christiancarlsson

dothegreenthing: Cut Your Shower by Michael Bierut 4/23 The...

Tue, 05 Mar 2013 11:14:58 -0500

Cut Your Shower by Michael Bierut 4/23

The shower scene in Psycho is one of the most famous moments in movie history – and it gave Michael Bierut, partner at Pentagram, the perfect way to scare people into cutting their shower short:

“Taking a brisk, water-efficient shower is the best way to start a productive day. And the most famous shower ever filmed was one that was notoriously interrupted. Had Janet Leigh been a bit quicker, she may have made it to the end of the movie!”

WHY?

Cutting 2 minutes off your showering time will save 16,425 litres of water a year – and you’ll still smell just as fresh.

HOW?

Download this Showercast of short, sharp songs to sing in your short, sharp shower.

We’re selling 23 limited editions of this poster printed on FSC paper with sustainable ink for £23 plus VAT, postage and packing with all proceeds going back to the Do The Green Thing charity. You can buy one here.

The animation on display at the V&A which was hosting the...

Sun, 11 Nov 2012 13:18:00 -0500

The animation on display at the V&A which was hosting the opening party of London Design Festival.

Luca d’Artista from christian carlsson on Vimeo. At the...

Fri, 09 Nov 2012 22:07:00 -0500

Transferring the animation

LED's

Luca d’Artista from christian carlsson on Vimeo.

At the end of each year Turin hosts a festival of light; Luci D’Artista, Artist/designer Martino Gamper was invited as one of the artists of 2012. A running theme in his furniture designs is simple geometric shapes which served as a starting point for me to realise in motion.

This new technology displays video through pulsating LED lights in circular motion. The LED’s are very bright diodes in Red, Green, Blue which combined can display 4096 colours. The video is transferred from a computer and stored on a chip next to the LEDs. Images are displayed at a refresh rate higher than 50 frames per second and works really well in rotation whereas animation from the centre going outwards is slower.

It was really interesting to design motion-graphics for a very different, circular screen compared to the normal 16 by 9 wide-screen video. To make a high impact visual, simple shapes combined with accelerated/decelerated motion seemed to work best.

#monkeylectric

#fixedgear

I little video I helped out on for do the green thing, a nice...

Mon, 29 Oct 2012 11:09:00 -0400

I little video I helped out on for do the green thing, a nice public service to help us lead a greener life. http://www.dothegreenthing.com/

I stabilised the dolly shot as it was a bit shaky..

Pretty amazing little story of which I’m happy to have...

Fri, 12 Oct 2012 12:59:00 -0400

Pretty amazing little story of which I’m happy to have been a small part of to tell!.Hoping to do more work for this great platform again!

LDF 3-screens I was happy to be get the honour to transalte the...

Fri, 12 Oct 2012 12:42:00 -0400

LDF 3-screens

I was happy to be get the honour to transalte the LDF branding to a motion-graphics piece across three screens displayed at he V&A. I also had the opportunity to go down and see it in action at this beautiful museum, alongside the great Thomas Heatherwick exhibit.

Graphic design: Domenic Lippa & Jeremy Kunze

I made the London Design Festival brand come to life through...

Wed, 29 Aug 2012 10:21:23 -0400

I made the London Design Festival brand come to life through animation at Pentagram, Partner: Angus Hyland / Graphic Designer: Jeremy Kunze

Do the Green Thing

Mon, 09 Jul 2012 11:46:00 -0400

I animated and graded this piece for DDGT - an initiative to help people lead a greener life.

I directed this film for Pentagrams 40 th Jubilee, more info on...

Mon, 11 Jun 2012 17:58:00 -0400

I directed this film for Pentagrams 40 th Jubilee, more info on my website! www.christiancarlsson.com

Make sure to check the post below after watching this!

Twixtor test I found some quite low-quality footage on...

Sun, 25 Mar 2012 19:44:00 -0400

Twixtor test

I found some quite low-quality footage on gettyimages and wanted to try Twixtor on it. Most tests I’ve seen before has to do with sports-footage, but I wanted to see if it could be done with human emotion. This also led me on to look at the object’s facial symmetry. I took each side of the face and mirrored it to see which part would be the most beautiful one. The outcome shows that one side of the face is more feminine looking than the other one.

Southbank - London This is a test of how to integrate 3D and...

Sun, 25 Mar 2012 19:36:00 -0400

Southbank - London

This is a test of how to integrate 3D and live-action. The plan is to track moving footage and make a video piece out of it.

Thamesmead - London This is a test of integrating 3D with live...

Sun, 25 Mar 2012 19:35:00 -0400

Thamesmead - London

This is a test of integrating 3D with live action.

Photo

Fri, 02 Mar 2012 07:39:45 -0500

Photo

Fri, 02 Mar 2012 07:39:05 -0500

In the Midwest of U.S.A — Vedic City

Mon, 12 Sep 2011 14:01:22 -0400

I went to Vedic City in Fairfields Iowa while traveling through the U.S this September. The city was initiated in 2001 and is a secluded (because of its location) mini community built for people practicing the Maharishi transcendental meditation technique. Maharsihi was a spiritual guru whom introduced the Beatles to this technique 1967 while meeting in London and embarked on a life long relationship. Maharishi himself died on February 6 this year (source bbc.co.uk) but has affected hundreds if not thousands of people directly through his knowledge and philosophy which is based on ancient indian knowledge.
We had been driving from Chicago for several hours and arrived in the late afternoon perhaps a tad late to see people from the community just walking around doing their business. The sky was dark and had great, big clouds in one direction approaching, so there was no good time for people watching.
I was very interested however in getting a personal experience and perspective on Vedic City and ask a few questions about their views on life and creativity.
I found a sort of town hall house where I knocked on the door as I saw a man sitting in the front of the room. He politely asked me to enter, I introduced myself, my purpose and asked if I cold film an interview. The guy sitting in the chair was named Jim Palmer, a practitioner of transcendental meditation for some 40 years. He had a certain energy about him and it’s not only the bright orange T-shirt he wore that I’m talking about here. He was focused and energetic but relaxed. He wasn’t worried about the camera at all so I got a pretty good 20 minute talk with him on camera where he explains the how meditation and creativity can be connected.
He explains the philosophy of meditation and the benefits of it. The topics we talk about are fundamental really but he explains them well by using gesticulation and metaphors. Transcendental meditation is the state of mind which is still, the universal experience of practitioners are that there’s a silence in oneself, a certain peace which you can reach only without effort.
One of the metaphors he uses is by comparing our state of mind to walking and lying down. You can run, you can walk, you can walk a bit slower you can stand still and in the end lie down. It is the sam with thoughts, transcendental meditation is to reach the place where the thoughts come from, where they emerge, once reaching that state you are in the now and can perhaps not stop your thoughts, they are there constantly, but after practicing people experience a silence. I
It’s about not using all your senses outwards it’s about using not taking in from the outside, but rather to focus inwards. When being in touch with oneself, Jim says that this is a source of true happiness, energy and creativity. To reach this state of mind is effortless which is why it can be difficult for stressed people to reach as they are used to work hard and push themselves to reach success. It’s not about performing!
I ask what creativity means to him. I like his answers as they are long and enthusiastically delivered. Creativity is often connected to art, such as painting, but for Jim it is more about a fundamental matter, where it can mean to listen to oneself inner emotion, intuition or whatever you would like to call it in order to make the right decisions for yourself and create a reality, a life that brings you maximum amount of pleasure. To make the right choices and work with yourself, treat yourself right and create opportunities.
To look at creativity as a bi-product of a state of mind brings the question to a new level, I personally like the way that he talks about creativity as something greater than an ability to be artistic. To be creative can be to create a life that you are happy with, to be able to make the right choices without knowing it in order to get where you want.
I will quote him further and look back at the tape to get the correct information and if I make a visual dissertation I’ll include the interview with Jim Palmer as a part of the research.

Kids & Creativity

Mon, 12 Sep 2011 13:55:17 -0400

We’ve all been there

‘I never let schooling interfere with my education’
- Mark Twain

We’ve all been to school and I think that it would be a good idea to see what todays kids are up to in school, how important or unimportant art based subjects are treated. What does creativity mean to kids? Do they know what it is?
I spoke to my mum today and she had heard a talk on radio by a Swedish guy who’s pretty clever and he said that creativity depends on family and parents heritage. Something I can agree on.
For example, if a kid aged 7 or younger is asked to make some x-mas decorations they will probably make them as they want them to look like, whereas a kid aged 8 and older would start being aware of how they look and try to imitate that. This is where parents and other older role-models play an important role. If someone is telling you how things should look or be written, then there is a limit to the creativity. It becomes square and boxed.
I saw an interesting documentary about a ‘child prodigy’ called Marla Olderstadt, she was aged 4 at the time and had then sold 24 painting to a gathered value of $40.000. It started with her father Mark painting and he gave her a canvas to paint on the living room table. The paintings was exhibited at a local friends coffee shop and the first one was sold for $250. The parents claimed not knowing anything about art, the dad seemed more optimistic to his kids new won fame as it became world wide news rapidly. The mum however seemed more concerned with preserving her daughters innocence and let her paint when lust kicked in.
The art community debated the question, what is art? If a four year old can paint modern/abstract art that is sold for thousands of dollars, then what? As it seems the fine art market is just as it were a market with supply and demand regulating prices. Little Marla couldn’t meet the demand and people were asking themselves how she later could produce many paintings in a short period of time, however not when a camera was around. The father told the documentary maker and other media that she was very shy and that she sometimes would get into a zone and paint on lust.
The story was the picked up by CBS 60 minutes and a hidden birds eye-perspective camera of a canvas was installed for a period of about three months. The footage showed Marla paint barely two paintings and her father would give her instructions on how to do it, telling her ‘not like that, you make me crazy’ ‘paint the red’. It made her clearly rebel and not wanting to paint, at one point she also asked her dad to help her paint as he had done before… this was in front of the camera and it was a cringing moment of embarrassment. She did though supposedly paint several more paintings off camera. It started to smell of a hoax! The parents claimed being portrayed falsely and tried fighting the mass-medial war by releasing a 90 minute tape of Marla painting… though many of the paintings look suspiciously different from one another. The art buyers in the local town and from other parts, (Marla fans) got angry and didn’t perhaps trust the father…
The documentary had a unique perspective as the film maker was a student aged guy and the parents trusted him as he followed them since the start in the local newspapers. At one point (on camera) the family was going to exhibit Marla’s work when Marla herself said: ‘I didn’t do that one, Max did (or what ever her little brothers name was).
The dad and the local art dealer obviously saw their chance in making extra money and the documentary maker had swayed his opinions of the parents and does confront them in the end of the film. The only time he speaks into the camera is in the end when he says that he is very disappointed with them.
I believe that Marla was painting some nice paintings, but what kid doesn’t? It got hyped and the dad saw an opportunity to make some serious $$$, I wonder if they ever got sued?
Want to check out Marla’s art yourself? You be the judge:::
www.marlaolmstead.com http://enwikipedia.org/wiki/marla_olmstead
I think it had a sentimental value cuz it meant that art appreciators could believe that she had a special gift, creating their own meanings in her art, often existentialist, deep.
Anyhow the market was there as she stirred debate and caused publicity.

Bohm on Creativity

Mon, 12 Sep 2011 13:51:11 -0400

Creativity is perhaps impossible to define in words, the more you know about it the harder it is… I think that it would be interesting to ask kids what creativity is to them.
Bohm speaks about how the ultimate drive of the scientist is to createsome sort of order, a beautiful order by the use of science. The scientist that would like to walk the easy, untrue way to get pleasure might bypass correctness and only strive for an end. The real scientists however have got a drive to make something real and beautiful.
”..what he really is seeking is to learn something new that has a certain kind of significance: a hitherto (until now) unknown lawfulness in the order of nature, which exhibits unity in a broad range of phenomena. Thus he wishes to find in the reality in which he live a certain oneness and totality, or wholeness, constituting a kind of harmony that is felt to be beautiful. In this respect, the scientist is perhaps not basically different from the artist, the architect, the musical composer etc., who all want to create this sort of thing in their work.”
I would like to say that science is as Blackfoot or English yet another language a form of expression to being able to express oneself and subsequently create.
Kids are seen as creative as we all have been there and started our lives by trying to walk, speak and jump… we have all succeeded by trial and error. If a kid doesn’t know something it will try, just without being afraid to fail, discovering all things that are new. Many people look back at childhood with romantic shades being sad over the fact that it is over, a time in the past, a lost paradise. “Growing up” is something we all have to do and school is a big part of shaping us into being more responsible, doing things for an end goal and not for it being fun. You can’t have fun all the time…
School starts to be more of a task at hand where one has to pass exams to please others like teacher and parents, learning is mainly conducted by repetition. Something happens with many kids at this time and some of the kids start to dislike school, the play and fun and learning disappear. Does it have to be this way? Is it good that it is this way? Most work places are the same, work for salary and do it by repetition. And is this what the society of today needs? Should we care what the society needs? And that need that the society is applying to us, has it turned in to a self-destructive pressure that creates more problems than opportunities. See I just wrote two distinctions… . black/white, problem/opportunities, maybe it isn’t that simple,.. categorizing is difficult but it seems to make things clearer for communication in order to define what the spectrum of the greyscale is. Anyhow…
The undisputed freedom to try and fail that kids inherent is one definition of creativity. Adults envy that and feel that it is impossible to re-obtain. I would say that this is untrue. In the right environment one can regain these qualities. One workplace that is encouraging their employees to have that one part of creativity is an advertising agency that was voted best ad company to work for 2007, which I went to for a work placement interview this spring. Wieden + Kennedy.
This is from their blog:
As we get older, wiser and bigger we need to make sure that we don’t lose our edge. We need to keep our thinking, our people and our environment fresh, provocative and surprising. In kim P’s works, we want today ‘wrong side of the tracks’. Because the craziness is what generates the big creative leap what makes this a stimulating, challenging, fun place to work. It can be difficult to remember this when you’re working as hard as we have been recently. But we have absolutely no interest in turning into a big, boring agency. Still crazy (after all these years)? Let’s hope so.
Keep the faith, true believers!

Bohm On Creativity

Mon, 12 Sep 2011 13:48:00 -0400

I bought this book yesterday at Foyle’s bookshop charing x road. I really like that bookshop by the way, really extensive back catalogue.
I started reading the book last night and only managed to get through the foreword which seemed more difficult to understand than the actual text.
I wrote down words that I didn’t know of in my moleskin notepad only to learn something new so that next time I read or write I might understand and use those big words. I encountered words such as:

denominator
anthropomorphic
repository
ignoble
eschews
dichotomies
intrinsic
affinity
perennial
encavates
paradigm
torpor
endemic
epistemic
implicit
acclimation
anomaly
inenomble?
vaporous
epherneral ?
impetus
discern
contravening
sleight
dissipation
relinquishment
discernment
protege

I will look up these words soon…
The introduction told me who Bohm was and a bit about creativity from a philosophical viewpoint. I think that I must look at creativity from a philosophical point of view to get an in depth understanding of what it actually is.
The introduction written by physicist ‘Leroy Little Bear’ who read and was inspired by Wholeness and the implicate order by David Bohm in the mid-late 80’s talks about comparison of creativity and perception from a native american point of view as he worked and knew a group of them.
Leroy Little Bear writes about how speaking both English and Blackfoot (which is his native language) can send you down different thinking pathways. He met Mr.Bohm and they acknowledged that Bigfoot as a language is very different than English and how that affects the thinking in a very distinct way. For example, a good Blackfoot* speaker can say the verb ‘to go’ in calculated: 356,200 different ways in Navajo. The words created are likened to sounds from a periodic table which can be combined in different ways to express oneself. That is a proof of how another language can be more creative as such, which is unaccessible for us to truly grasp as we are fostered with european language.
English and european language does divide the thinking in a way of thinking which is judging things all the time, leaving less space for freedom of thinking and creativity. We think often in good/bad, black/white, absolute/relative, either/or which gives us thought patterns that are logic, square and steers perception towards mechanical reflexivity.
Blackfoot* philosophy is about constant motion, constant flux, all creation consisting of energy waves, the essence of life being movement. How everything is connected, as our scientific world view could be said to be today (atoms)
European language stresses syntax (ordering of words in a sentence) Blackfoot stresses morphology (the way individual words are constructed) A language like Blackfoot* is all about process and action!
Furthermore is also spoken about how science and art can and are connected in the way that what drives the scientist to do what he does is to find something profoundly beautiful just as the artist. The scientist has taken belief in some rules and does from that point on work to find answers, an order perhaps prediction. But ultimately feeling that he or she has gained knowledge and discovered something that was previously unknown.

Distertation Topic Decided

Mon, 12 Sep 2011 13:45:08 -0400

OK. So I’ve finally decided what my topic is. And I am glad that I reconsidered my topic as I’ve known that it’s important to choose a topic/question that is interesting and fairly easy to research + something that I find engaging.
This is an engaging question because everybody has got an opinion about school education. We’ce all been there and liked it more or less.
Today is debated increasingly about kids with problems, not fulfilling the targets set out by government and education authorities. Kids stab each other and drug taking is staring at a earlier age by the day… at least it seems.
I will look into what creativity is in order to answer my question and also look at why the school is constructed the way it is. What I’ve heard thus far the school system is ultimately based in philosopher Plato and some other greek mythology. It was changed rapidly around industrialization to meet the demands of society. Technology requires education and know-how to use it. That knowledge was often practical, as for the farmers. Although I heard on the radio in Sweden where a test was made. An IQ-test was performed on farmers and industrial workers at the age of 20. They then tested them again at an older age only to find out that the ‘stupid’ farmer had retained his IQ, whereas the industrial workers had decreased their IQ rate by monotone work. The farmers undertook work that requires ‘thinking’ and initiative was essential. The brain is like a muscle, but if you don’t get to exercise that muscle in the way you could and perhaps want, then you are limited.
I want to look at those limits, the limitations of school and disregard to some young peoples way of learning. Maybe is it here that we hold the key to the solution of the growing youth problem in especially U.K and America.

Bohm on Perception

Mon, 08 Sep 2008 13:49:00 -0400

To understand creativity we need to look at perception. If I see a circle it might just be a circle, but if you watch the circle from the side it will appear as an ellipse. If you view it from the exact side it will be a line. You can also look at it as being black. Or as being atoms, electrons, quarks.
In the video on youtube, Bohm speaks about how science is creative and perceptual, even the word theory is a good example of this.
Theory is derived from Theatre, . . Theories don’t give knowledge, the theatre in the mind - theory, is used in science and therefore perceptual. Knowledge and science is a byproduct of perception. A chosen belief