Offf

I'm attending the Offf Festival this weekend which describes its theme as post-digital creation culture. Offf is a seven year old conference that originated in Barcelona and this year is being held for the first time in NYC. Some highlights so far have been the designers Paula Scher and Hillman Curtis.

Scher gave an insightful talk tracing her history from the mid-sixties all the way to her current work, large scale politically charged paintings of maps. She began by describing how the sixties influenced her world view. Her interest in hand drawn type evolved in reaction to the Vietnam War. She explained that in her view, Helvetica, being the typeface of choice for many corporate logotypes, was seen as the enemy. It was symbol of those that were responsible for sending young people to die in a foreign land. She posed the interesting question of how the current administration's policies and actions might affect the work we create today.

Hillman Curtis, a self described "commercial artist" chose to focus on one of his non-commercial web films entitled Embrace. He said he needed to make these films to feed the artist part of himself. The commercial feeds his belly, the art feeds his soul. Yeah, I relate. We can do both.

Another really interesting presentation was a group from Barcelona, who created a new interactive musical instrument dubbed Reactable. This new instrument has been generating quite a buzz (no pun intended) lately, so much so that the musician Bjork purchased one for her current tour. Do a search on youtube. They performed a couple of musical compositions that a led a couple of audience members around me to remark that it was too "advant-garde". I loved it. I love popular music as much as the next person but I am also down with pure cacophonous noise. John Cage or Autechre? Yeah, count me in.

It's inspiring to be around these really creative people. I look forward to the next couple of days.

I also had the good fortune to briefly see a friend of mine, Greg Herman, who currently works at the design firm Digital Kitchen. He showed me some of the work he has been doing over the last couple of months and I was completely blown away. Greg is a great guy and ridiculously talented and driven. It is inspiring to see someone who works eighteen hour days just for the love of what he is doing. I need to get back to work.