Beautiful Connections: The Art of Conversation
The color of conversation, 6 million colors, and why Flash is more antisocial than your misanthropic uncle.
Universal love for the iPhone aside, when it comes to the creative exploration of a gadget’s cultural context, Apple has nothing on Nokia. To promote the Nokia’s E71 smartphone, Wieden + Kennedy London came up with Beautiful Connections — a multimedia homage to the art of conversation.
From text art to a mobile app to short films inspired by the beauty of everyday conversation, the microsite is pure visual indulgence.
It also invites visitors to create their own audiovisual art piece, using their computer’s webcam, microphone or keyboard to explore how text, sound, color and motion influence your message. Here’s ours:
The winner of the film contest, Ewan Watson, used rotoscoping to create S I G N A L S — a colorful play on communication signals.
You can see the other 4 film finalists here, here, here, and — our uncontested favorite — here.
Which brings us to our only gripe with the project: The inherent unshareability of Flash content — the medium blatantly contradicts the message if none of the work can be shared in “everyday conversation” via individual permalinks or… gasp… embed code.
How did the W+K team miss the irony here?
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>How did the W+K team miss the irony here?
Hm. Could it be that they make dog food, but don’t eat it?