OFFF 2007 NYC Recap

PSFK spent the weekend camped out at the Tribeca Performing Arts Center attending the first US OFFF Post-Digital Creation Culture Conference. OFFF featured presentations and performances from digital artists, web and print designers, motion graphic studios and avant-garde electronic musicians over the course of three days. On paper it looked ambitious. Here’s a few of our highlights.

Paula Scher Presented the story of references from her childhood and her father that later influenced the development of her sought after map paintings. Paula spoke about how her work drew from many different experiences in her life. She spoke of rebelling against her hyper-organized father, being involved in political protests in the 60’s, and her love of images created by hand. She also presented a few projects from Pentagram including the Citi logo she originally sketched on a napkin but took over a year to finally approve.

Craig Swann Craig is doing really radical interface work with cameras and computers, specifically the iSight camera on his powerbook. Craig showed how he is adapting the camera to recognize motion, light, and sound and convert that to information the computer can understand and use. His best examples used color to tell the computer through the camera to do certain things. Craig spoke well and got the whole theater buzzing.

Reactable isn’t brand new but to see it in action in person is hypnotic. Sergi Jorda and Gunter Geiger created a new interface for making music using coded blocks that control a computer. The two blew the house up, literally after the first few minutes of their performance when a fuse blew and cut power to half the theatre. The table is controlled by about 2 dozen different acrylic blocks that each contain different patterns on them. A camera under the table reads the location and orientation of the blocks which control sound samples. The table interface encourages a lot of improvisation. Bjork recently used a Reactable table on her latest tour.

Jonathan Harris spoke about his web based projects that aim to explore and understand the human world through storytelling. Jonathan developed sites like 10×10 and WeFeelFine. Jonathan previewed his next project The Whale Hunt. Jonathan documented his trip to the arctic to spend nine days with an tribe hunting whales. He captured his journey on film taking individual photographs every five minutes 24 hours a day. The new site will tell his story from a number of different angles that each user will be able to choose.

Neville Brody delivered the unofficial keynote on Saturday night. Brody is a legendary graphic designer found fame through his work as art director for Face magazine. Brody continues to push the limits of communication using type in graphic design. He encouraged everyone to create unique work and critized the lack of diversity being encouraged in design and music. He commented that too many people feel the need to mirror work being done by others to fit into a category. Brody lamented about the late 80’s when it was much more accepted to experiment and push the limit. He challenged everyone to look deeper and really enjoy the creating the work.

More on OFFF 2007 here.