24 gifts for you!

Over at the website of a secret club we're throwing a little gift your way every day until Christmas eve. Previous days' gifts will not be available, so you best check in 24 times if you want them all.



So far we've given away the crown of King Winter, some delicious gift wrap, a magical landscape and today you'll get a classic collage challenge, unless you read this tomorrow...

Subconscious art at Aros Art museum - a rant

Since moving to Aarhus, I've been baffled by the dumbed down attitude towards art here. First off, theres the shop at the art museum Aros. What they mainly sell is cook books, nick-nacks and babba-pappa toys. Not that there's anything wrong with either cook books or babba-pappa toys, there's just no connection to the art - it's like any other slightly out of it "design" shop, catering to slightly out of it customers. You could argue that a shop isn't an important part of the museum, but why not use this amazing opportunity to continue the vision you have for the museum in the shop Like they brilliantly do at Design Museum in London? You learn about design in their shop - at Aros, you learn about cooking with a Weber grill.

In town, the galleries aren't helping either. Far too near to my home a gallery called "Art Snob" has opened, here's a few of their paintings

And there's a gallery that advertises: "design your own painting" - send them a holiday snapshot and they get their band of Chinese craftsmen to copy it onto canvas - I'm tempted to use this service to see what they'd do with a broken jpeg or a gif animation.

So, on to the good stuff:
Tomorrow at the smaller and edgier art museum Aarhus Kunstbygning the graduation show of the art academy opens, including work by Ea Borre whom we'd very much like to work with for a secret club, but until then, I recommend going back to Aros where they currently are having an interesting exhibition of subconscious art. (a notion nicked from Matt McCormick's brilliant film "The Subconscious Art of Graffiti Removal".)


some of the work on display at Aros a few days ago

The piece sits somewhere between perfomance and sculpture, and that's an interesting place to sit. I've been back to see it a couple of times and it is ever changing, but the magic of it is that you rarely see anyone changing it.

Trust me. Start looking at subconscious art - and be honest about it, don't do it wih a snidey, ironic twinkle in your eye - and your world will become a lot more agreeable.

A Storm in your Hand

Things are really slow here as you may have noticed - due to a certain little fella arriving with winter, but now spring is here and it's high time I got to work. Most of the work at the moment is for a secret club as that is what I enjoy mostly at the moment for a couple of reasons. Firstly, it feels good to be part of a collective, to rid myself of "my" personallity and don the gelled personallity of a secret club. It also feels good to design in a way where I haven't got the full control, where I am not meant to have the answers, but instead we must find them together, but lastly - and probably most importantly - it pushes the work in new directions, and the method of working in new directions.

Well, enough soul searching, on to the work.
We recently designed a whirligig for the children's at and science magazine OKIDO and it ended up like this



The vigilant reader will notice some conceptual recycling from an old collage:



but it was a long way to get to that - first thoughts were on a tornado tearing up a house Wizard of Oz/Twister style, we also thought of wind gods and cloud surfers but in the end, we created our own little story of ships that are fish and the weather being considered "good" or "bad". A mostly did the illustration and I made the mechanism work and squeezed it all in to on page in the mag.



it's been a fun little project, making a a paper mechanism that actually worked. I am aware that we may have overcomplicated things - kids will need help form their parents to build this, but designing a piece of communication that takes collaboration to use is very close to what we're all about.

Now, go buy OKIDO and support their and our mission to make this place magic.



I'll be back soon with exciting news for those living in or visiting Aarhus...
//EARTH ASTRONAUT OUT