far my favorite, with our gritty worker-bot hero Wall-E going about his everyday routine and unraveling a past of corporate consumerism gone awry.  He soon encounters a sleek, sexy instrument of Apple brand death and destruction named E.V.E. and the duo form a complex relationship using nothing but flawlessly timed animation.

The film is a perfect abstraction of visual storytelling, utilizing only the most essential elements of motion, color, sound and symbols to do the whole job.  Granted, there is a lot more dialogue in the film than I’ve indicated here, but those scenes are saved for the human characters who are ultimately a sideshow to the robots.  So when you go see Wall-E (and you should), take notice of how much can be conveyed by moving shapes with the vocabulary limitations of a Pokemon.  And ask yourself, how did they make me love a stupid cube with wheels so fucking much?

RIP Joe Ranft

Great little KAWS interview from i-D Magazine. Enjoy!

Over the past few years Joshua Davis has been in charge of a week long workshop at the Anderson Ranch Art Complex in Snowmass/Aspen Colorado. The workshop takes a select few artists that spend a week working with Joshua’s Dynamic Abstraction process. This process works with programming to dynamically generate digital prints.

I’ve always wanted to attend but the workshop is quite pricey. Here are some flickr photos on Joshua’s website from this year’s workshop.