Underground by adriana matamoros

Underground

April, 2017

4 6 8

10 12 18

INDEX

20 22 24 26 28 30

SPETO

Graffiti pioneer from Brazil

Creating content

The genius behind Buzzfeed

BIG

The Bjark Ingels Group

Unique design vs Mass production D.A.T.E. Sneakers

SNASK

Cover story

MUSIC BOX

Discover new sounds

Carl Sprague

Art Director in films

Mind bending porcelain Johnson Tsang Sculpture

Netflix Originals What’s even an original?

Analog vs digital Fight or colab

Daan Rosegarde A social design lab

Mood letters

Top indie reads of 2017 (so far)

FROM EDITOR Before you read Underground’s first issue, there are a few things you need to know: You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it.

Don’t settle.

graff iti

SPETO ion

o m r brazi f r e l e

ONE OF BRAZIL’S TRUE GRAFFITI PIONEERS, SPETO HAS BEEN DECORATING WALLS IN AND BEYOND HIS NATIVE SÃO PAULO FOR OVER FOUR DECADES. He’s influenced by native culture, specifically “Cordel literature,” D.I.Y. books sold by street vendors. Honoring the inexpensive pamphlets, Speto’s work playfully evokes classic woodcuts, and he also blends in hip-hop style graffiti, illustration, and tattoo motifs. Speto’s aim is to create bold murals that are legible from distance. In that, his output is nearly unmistakable. Brazil has a vibrant street art scene, and most of its protagonists use street art as a means of commenting on social and political realities in Brazil. Even the World Cup was under fire. Ahead of the global event, despite the population’s passion for football, we had the chance to see many walls in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, covered with murals blaming FIFA and the local government for burdening the country’s already struggling economy. Besides such purposeful art, graffiti that celebrate football and Brazil’s football heroes, popped up, demonstrating how much the country’s urban art scene is dynamic and open to different opinions. Speto, as Paulo Cesar Silva is known, is a plastic artist, illustrator and one of the leading names in graphite in Brazil. He was one of the precursors of this artistic manifestation in the country and already had, since childhood, ability to draw, when he illustrated skateboarding, a sport he practiced on the streets of São Paulo. Speto’s interest in graffiti came in the 1980s, when he attended the movie “Beat Steet” at the age of 14 and bought his first spray to color the city walls, inspired by one of the characters in the film. Alongside Binho, Vitché and Os Hermanas, Speto represents the first generation of graffiti artists from Brazil, which emerged after the end of the military dictatorship, when hip-hop culture from the suburbs of New York invaded Sao Paulo. Inspired by the folklore tradition of cordel northeastern literature and woodcut, Speto developed his own original style, which impresses a genuinely Brazilian expression in his works. The idea of seeking folk art to support the development of his works emerged when he saw the cover of Dead Man’s Party, from the Californian band Oingo Boingo. Although a self-taught artist, he has taken several courses at MAM, Museum of Modern Art, and wood engraving classes with Bruno de Oliveira, whom he considers his master engraver and printer. Among his artistic references are

also the painter Pablo Picasso, Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst, Takashi Murakami, Vânia Zouravliov, Di Cavalcanti, Ademir Martins, Cândido Portinari, Muhammad Ali, Bruce Lee and Oscar Niemeyer, as well as inspiration in traditional tattoo designs and Manga Throughout the 1990s, the artist helped shape the visual identity of bands like Raimundos, Planet Hemp, Nação Zumbi and O Rappa. His works have already been exhibited in museums such as the Palais de Tokyo in France, Afro Brazil Museum in São Paulo, and several galleries in the United States and Europe. The artist was still curator of the Paulo Borges HotSpot Movement and painted squares, buildings, viaducts, hotels and even church. Speto also worked with renowned artists in music, from Alice Cooper to Elba Ramalho and his works appeared in video clips of O Rappa and the well-known pop singer Beyoncé. Speto also illustrated advertising campaigns for major brands such as Brahma and Coca-Cola, when he was responsible for the visual identity of the FIFA World Cup 2014 World Cup campaign. The artist also works with various NGOs and projects around the world, such as SOS Racisme of France, Viva Con Agua of Germany, Fundação Gol de Letra and Instituto Crear.

We spent an hour talking to BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti about the media business, what technology actually helps BuzzFeed do, and what’s next for a company he says was a “cat site” three years ago. UNDERGROUND: It sounds like you have some pretty exciting tech news going on.

CREATING CONTENT How BuzzFeed mastered socia l sharing to become a media giant for a new era

Jonah Peretti: I think that one of the interesting things about all the stuff we do in tech is that in general technology is harder for people to understand. Some of the stuff that I’m most excited about I don’t get a chance to talk about as much. It seems exciting to me and is probably interesting to readers of The Verge, but there are a lot of people who love BuzzFeed for entertainment and news and how it gets to them isn’t really as exciting as what is getting to them. Obviously we have a very big tech audience at The Verge, but I spent six months earlier this year working on the Vox. com team, and it was actually really interesting for me to step back and watch how our publishing platform helped that team scale so fast and hit a different big audience. We think about our platform so much that it almost circles back around to taking it for granted, and I suspect that that is true at BuzzFeed as well. Well, there’s certain technology that you want to have disappear so it makes things faster and easier. Ev Williams likes to talk about technology that lets you skip a step — something took five steps now takes four steps. The benefit is something that isn’t there. Then there also are other things where technology doesn’t recede to the background, like a lot of the stuff we do with new post formats or slide-y things or quizzes or rubable GIFs. That’s all more in the category of fun technology that you get to play with. Maybe this is a question that only a media nerd asks a media nerd, but it seems like a great deal of your investment in technology so far has been at the platform level and for content creation, while distribution has all been about making things really sharable and really great so people will share them. But buying a company to make a native app is a distribution side move. A native app puts your icon next to the Facebook icon on my phone. How do you think about that relationship? I think that things have really evolved fairly quickly. I think the classic model of a media company is that you have content and you have distribution, and usually they’re pretty separate.

One company makes content, another company does distribution, and they often have a deal, a partnership, to distribute the content. BuzzFeed has invested in a model that’s more vertically integrated. We’re building the technology and the site and the CMS, and also the brand and the content, and building this full-stack startup. What we’re seeing now is that’s become more complicated. I read a couple days ago Ben Smith saying that in three years he doesn’t think BuzzFeed will exist in its current form. Can you tell me what Ben was talking about and what you think that means? He was talking about all the stuff we’ve been talking about. It’s hard to predict three years out, so part of it was saying, “Who knows what’ll happen in three years, what the web will be like in three years?” We’ve been based on a model of continual change. Three years ago, BuzzFeed had no reporters. Two years ago we had no video. One year ago we didn’t have foreign correspondents around the world or an investigative team. Three years ago we were a cat site, an internet meme site. So a lot has changed in three years. It’s an out-of-context quote — Ben was talking about the changes that have happened in three years. We went from the traditional media model of content and distribution to the vertically-integrated model of content distribution technology to the network-integrated model of technology helping at every level. Technology helping with content creation and then that content going on our platforms, distributed across the web, potentially going to traditional platforms like television or print. We don’t really have plans to do any print. But there’s a possibility of having something that you look at and think that this isn’t a site, this is a global media company. It’s not just a site, it’s a whole process for distributing news, buzz, life, on the web, mobile, native apps, and it looks very different than it looks today.

BuzzFeed excels when we can combine art and science. This is why we focus on platforms where creative people can try ideas, get feedback from the world, and use it to learn and get better everyday. This is why developing the technology for our own site and apps is so important to us and why we invest so much in data science. And it is also why we invest in platforms like Facebook and YouTube that give us data back to incorporate into our creative process.

BIG

Check out BIG TIME, the Bjarke Ingels Documentary!

BJARKE INGELS IS ONE OF THE MOST INSPIRING ARCHITECTS PRACTICING TODAY. HAVING FOUND SUCCESS AT A RELATIVELY YOUNG AGE, BJARKE HAS NEVER SHIED AWAY FROM EMBRACING HIS YES IS MORE PHILOSOPHY. His conspicuous enthusiasm for the potential of architecture and design sets him apart from his peers. And it is precisely this go-to attitude that has allowed him to overcome some of the significant limits that face many young architects today. An impressive portfolio of both built and upcoming projects shows that his approach to design, though sometimes criticized, is profoundly impacting the social environment of architecture. On running an office, Bjarke says that “you have the opportunity and the responsibility to create the work environment that you would like to work in.” He has modeled his firm as a type of organism that is able to adapt to growth and change. In the interview, Bjarke explains that not only does his own role constantly evolve, but that the success of BIG is contingent on the invaluable contributions of his partners. BIG is more than just Bjarke.

Bjarke Ingels, is incandescently youthful, remarkably young when tallied to the level of his repute and success, and perhaps the last of the world-building, world conquering ‘media darlings’ of the 20th and 21st Centuries. He is, many would argue, an unstoppable force.

Architecture is the art and science of making sure that our cities and buildings actually fit with the way we want to live our lives: the process of manifesting our society into our physical world. Life is always evolving and as life evolves, so should our cities and buildings, so that they fit with the way that we want to live. In the really big picture, life on planet earth has evolved, in a Darwinian sense, through million of years by adapting to the surroundings. So, different life forms would evolve attributes that would allow them to occupy different eco-niches. Life always adapted to the physical environment. When we invented technology, tools and architecture, we reversed that situation and we started adapting our physical environment to life. What can you tell us about leading an architecture office? Creating an office is very much an evolutionary process. As the office evolves, your role is constantly changing. Every three months I realize that I can no longer do what I did three months ago. I have to do things differently because the office has evolved and my role in it is constantly evolving. One of the important things about creating an office is that you have the opportunity and the responsibility to create the work environment that you would like to work in. Because if you are working for someone else, you might have to put up with a certain culture or way of speaking to each other that you endure because you want the job—but it’s actually not the way you would want to be at your work. So, when you create your own office, you have the responsibility to set the tone and establish the culture and way that people talk to each other and collaborate and help each

other, the way they ask for favors and the way they give out favors to their colleagues. I think that establishing the culture and the environment is incredibly important. Also, you’re going to be spending a lot of time in your office, so if you don’t enjoy it it’s going to be hell. I’ve always been very conscious about what I like doing and where I think my skills are the strongest. I’ve tried to establish an office that allows me to always have my dream job. For instance, back in the days of PLOT, when we won our first commission, a circular swimming pool, I didn’t have the experience to be the project leader of a construction project. I wanted to be the project designer, and I also wanted to keep doing competitions to expand the office. So, we hired a guy named Finn Nørkjær, who is now one of my partners in the Copenhagen office. He is 10 years older than I am and he was the project leader for that project. So even though I was his boss as a designer, in his team, he was responsible for making the project. Even though, traditionally, you might have said, “OK, this is my office. I’m going to be the project leader,” I actually knew that I didn’t want to be the project leader. I wanted to be the designer. So I hired someone with more experience than me to fulfill a role that I wasn’t mature enough or interested in. I think I’ve done that ever since. In the end I’m left with having the job I do the best and I am constantly creating positions or helping people create their own positions to make sure that the office really becomes more like an organism where everybody has their favorite role in that organism.

Unique design vs Mass production People want unique things.

D.A.T.E. IS SIMPLY THE ACRONYM OF THE NAMES OF THE FOUR YOUNG FOUNDERS OF THE PROJECT.

In 2005, the four of them met up in London and there, feeling unsatisfied by their jobs, decided to throw themselves into the ambitious project of creating their own range of sneakers. Despite various difficulties, they succeeded in completing their first collection, made up of just a few pieces. Emiliano and Damiano’s experience was fundamental for getting them started. Picking up old machinery here and there, they created a crude and impromptu workshop in Emi’s garage and met up there every evening after work - obviously not being able to give up their day jobs. They spent the summer shut in that garage, working day and night to successfully get the job done and pull through on their deliveries. In January 2006, thanks to a favour from a friend, they obtained an invitation to display as guests on a stand at Pitti Immagine Uomo, displaying their collection in a small space. Thanks to their craftsman’s feel, the first D.A.T.E. charmed the public and sold more than 8,000 pairs in just three days. It was a success! D.A.T.E. had become the real news of the season. The Founfers> Damiano> - Born among shoes - He has started working with shoes when he was young, in his father’ footwear factory, then he moved to London. He worked as a Product Manager for Valentino and other brands, before taking the plunge into the D.A.T.E. adventure Alessandro: - The inventor of brilliant ideas - He graduated in Communication Strategies in Florence, specializing Fashion Marketing in Melbourne, Australia. Here, for the first time, he came up with the idea to create his own sneakers brand. Tomasso: - The strategic planner - He gratuated in Business Administration, specializing in Marketing in Australia. He has worked for an international consulting company before jumping into the new D.A.T.E. ambitous project. Emiliano: - The creative mind - He has learned the traditional art of shoemaking in Florence. He started his own career in London, working for such brands like Paul Smith and Escada. Emiliano designed the very first D.A.T.E. model and he still keeps being the creative mind of the style department.

Snask, a Swedish creative agency who moonlight as a rock band, give us the lowdown on creating and rejuvenating brands and getting enough sleep to be creative. Snask is an unusual creative agency based in Sweden. Their 10 commandments (which you can find on their website) include brand wisdoms and philosophies such

as “See people as people, not as target groups” and “Just because you wear a black suit, doesn’t mean you’re a goddamn professional”.

Swedish Creative Agency Snask is

“Sweet, Filthy, and Full of Life”

Their clients include H&M, Samsung and Microsoft and in between being busy rebranding an island in the Maldives and writing rock music, the Snask designers will be heading south of the equator to make an appearance at Design

What’s the worst thing a designer can do? Follow rules and boundaries. Break them. The person who made them up was either an old man with too much power or a seriously ill and small minded person. When it comes to design you are free. Of course you should still design for a purpose but following already beaten tracks is something we gladly avoid. To cook a great stew it must be a huge benefit to know how a lot of different ingredients taste, unless you’re preparing the most boring and tasteless stew in the history of mankind that is.

What pieces of work have you done that you can look at now and think – “yes, we rock”? We feel that we rock when we rebel against the conservative and boring world. We felt amazing when we had two days lecturing at Google and Stanford University, two things to cross off our bucket list. Apart from that we love it when work becomes what we envision. Like when we did the Malmö Festival 2014 we felt really proud when we understood that no one else on this planet had ever done something similar!

How do you see women perceived in the creative world? Erik Kockum: Where we’re always trying to shout to make a difference is of course within the industry that we’re in, because the industry is really fucked up. It’s just run by old men, basically. That’s something that we experienced a lot when we started out. Some of these people we tried to meet up with in the beginning to see if maybe we could get some cool knowledge from them, but we quickly discovered that they’re these old men and they have a really conservative outlook on things a lot of the time. Not everyone, but most of them. Fredrik Öst: The whole industry is ruled by old men, the whole structure—the whole hierarchy system—is made up by old men and controlled by old men. Like Behance, in our world, is the way forward, because that’s a forum where no matter your age, ethnicity, nationality, race, gender or your clients, you’re only based on your work. Nothing else. In industries, you are based on which people you know; if you’re a man, you earn more money, if you’re an older man, you have respect. All of this fucking bullshit that has nothing to do with the quality of design and creativity. EK: But now it’s starting to change. We feel like it’s because of younger people taking over, starting to have the higher positions in companies and so the view of things is changing, hopefully.

Why do you like pink so much?

WHAT IS THE BEST THING A DESIGNER CAN DO? HAVE PRIDE IN YOUR PROFESSION. YOU WERE NOT EDUCATED TO JUST SIT AND PRODUCE FLYERS AND BANNER ADS. YOU HAVE A HIGHER PURPOSE. THERE’S SO MUCH MORE TO THE PROFESSION THAN THAT. STEP AWAY FROM THE COMPUTER AND START DOING A LOT OF WORK BY HAND AND YOU SHALL SEE THAT THE PASSION YOU THOUGHT WAS BLOWN OUT BY THE WIND OF BUREAUCRACY WILL ONCE AGAIN BURST INTO FIRE.

Pink is a nice color, but also it has so much provocation for people. For some fucked up reason, people think it’s female, but just a few hundred years ago it was manly because it’s close to red and red is blood. Now suddenly it’s manly, but only manly if you wear it on your shirt. If you wear pants that are pink, or shoes that are pink, you’re “gay.” It’s just these stupid rules that no one ever questions, and we liked pink because it’s a nice color but it’s also a bit provocative and we wanted to mix it with gold. EK: Especially in the beginning when we were pushing out our name and our brand, we were like, anti-macho. We could have gone black and white, because that could be nice too. But when we really saw how people reacted to this, and to the name too (in Sweden “snask” means candy and gossip and filth), you sort of get pleased about the reaction.

What happened when you reached out with your pink and gold logo idea? FO: We got a lot of positive feedback from everyone. But as Eric said, the first five years, every one of our clients were female. Every single one, but from within every age group.

How do your individual skills compliment each other? At Snask everyone is a superstar. No one is an assistant to anyone else but we collaborate in teams all the time. We have a very flat hierarchy and everyone contributes equally to our quality of work, brand and Snask lifestyle. I would say that everyone possesses remarkable specialties, but the most important one is the ability to not take ourselves too seriously – even though everyone is superstars.

Where do you find inspiration?

In the world around us; politics, film, music and popular culture in general. Family, friends and pets... You name it. We have the belief that in order to be a successful creative you have to know and be a part of the world around you. Simply claiming that you’re not interested in politics doesn’t do it for us. Simply put, life in general inspires us. And if we stop being inspired it means we have to live life to it’s fullest again and that we probably had a dip.

What’s the best way you know how to get ideas flowing when you’ve got creative block?

Do something else for a while or just think about nothing. Everyone has their own ways. Some go out and run, others read a novel whilst some sink into a nerdy video game. Clearing your mind can be a huge anti-blocker. We also find it common that creative block and bad sleep behavior goes hand in hand, so go to sleep!

Is kooky something people can learn to be? Or were you just born that way…? If kooky means strange I think everyone actually always is. It’s the normal state of a human being and being “normal” is just a game and a cover up. We are all born kooky as well as creative. Society then makes you unlearn the behavior with something they call “act grownup”. And that’s exactly what people run around doing. They act grown up and everyone are afraid that soon someone will call my bluff and realize that I’m actually not grown up at all and that I actually don’t know anything for certain. We stopped acting and try to just be ourselves. If creativity was crystal meth we would be Walter White and Jesse Pinkman. Kooky, unpolished but fucking amazing at what we do.

What’s the dream job you are yet to do?

“It’s this combination of conventional design rigor and offbeat craftsmanship—tinted with the founders’ questionably hilarious sense of humor—that makes the work of Snask so good. Like candy. Or gossip”.

We would love to rebrand North Korea the day they would become a democracy and open up as a country and society. It would be an incredible challenge since they have a very distorted view of their own brand. They have an equally distorted view of what the rest of the world see them as. Imagine to create new hope for them and build everything around a new and proud democracy with a new tone of voice and a new pride built by the people rather than an elitist dictatorship.

From humble, financially challenged beginnings, Snask has grown into a 10-person firm working in branding, film, stop-motion animation, packaging, editorial design, and more, through a range of work that is a true reflection of their name. Not literally; their portfolio is not made up of filthy candy or sweet filth. Rather it’s their ability to instill their projects with a consistent sense of dichotomy by putting ideas, typefaces, colors, and materials that don’t go together in ways that are surprising, fresh, and energetic. Swedish design agency Snask doesn’t do anything by the book, which is precisely why they’re considered one of the most innovative and all-round fun collectives out there (not to mention, one of the most attractive places to work). In all its branding, design and stop motion work, the agency strives to go beyond the ordinary, often creating elaborate imagery and typography by hand rather than resorting to the computer. A prime example is the poster the company designed for the 2014 Malmö Festival that entailed 34 enormous 3D letters being built and shot from a crane high above. Design exists for our viewing pleasure! No, not only. It also exists to make life easier and solve problems. Design that is too abstract and doesn’t communicate a certain clear message or solve a certain problem should be called art. And they also have a reputation for doing talks that are anything but the standard designer show and tell.

MOOD SOUNDS

No one expected this song to blow up the way it did, and before they knew it, The Strokes were selling out statium shows to perform it live. The Strokes brought back the guitar with this song, and haven’t looked back since

THE STROKES – ‘LAST NITE’

Speaking of clowns, ever since Jack White made that crazy collab with Insane Clown Posse, we’ve been a bit wary of his musical decisions.

Killers fans voted in their millions and shifted this excellent, if somewhat slightly unexpected choice, into the top spot. Big tune.

THE KILLERS – WHEN YOU WERE YOUNG

This song helped further boost the Monkeys into one of today’s greatest indie rock bands.

ARCTIC MONKEYS – ‘I BET YOU LOOK GOOD ON THE DANCEFLOOR’

TOP INDIE ANTHEMS

Even if you know absolutely nothing about Blur, you’ll know this one. It was their biggest hit Stateside, and it’s been (unfortunately) covered by everyone from Avril Lavigne to Robbie Williams.

Ronnie Vannucci recently told NME.com that he believed people were drawn to this song because of “the vulnerability of what the song is saying”.

THE WHITE STRIPES – ‘SEVEN NATION ARMY’

BLUR – ‘SONG 2

THE KILLERS – MR. BRIGHTSIDE

Every indie anthem list needs some Britpop, and who better to represent than Jarvis and co.?

PULP ‘COMMON PEOPLE’

Scottish synthpop band from Glasgow Mostly deriving from the synthpop genre, Chvrches also incorporates indietronica, indie pop, and electronic dance into their sound.

It’s not a house, it’s Buckinghamshire-born Amber Bain, who has been recently touring with pals and label-mates The 1975. She chose the mysterious name to stave off any preconceptions: her music is lush electronica,

Black Honey make whirling, epic guitar music that has brought them to the attention of Ash and Slaves, who have both invited the Brighton-based band on tour in recent months. Following the release of their Headspin EP in August.

CHVRCHES

THE JAPANESE HOUSE

this Liverpool-based quartet have a sharp, clean, joyous brand of guitar pop. have wound up a year of extensive gigging with a support slot on Courteeners’ UK tour. heir latest single, Make Believe, was released in October

Ethan Barnett is a 19 year old singer-songwriter, with a bluesy take on indie guitar pop .

“I want to be the biggest male artist on the planet,” says this soulful singer-songwriter from Kirkby in Merseyside, who has already been compared to Johnny Cash and Alex Turner. He released the single Restless in November,

BLACK HONEY

CLEAN CUT KID

TEN TONNES

Manchester post-punk quintet who have just release a new EP, the brilliantly-titled Terrorist Synthesiser, on James Skelly of The Coral’s Skeleton Key label. The EP follows their previous outings:, as a mini-album in January 2017.

“Four girls about to rule the world” Their debut single Stuck, released in 2016, and its summery 70s vibe puts us in mind of a female Two Door Cinema Club. The foursome have recently signed to Red Bull Records to record.

LOUIS BERRY

CABBAGE

DISCOVER NEW SOUNDS

THE ACES

MUSIC BOX

Sprague has paid his dues, translating other directors’ visions into reality. But he wants to turn his attention next to a long-simmering project of his own — a film adaptation of Edith Wharton’s Summer, which he aims to direct.

Carl Sprague It’s particularly satisfying, he says, to work on projects where he’s truly telling a story through his work.

Carl Sprague is a designer working for film and stage as well as special, site-specific projects. Recent career highlights include concept illustration for Academy Award winners “The Grand Budapest Hotel” and “Twelve Years a Slave”. Carl is currently developing a feature adaptation of Edith Wharton’s 1916 classic “Summer”. Carl brings more than twenty years of experience as a Production Designer, Art Director and Illustrator to his work. The diverse projects he has lead to success share an emphasis on dramatic expression and creative solutions. Carl Sprague was in Görlitz, Germany last winter, on the set of Wes Anderson’s latest essay of beguilingly affected cinema, when an anonymous bomb threat (later seen to be a hoax) sent the cast and crew out to shiver on the street.

“We were shooting this funny scene where all these army officers are half-undressed, jump out of their hotel rooms and start firing their guns. Everyone fled the building and went out to the street, including all these poor extras in their underpants,” Sprague recalls, before mimicking the avalanche of whirring camera shutters that accompanied the assembled paparazzi’s efforts to take their best shots at the exposed actors. There was particularly good hunting, with Adrien Brody, Jude Law, Bill Murray and many other household names among the cast. Sprague sits in his Stockbridge living room on a bright winter afternoon as he recounts some more-pleasant events during the shoot, including bowling expeditions with the cast (“Jeff Goldlbum turned out to be a very impressive bowler,” he recalls with admiration), or anytime Anderson looked over Sprague’s shoulder, as he sketched out his proposal for a set model, and offered approval. Anderson, of course, is famously preoccupied with design aesthetic, including the obsessively detailed sets that articulate the carefully curated world of his imagination — a familiar but disorienting place, where oceanographic documentaries are received at lavish premieres like the magnum opera of auteurs, and

there’s good swimming to be had at the 375th. Sprague was concept illustrator for Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel, sketching out designs for key elements like the titular hotel’s façade, seen above. (The film did remarkably well in its initial, limited release, and opens locally at Great Barrington’s Triplex Cinema and in Pittsfield at The Beacon Cinema on March 28.) He did the same for Anderson’s previous film, Moonrise Kingdom; their relationship began with the director’s 2001 breakthrough The Royal Tenenbaums, for which Sprague was art director. Sprague is on a hot streak. After Budapest, he was brought on as concept illustrator for the eventual 2014 Best Picture Oscar-winner 12 Years A Slave. The Anderson connection is a particularly fashionable one, but Sprague cut his teeth on the sets of a couple fairly well-known folks named Spielberg (Amistad) and Scorsese (The Age of Innocence), both of whom employed him as assistant art director. He even wound up onscreen in Budapest, securing an acting credit as Distant Relation (seen in costume below) in a will-reading sequence. The glitz of these types of film shoots is certainly fun, but he has a freer hand over the look and feel of a production when he works closer to home, in the theater. Sprague is familiar as the set designer for innumerable productions at Berkshire Theatre Group, Shakespeare & Company, Oldcastle Theatre and elsewhere. He’s clearly an adaptable guy when it comes to this stuff; he was even production designer for Gregory Crewdson’s signature series of conceptual photographs, Beneath the Roses. (For that project he built some sets at MASS MoCA, where Sprague Electric Company once ruled the roost.)

THE MIND-BENDING SCULPTURES OF JOHNSON TSANG PUSH THE LIMITS OF IMAGINATION AND SOMETIMES EVEN OF GRAVITY. By turns whimsical, lyrical, and provocative, his works capture the fluidity of both physical motion and human emotion while challenging us to see the world in a different way. UNDERGROUND: Tell us how sculpture became your preferred medium for creating art.

MIND BENDING PORCELAIN J o h n s o n Tsa n g p ush es t h e lim i t s o f ima gina t io n a n d s o met imes even o f g ravi ty wh ile cha llen gin g us t o s e e t h e world in a dif ferent way.

Johnson Tsang: I have liked observing everything around me since I was four years old. The world was so beautiful for me, especially Mother Nature. I drew as much as I could. Ten years later, people said I was very good at it. However, I wasn’t satisfied with 2D expression because everything I saw was in 3D. I could not find a way to capture the beauty of nature even though I was able to draw very realistically. Then, just like other kids, I started to play with clay. I just loved it. The difference between me and other kids is that when I found something I liked, I never wanted to stop. So, here I am. You were a police officer for several years before you started making art full-time. Did you leave the police squad in order to devote more time to art, or did you simply find that after you left, you had more time for sculpting? I had been working in the Royal Police Force for 13 years before my resignation. It was my passion for art that led me to this crucial step. In 1991, I started to learn ceramics. I fell in love with clay immediately. I kept having ideas when I wasn’t in the pottery class. Two years later, in 1993, I decided to quit my job to explore a new life. It was this turning point that changed my life forever. Then, art changed the way I observed things happening around me. How did your time on the police squad affect your artwork in terms of subject matter? At the beginning of my new life, I felt that I had wasted 13 years of time when I wasn’t exploring art. A few years ago, I started to see something hiding in my works that may have originated from the time of my service. I’d been serving in many departments in the police force— like the tactical unit, emergency unit, special duty squad, vice (anti-drug squad), and traffic accident investigation team. I’ve seen a lot of cases that needed police assistance or enforcement. Most of the time those cases showed the dark side of the city and humanity. What

affected me the most were the fatal cases. I saw people being stabbed and killed by gangsters, a 6-year-old girl who was murdered by her maid, an 11-year-old girl who watched her younger brother die under a big tire of a double-decker bus while she was helping her mother to take care of him, and lots of faces of people who lost their lives in fatal car accidents. Today, I would definitely say that my service plays an important role in my creation. At least, I see things differently. JW: Would you say that there is an overarching theme in your work? What is it that you hope viewers will carry away from your pieces? JT: There are something deep in our soul which answers all the questions and problems happening right now. That is love. I do wish to make a better world. Somehow, I couldn’t find a better way to do it, as I am not good at any other territory. Luckily, I found art. Recently, when I had a chance to look over my past works, as I prepared for a talk about my works, I discovered that I have a pattern in creation. I found that I created work related to the theme of love after I made a couple of works expressing some negative messages. It seemed like I was answering with “love” to the questions arising from my work. JW: Do you start your pieces with a concept fully in mind, or do the concepts become more complete as you work through a piece? JT: I have worked in both ways, and I enjoy both. Sometimes, a spontaneous way of creating brought a big surprise. JW: What do you enjoy most about the process of sculpting? JT: I enjoy every moment in creation. I feel excited when building an idea in my mind. I find peace of mind when I touch clay. I feel satisfied when a problem is solved. I feel grateful when the mission is completed. Then, I feel that I love it more than ever. So I feel excited to start the next project. Do you have anything you would like to tell our readers about what you are working on now and what you have planned for the future? I am working on a couple of series right now. One of them is “Lucid Dream.” The idea came from my dreams. For years, I have written down my dreams.

Netflix originals

WHAT DOES THE WORD ORIGINAL REALLY MEAN TO NETFLIX?

Well, it’s a little confusing. You have original-originals -- shows created and driven by Netflix, like “House of Cards,” and the upcoming “Daredevil.” Then, there are also continuation properties, ones Netflix picked up from cable T V and made additional seasons of, like “Trailer Park Boys” or “Arrested Development.” Finally, there are exclusive shows of which Netflix is the sole distributor within the US, like “The Fall.” Got it? Basically, if it’s branded as Original, Netflix paid a lot of money so you can’t watch it anywhere else. When “One Day at a Time” started its run on CBS in December 1975, it became an instant hit and remained so for almost a decade. In its first year, “One Day at a Time,” a sitcom about working-class families produced by the T V impresario Norman Lear, regularly attracted 17 million viewers every week, according to Nielsen. Mr. Lear’s other comedies were even bigger hits: One out of every three households with a television watched “All in the Family,” for instance. Netflix funds their original shows differently than other TV networks when they sign a project, providing the money upfront and immediately ordering two seasons of most series.

Last week, a new version of “One Day at a Time” started on Netflix. Critics praised the remake for its explorations of single parenthood and class struggle, a theme that has faded from T V since Mr. Lear’s heyday. Yet, well intentioned and charming as the new streaming version may be, there’s a crucial aspect of the old “One Day at a Time” that it will almost certainly fail to replicate: broad cultural reach. The two versions of “One Day at a Time” are noteworthy bookends in the history of television, and, by extension, the

history of mass culture in America. The shows are separated by 40 years of technological advances — a progression from the over-the-air broadcast era in which Mr. Lear made it big, to the cable age of MT V and CNN and HBO, to, finally, the modern era of streaming services like Netflix. Each new technology allowed a leap forward in choice, flexibility and quality; the “Golden Age of T V” offers so much choice that some critics wonder if it’s become overwhelming. It’s not just T V, either. Across the entertainment business, from music to movies to video games, technology has flooded us with a profusion of cultural choice. More good stuff to watch and listen to isn’t bad. But the new “One Day at a Time” offers a chance to reflect on what we have lost in embracing tech-abetted abundance. Last year’s presidential election and its aftermath were dominated by discussions of echo chambers and polarization; as I’ve argued before, we’re all splitting into our own self-constructed bubbles of reality. I buy this argument; obviously, powerful cultural products can produce an impact even if they’re not seen by everyone. But I suspect the impacts, like the viewership, tend to be restricted along the same social and cultural echo chambers into which we’ve split ourselves in the first place. Those effects do not approach the vast ways that T V once remade the culture: how everyone of a certain age knows the idioms of “Seinfeld” (“It shrinks?”), or followed the “Cheers” romance of Diane and Sam, or how a show like “All in the Family” inspired a national conversation about the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement. It’s possible we’re not at the end of the story. Some youngsters might argue that the internet has produced its own kind of culture, one that will become a fount of shared references for years to come. What if “Chewbacca Mom” and the blue and black/white and gold dress that broke the internet one day become part of our library of globally recognized references, like the corniest catchphrases of television’s past, whether from “Seinfeld” or “Diff’rent Strokes”?

Analog vs digital

WIll analog die in the face or digital? What are the bright spots of each one of them?

When you look at beautiful digital art and compare it with the things you draw with a pencil, you can feel astonished and belittled. If only you could afford a graphics tablet, you could be just as good! And if you already have a tablet, your thought is, “If only I could afford Photoshop! So many amazing things can be done with this software.” And if you’ve got both a decent tablet and good software, you’re dreaming about the godlike Wacom Cintiq—the bigger, the better. But, until then, you’re stuck. You can’t be any better. And it’s not your fault, it’s all about money! This is probably why there’s a misconception that digital art isn’t real art. After all, a real artist needs to learn all these hard things, master pencils, brushes, color mixing, different kinds of pigment, and they can’t just undo a mistake! And when they finish, their art is one of a kind, it exists physically, it’s not just an array of digits that you can copy infinitely. At the same time, a digital “artist” buys some expensive equipment and that’s all—they can now produce outstanding art. That’s cheating, isn’t it? If that’s your point of view, keep on reading. If

you’ve never tried digital art, you’ll learn what it’s about. If you have, but you’re poor at it, I’ll tell you why. In both cases I’ll clarify the misconceptions that may have been bothering you for a long time. There are lots of methods of recreating the real world in some small form. You can take a soft mass and mold it. You can take something harder and sculpt it. You can make thin rows in sand to represent the outlines of something. You can take a sheet of white paper and create smudges with a small bit of charcoal. You can make blobs of color to imitate patches of light and shadow. The weird thing is that we don’t have a word for all these activities. It’s not really “creating”—we don’t create a thing, we create an image of it. In the end, we tend to call it sculpting (for built forms) and drawing (for shapes on paper). People more familiar with art add another category to it, painting, to distinguish it from line-based works. Not so long ago another category appeared— digital art. The computer has turned out to be a powerful tool for an artist. It provides a clean workspace, with the freedom to make mistakes. It’s so powerful that traditional

artists have started to look at it as some kind of unfair extension. One pen instead of a bunch of pencils with different softness, all the brushes that need to be cleaned all the time, charcoal, ink and whatever you’d like to use? One machine for every size, shape and material of canvas, for every color and way of blending? Everything neatly placed on your desk, with the option to save for later? A dream tool for lazy people! Computers are also well known for their function of automating boring and time-consuming processes. For example, you give it ten big numbers to multiply, and get a result without any effort on your side. In the same way you can create a brush (one not similar to anything traditional) of a tree, and create a whole forest with simple clicks. Click, click, click—and there you are, every tree perfectly detailed. All in a matter of seconds. Want to create a gradient for the sky? No problem—select white and blue, and it just creates itself. Did the character turn out to be too small? Don’t worry, just scale it. Or use a special deform tool to change its shape without having to draw it again. Everything without affecting the background—we’ve got layers, after all. It’s too easy. Too easy to be called art.t

Benoit Ladouceur

Daan

Rosegarde A social design lab.

In 2015 saw Beijing experience its first “red alert“, when its air quality was so dire that schools were closed and outdoor construction projects were shut down. Clearly, something was needed to improve China’s air. Dutch artist and innovator Daan Roosegaarde (1979) is a creative thinker and maker of social designs which explore the relation between people, technology, and space. Studio Roosegaarde is the social design lab of Dutch artist and innovator Daan Roosegaarde and his team of designers and engineers who make ideas of future landscapes become reality. Roosegaarde and his team create interactive innovations which explore the dynamic relation between people, technology, and space. Internationally acclaimed projects include Smart Highway (roads which charge from sunlight and glow at night), Waterlicht (which shows the force of water) and Smog Free Project (the largest outdoor air purifier which makes jewellery from smog), many of which earned prestigious awards. Works of Studio Roosegaarde have been commissioned by numerous organizations and were exhibited at the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, Google Zeitgeist, Tate Modern, the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, the Tokyo National Museum, and the Victoria & Albert Museum. Roosegaarde has won numerous international innovation awards and his public artworks are commissioned across the world. Studio Roosegaarde is based in Rotterdam (NL) at the Dream Factory, a 1930s glass factory overlooking city’s harbour. It also has a pop-up studio in Shanghai, China.

The answer may come in the form of Dutch designer and architect Daan Roosegaarde, who created the “Smog Free Tower.” At 23 feet tall, the tower is the world’s largest air purifier. Roosegaarde says that, while using an amount of power equal to a home-use water boiler, his tower can clean 30,000 cubic meters of air in an hour. (That means, in a day, it could clean a majority of the air contained in a standard football stadium.) As an amazing bonus, the carbon gathered from collecting pollution is then placed under high pressure, which converts them into diamonds. The profits made from the jewelry are used to support the construction of additional towers. One “Smog Free Ring” is equivalent to 1,000 cubic meters of clean air. Roosegaarde has already set up one of these towers in China’s capital city. Through a collaboration with China’s Ministry of Environmental Protection, the designer installed the purifier in Beijing’s 751 D.Park on September 29th. There’s no word on how long the Smog Free Tower will remain in Beijing. Since the Roosegarde designed the purifier to be mobile, he intends to bring it to other cities around the country. Ultimately, the designer wants to place up to 25 of these towers in Beijing’s public parks,.

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