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?

Life, Visually Dissected

An owl, a worm and a lizard walk into a bar…

The glorious thing about natural habitats is that one organism can house millions of others. And we often seem to forget that — when we stroll by a tree in the park, the only “organism” we’re likely to see in it is an 8-year-old scrambling for the next branch up.

But a recent campaign for WWF (that’s the World Wildlife Fund, not the World Wrestling Federation, ahem) visually dissected the fascinating microcosm of life that exists inside (and on, and under, and around) some of those our flora and fauna stand-bys.

Of course, if you’ve been paying attention lately, the complexity of life inside a coral reef won’t surprise you. But it’s still a stride-stopping reminder of just how much we can lose by doing so little to preserve it.

Not unlike Chris Jordan‘s work, the campaign borrows from the revelational capacity of data visualization to inspire deeper environmental awareness through an emotional understanding of an issue that would remain abstract and irrelevant if presented as dry statistics — a visceral bridge between left brain and right brain.

Out of DDB Brazil.

Hyper-Marketing Meets Meta-Art: Tate Tracks

How to lure twentysomethings, or what Basement Jaxx have to do with high art.

We love seeing “advertising” that swells far beyond the traditional commercial boundaries of the industry and into the broader cultural realm in a way that inspires, provokes, and adds poetic resonance to the cultural dialogue. 

Today, we take a lesson in culturally enlightened marketing — an inspired effort by London ad agency wunderkind Fallon for the Tate Modern. The project, dubbed Tate Tracks, aimed to get more 18-to-24-year-olds into the gallery. And it did it brilliantly, through the one medium most relevant to that demographic — music — using it as a vehicle to connect young people to art.

So they invited several prominent music artists — including Basement Jaxx, Chemical Brothers, Graham Coxon from Blur, and more — to walk around the museum and find a piece of art that inspired them to write a music track. The rest is, well, art history.

Another layer of the effort included Your Tate Tracks, a music competition aimed at unsigned bands and musicians aged between 16 and 24. The YouTube community chose 20 finalists, out of which the judging panel — Graham Coxon, Basement Jaxx, Roll Deep and Radio 1 DJ Huw Stephens — selected the winner: U.K. indie trio Kotki Dwa.

But what really makes this effort special isn’t just that it redefines the notion of “advertising” — it also expands the traditional conception of what a gallery is, from a place that merely collects art to one that helps create it.

See the project’s full music output here. For more Tate goodness, check out their iTunes outpost, where you’ll find 4 years worth of incredible talks by some of the art world’s biggest thinkers.

Curating Twitter: Three Hand-Picked Must-Follows

Because #followfriday is insufficient, props are to be given, and we like Big Words.

Twitter is quickly evolving into a superb way to discover fascinating content you normally wouldn’t have, by following interesting people who tweet with great editorial curation. The key, of course, is exercising your own curatory judgment in identifying said interesting people. And since we’ve been in the business of sparing you unnecessary curatory work since 2006, here’s some help — 3 incredible Twitter personas on whom we have a massive, butterflies-in-the-brain culture-crush.

NICK BILTON

Nick Bilton may work at a pillar of traditional media — The New York Times, to be exact — but his interests are closer to what we like to call enlightened futurism: Cultural and technological innovation of the most compelling kind. You can count on him for a steady stream of fascination across technology, new-age publishing, media, data visualization and miscellaneous finds of cultural relevance.

Nick may tweet infrequently, but when he does, it’s quality stuff.

Stats:

• Followers: 3,072
• Following: 342
• Tweets/day: 0.8

BBH LABS

Underwritten by Mel Exon and Ben Malbon, @BBHLabs is the Twitter outpost of — you guessed it — NY-and-London-based neo-agency BBH Labs.

These guys just “get it” — “it” being all the diverse incarnations of the business of ideas, from design to advertising to social media to interactive wizardry. Mostly, they seem to share our belief that the future of the marketing and advertising industry is not in the pushing of product but in the pulling of ideas — from innovators, from artists, from various cultural agents who pursue their own passions that may just so happen to make for great marketing.

You can count on @BBHLabs for a variety of creative explorations, but especially for bleeding-edge developments across data visualization and crowdsourcing.

Stats:

• Followers: 2,888
• Following: 802
• Tweets/day: 3.6

CHRIS ANDERSON

If you’ve been reading Brain Pickings, you’re well familiar with TED and thus with Chris Anderson — TED’s brilliant curator but oh-so-much-more.

Unlike most people who tweet as the “public face” of a big organization or institution (sorry, @SamsungMobileUS), Chris goes well beyond simply promoting TED’s (already fascinating) content and actually walks the walk of what TED stands for — ideas worth spreading — sharing brilliant ones across all facets of culture: Design, art, sustainability, technology, social media, philanthropy and miscellaneous curiosity about the world.

Chris also writes The Untweetable — a roomier outpost for insight that can’t be contained in 140 characters. There, you’ll find anything from the continuation of compelling, heated Twitter discussions to bonus content beyond Twitter to original social media experiments.

He comes with our highest stamp of approval — a rare combination of superb editorial judgment, compelling cultural curiosity and, to use a TEDism, incredible moral imagination.

Stats:

• Followers: 100,422
• Following: 269
• Tweets/day: 5.6