Friday 18 October 2013

Canal Mills: contributions

A short piece I've written for Canal Mills, which is a warehouse club back up in Leeds



My contributions to their blog will cover arts and music.

Tapping into the context of a CAD-reliant world of fluro snakeskin and trippy renaissance gifs, French design team UNICORN create some pretty awesome visuals.With projects ranging from shop-front installations and data mapping, right through to fashion show animations and beat-match visualisations, their tumblr portfolio makes for both an impressive and a really interesting scroll. UNICORN infuse a critical technological element into their work. Their use of 3D scanning (employing the mega-successful kinect sensor) takes the physicality of the body/sculpture and slots it into the surreal, digital environment of the Internet animation

The graphic aesthetic is that of early-days myspace embellishment, whilst the soundtrack ranges anywhere from an electro-synth organ symphony to a glitchy techno clickbeat - and this experimental, musical aspect of their work is particularly interesting. Under the impact of generative design and digital imagery, UNICORN explores contemporary music visualisation in a tangible way. Such a playful approach to matching moving images with live track mixing not only looks really effective, but really fun, and could certainly provide some creative performance possibilities for live DJ sets and shows in the future.
For more examples of their work, including their video projects, visit the Unicorn Paris tumblr page

Additionally, this mentioned work reminded me of this: Rhizomatiks