Creative Allies gives passionate art students, designers, creative types, writers, photographers, videomakers and fans (Allies) the opporunity to work with their favorite bands. Allies can from anywhere in the world upload their creations inspired by music. The creations can be licensed by the musician it was made for.

Musicians on the other hand can post requests for whatever they need made,  and allies can browse jobs to find something that strikes their creative chord.

As part of the Afternoon Travel Type performance workshop led by Professor Karel Boonzaaijer and Prof. Ilka Helmig on three-dimensional typography, the students of FH Aachen created more than 100 characters and symbols. The designs were then used in a four-hour performance in and around the central train station of Aachen.

The video shows impressions of the production of the letters, and of the performance.

Mobile Mobile is an interactive installation by James Theophane, where he reinterprets the Christmas tree and its role as the traditional focal point for a communal space. ’Mobile Mobile’ is a six metre circumference interactive sculpture, and signature piece for the entrance of the Brick Lane studio.

Each phone is individually addressed by a computer to cofunction and create a choral arrangement.  Assigning each phone a tone, the mass is transformed into an aural form that appears to come alive, shimmering and flirting for onlookers.

To add a little xmas spice to the mix, anyone can visit our live stream and serenade bystanders with their keyboard dexterity: xmas.lbi.co.uk

Box Animation is a 3D animation created by Canadian Motion Designer, Jordan Clarke. The animation was presented as an Event installation using matchmoving and compositing techniques.  Box materials were hand painted and scanned into the computer to create the materials for this project.

Click to watch the video.

Silhouettes of Jazz is an animated short movie that outlines the history of traditional jazz music in a virtual walkthrough of a shadow art museum. Shadow art is a unique form of sculptural art that exploits the fact that we can recognize objects from their shadows or silhouettes. Improvisation, a key ingredient of jazz music, is mirrored in the ambiguity of a shadow sculpture: many different 3D shapes can cast the same 2D shadow.

The movie highlights five different milestones in the evolution of jazz: the early songs of field workers, ragtime, New Orleans jazz, swing, and bebop. Each era is represented with a room containing 3D sculptures which cast multiple shadow images at the same time. This unique property is achieved using a novel computational method for the interactive creation and manipulation of shadow art. Given a set of desired silhouette images, a global geometric optimization builds a 3D shadow volume that can subsequently be edited by the artist using a set of 3D modeling tools.

Silhouettes of Jazz was one of the three nominees for the Best in Show Award of the SIGGRAPH 2009 Computer Animation Festival. Authors: Dominik Kaeser, Martin-Sebasian Senn, Mario Deuss, Niloy J. Mitra and mark Pauly.

Urban Screening was produced by  design students from the Universidad del Desarrollo in Santiago, Chile. The students turned the movie into a giant light projection using the walls of the campus building.

When Blu Dot opened their SoHo store in 2008, they became surrounded by the resourceful culture of “curb-mining”: the act of finding furniture and art on the street. Now that a year has passed, mono approached them with a way to conduct their own curb-mining experiment: What would happen if we left a bunch of GPS-enabled Real Good Chairs all over New York, free for the take? Who will grab them? Where will they go? How will they get there? What will their new homes look like? Thus, the REAL GOOD experiment was born.

You can follow the Flickr stream here.

“Man as Industrial Palace” is an interactive installation based on a poster by Fritz Kahn from 1926, exploring the six cycles within the human factory. From the moment on that Henning Lederer got to know Kahn’s poster “Man as Industrial Palace” in 2006, he had the idea to animate this complex and strange way of explaining the functions of a body. He wanted to continue Fritz Kahn’s act of replacing a biological with a technological structure by transferring this depiction with the help of motion graphics and animation.

In addition to the moving images, as a framework, Henning created a cabinet for his work including a mixture of old and new technology. This new version of the “Industrial Palace“ is an installation for the audience to interact with – and by this to explore the different cycles of this human machinery.

For their bachelor thesis, Michael Flückiger und Nicolas Kunz focused on dynamic typography, and more specifically on dynamic typefaces. Since not much work has been done in this field, they devised a system in which a typeface would no longer be defined as static font styles, but would be able to change shape and appearance, reacting to a broad spectrum of inputs.

Read the full story here. Click here to test the system.