Reed + Rader

Interactive animation for SQUIDDIES - See all collection here.

How is digital going to change fashion? What is the future of fashion editorials? Photographic and animation duo Pamela Reed + Matthew Rader are probably the most qualified people to answer these questions. Reed + Rader have been together for 10 years, living and working together. Before everyone else, the couple understood how to take advantage of the Internet in order to promote fashion and create new fashion stories, using the GIF format and augmented realities. Their aesthetic is giving a fun, dreamy, colorful, fresh and futuristic twist to the fashion industry. Let’s have a chat with these two fashion geeks! See more;

▼ Read the interview ▼

Dora Moutot (DM) interviews Reed + Rader (RR);

DM: How did you meet? For how long have you been working together? Is it hard to combine love and work?

RR: We met online on a pre-Facebook social media website. We learned that we both were attending the same school (Art Institute of Pittsburgh) and living in the same dorm.  We both also had blue hair, so I guess it was meant to be. In February 2013, it will be 10 years together. For us it feels natural to work together, there’s not much separation between Reed + Rader and Pamela + Matthew. 

JOCK JAMS - See all collection here.

DM: Where do you live? When are you originally from? What and where did you study?

RR: We live in NYC. Originally we’re both from small towns in America. Pamela is from Pennsylvania and Matthew is from Ohio. We both studied Photography at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh and then we transferred and continued our studies at the School of Visual Arts in New York. Then it was a few years off and back to school at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP).


DM: How do you think the internet and new technologies are going to transform fashion? How do you see the future of fashion? Don’t you think fashion is actually stuck in traditional medias?

RR: Digital clothes is going to be big, especially when augmented reality reaches its peak. We foresee designers creating digital clothes in on screen environments instead of actually creating tangible items.  Digital is a space that has only begun to be explored for fashion. 

POW - See all collection here.

DM: Who are your clients? How do you combine art and commerce? Do you find it hard?

RR: Our clients are usually in the fashion or advertising world who are looking to try something new and take advantage of the internet platform. The lines between art and commerce for us are very blurred almost to the point of sometimes having no separation.  I think with our aesthetic if you are coming to us for a job, you already know what you want and what you’ll get.

DM: Where does your inspiration come from?

RR: Internet, Video Games, Films, Friends, Cats.

POW - See all collection here.

DM: Do you believe in a “New aesthetic” fashion movement?

RR: Fashion only seems to have come curious of the internet in the last few years. And while the fashion powers that be may not quite be sure what to do with it it’s definitely on their radar. Fashion is thought of as this cutting edge thing but the status quo is actually really quite conservative. A decade of mainstream internet acceptance has usurped things though. Now anyone with cool ideas and great personal style can be a poster child for the fashion industry much to the chagrin of the old guard and admiration of the rest of us. Pixel prints are cool, but it will be better to see what happens in fashion after designers get it and dive a little deeper.

DM: You were already working with the GIF format and creating dreamy imagery before the rise of the Tumblr culture and aesthetic, how do you feel about it? How do you feel about early internet nostalgia, glitch and gifs becoming very popular? Do you find it inspiring?

RR: We’ve made GIFs since we were kids playing around on our Geocites and Angelfire webpages but it wasn’t until 2007 that we started seriously considering that the GIF could be a platform for us. People on 4chan, SomethingAwful, YTMND, etc had been making awesome stuff for quite a while but in fashion it had never really been done except maybe as a laugh.

So, being huge internet nerds, we abandoned our 4x5 camera and jumped into the digital abyss and haven’t really looked back since. The Tumblr juggernaut seemed to start around the same time but to be honest we never really used it much as a platform although people certainly shared our stuff there a bunch. Not that the GIF format was ever ours but there was a time when it felt like it was and now that there are a bunch of people doing GIFs in fashion so it feels less unique although it’s still mostly what we do. Looking back, the growth of the GIF as a platform in the last five years has been a good thing because it’s validated all the crazy things we were pitching to clients and editors years ago. The market had to be created and it’s finally caught up. We may be 10 steps on to the next things but GIFs are still new to a lot of people and that’s good for us.

Glitch GIFs are neat for a minute but we never personally got into them.

V - See all collection here.

DM: What is interesting about your work is that you use technology but you also use analog photography, illustrations and collage. How can you be so good at everything? And how would you describe what you do?


RR: We try to mix the real with the unreal. Our work ends up digital in the sense of being on the internet or on a screen, but it’s composed of many elements that were created by hand. Almost all of our collage work is done by cutting and gluing paper on top of each other. We love being able to create something tangible but then have it exist in the digital world. We quickly get bored so we’re always wanting to try something new.

Usually we have no idea how to technically do that something new so we have to teach ourselves. The internet is amazing for tutorials and self learning, take advantage of it!

AR_AVATARS - See all collection here.

DM: Who are your favorites digital artists?

RR: Artists making a living doing crazy shit on the internet and loving it. Artists that do cute things. Artists doing AR, VR, games, computer vision, terraforming, and other things in outer space. Friends With You, Memo Akten, Rachel Maclean, Brody Condon, Marc Owens, 0100101110101101, TYMOTE.

DM: Favorite blogs/websites?


RR: A mixture of political, science, art and cooking blogs.  Also, anything with cats on it. MisterWubba, Meowzas, TheVerge, TheGTF, TheYoungTurks, TheDish, BadAstronomy, AllRecipes 

DM: The characters in your work are usually very cartoon like. You seem to both still have a child soul, which is awesome! Who does the styling? Do you work with a team? ( hair, make up etc?)

RR: We work with a great team who understands us and we trust. We often work with stylist Aki Maesato who has a similar aesthetic to us. We’ll often send her inspiration images or sketches, she’ll shoot us back sketches, and then it will continue that way. We’ll keep each other updated along the way during the entire process.

Interactive animation for NAPTIME - See all collection here.

DM: What’s next for Reed and Rader?

RR: We stopped doing stills because it didn’t make sense to us to look at stills online when the medium allowed for multimedia. Now, video and GIFs seem dated because they are passive mediums and viewers can’t interact with them. Getting people to interact with our work either online or in physical installations is starting to be big for us. Being able to take our 2D worlds and walk around in them in 3D like a game is very exciting too. Besides that, simple things. More Cats. More Gardening. World Domination. Zero G. Colonization of Mars.

REED + RADER

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Interview by Dora Moutot for Triangulation Blog - July 2012 

Dora Moutot is a young journalist specialized in fashion within the digital culture. She is the founder of La Gazette du Mauvais Gout where she writes about bad taste, eccentric and kitsch trends. www.doramauvaisgout.tumblr.com

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Liquid Rainbow by Edwin Deen

Edwin Deen made this great colorful installation based project which uses color pigment, an electric tap, a few meters hose and a plain garden sprinkler. It is called Liquid Rainbow and it springs the liquid wherever it is installed but the visitor doesn't know when it will start to work until the repetition of the spray movement intensifies the seven colors on the walls. See more;

Liquid Rainbowis is being shown at "Use it Again", an ongoing exhibition at Ampelhaus, Oranienbaum, through August 26.

via | IGNANT

64 CCFL by Nils Völker

Nils Völker who lately was focused working on his generative installations made from plastic bags inflating and deflating them through a microcontroller such as One Hundred and Eight and some other great variations from this, has just launched a new beautiful light installation called 64 CCFL, which is  mainly made from so called cold cathode fluorescent lights which are used as backlights in computer monitors. The whole installation is controlled by a program running on a micro controller which constantly adjusts the power for each light tube and therewith the height of the luminous parts.

64 CCFL, 2012 > ccfl, mdf, custom electronics > 1 x 1 x 0.4 m

SHEROES - Dialogue between Rea, Lorna & Andrew

Tony Halmos's GIF from Sheroes #4: Madonna

We continue our post series on SHEROES, the monthly Toronto art event series that began in July 2011 and has curated on and offline works that playfully and performatively explore the iconography and fan culture surrounding the “League of Legendary Ladies.”
In the first part of our series, we published an essay by David Balzer called “Is She a Snob?” , an account of the series and its “vortex of gleeful, deconstructing snobbery”. Forthcoming will be interviews with some of participating artists in Virtual Season. 
In our second part, we have below a condensed and edited email dialogue between Sheroes founder Rea McNamara, GIF art curator/participating artist Lorna Mills , and participating artist Andrew Benson. See more;

I. On “Mythic Woman Power” 

ANDREW BENSON (AB): I feel as an artist involved with Sheroes for some time that it is something that always revealing itself in new ways, like its defiance of easy classification leads me to constantly develop my own perceptions of it. The "snob" stuff is good to consider, but I have to say that I see it in a totally different view.
Do either of you want to talk about how Sheroes itself is experienced from different angles and through different media and how that relates back to this whole thing about fandom being a collaboration with the celebrity that ultimately creates our understanding of the celebrity?

LORNA MILLS (LM): Looking at Sheroes from different angles is pertinent, because at the beginning I told Rea that we shouldn't document the events so much as mythologize them. (A photographer told me once that mythologizing artwork was what you did when you documented it.) 

REA MCNAMARA (RM): I do like that “fuckyeahsheroes” was often very “fuckyeahlornamills”. 

And even though "herstory" & "sheroes" & "mythic woman power" makes her cringe, she’ll still talk your ear off about a Virago Modern Classic . 

LM: Yes, “fuckyeahlornamills” worked out quite nicely for me. (And the dear Victorian and Edwardian Hens, who wrote all the novels reprinted by Virago Press, would never have used those goddessy terms.) 

But now you’ve touch upon my snobbery by taunting me with campy 70's feminist-speak. 

Rollin Leonard & Lorna Mills for Sheroes #5: Yoko Ono

RM: Andrew and I actually had a gchat about that "herstory" playfulness. I had related to him the number of times I'd been asked if Sheroes was an "all-woman" effort; he talked about how we'd managed to avoid the "sticky and sometimes ugly gender-political stuff". 

LM: I kind of thought the presumption that all the Sheroes participants were female showed an amazing lack of imagination. 

The sticky and sometimes ugly gender-political stuff was avoided because no one wanted to participate in a mono-culture; with that in mind, cultivating a wide variety of artists and performers came naturally. 

But it wasn't just about gender. Other classifications were broken down in terms of identity. The GIF artists really were as international as I could find and the age & exhibition experience of the artists covered a wide range. 

Nothing is more pleasurable than to ignore a current artificial hierarchy.

RM: Lorna, I love that. "Current artificial hierarchy". The Sheroes Stan residency definitely came out of that. 

LM: As a whole, all the Sheroes events were queer-friendly, racially mixed and damn sexy. And considering the cultural mix of the city we are based in, how could they not be? 

That said, the project is also very much about gender without leaving out men or leaving out women. 

RM: The Toronto-ness is a meta layer. I always like bringing up Will Munro & Vazaleen. 

We've been lucky with Sheroes in being booked at venues that had a reputation for being inclusive queer-friendly spaces. (And straight up: the gays loved Sheroes before anyone else did!) 

I do think it's worth pointing out though that we still have issues around racially-mixed events happening in Toronto. While it's definitely a diverse city, do enough events happen where you see that intermingling, especially within the arts & culture community? I don't necessarily think so. Toronto Arts Council only implemented a cultural equity policy in the early 1990s, so there's a complicated history there in terms of representation and support for particular practices. 

LM: WTF? Are we not post-racial??????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? ???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? (Well, that amused me.) 

II. On Fandom 

RM: I think a lot about how the open space we created with Sheroes was akin to participatory online spaces like slash & fan fiction communities. 

Take the whole canon/fanon thing that's at the heart of many fandoms. A lot of the transformative works you'll find come from this process where seemingly individual, private yearnings for a canon (the original source material) produce these fannish works that, alongside other fannish works, create a better version of that favourite show/film/book/etc. This then created the "fanon" — the "fan canon" where fan-created facts are accepted as canon by the fandom. 

Does that make Sheroes a fandom? We brought together a seemingly disparate group, and presented them in such a way — with the pomp and pageantry of goddessy terms — that created a fannish-like narrative. 

Helen Adamidou's GIF for Sheroes #8: Marianne Faithfull

AB: I like the relationship to fandom that you talk about, but I think one thing that is pretty interesting about Sheroes is that often you have artists with very little relationship with a celebrity's image or work contributing. It's sort of posing as the actions of fans, but really it's something else, or maybe it's positioned as fandom. 

There were a few Legendary Ladies that I wasn't that familiar with, TBH, like Dusty and to some extent Etta , so part of the assignment for me was the research that went into it. Even ones that I'm really a fan of (Yoko , Nina , Dolly ) I spend a lot of time researching on YouTube and Google image searches and Wikipedia.
LM: True, the fandom wasn't always genuine. There were a few legendary ladies that I couldn't have cared less about, but even if I was a fan, I still had to look for some sort of way my work could enter into the stream. That's why I was easy-going about submissions not being literal. I would have hated the project if everyone submitted portraits. 

RM: Madonna was a "difficult" Shero for me. Early on, a few of the Sheroes were chosen based on speculation around which Shero would bring the ppl out. (Apologies if this punctures any mythologizing efforts!) 

AB: I'm SHOCKED. But really, I suppose it's important to always remember that this thing wasn't just a conceptual feminist art project but also had to function as an event that people actually showed up to. Had to have a little appeal to the rest of the world. 

IV. On “Sexiness” (part I) 

RM: Why's the "sexiness" so important? What was it about that quality that drew in the GIF artists? How has the exhibition of the GIFs at Sheroes events been different from any other exhibitions? (Ie. BYOB , Speed Shows , etc.) 

 Yoshi Sodeoka’s GIF for Les post-Gendered et les autres group GIF show at Sheroes #10: Grace Jones.

LM: The sexiness is refreshing. Outside of some queer art practises in this city, anyway, there's still a lot of passive-aggressive minimalism with an exalted sense of its own importance, purity and rigor (plus the delusion that it’s original). I'd rather sleep on a bed of nails. Real BYOB events, where a bunch of young artists ACTUALLY bring their own projectors, can have the same sense of occasion as Sheroes, but obviously we are thematic and an integral part of something bigger. 

As for what draws in all the good GIF artists, I can't be sure. I was so surprised at how it snowballed from six or seven artists to 30. Treating it as an organized crew of artists rather than a different curated group show each month was easier for me. The excitement we generated for each other, each month, as we started to post our new GIFs was pretty infectious. 

AB: The relationship to other on/offline shows of internet artists is interesting. Many of these shows seem to me to function as an establishment of boundaries around a particular clique of Internet Artists. I guess this is what Lorna is referring to with her "current artificial hierarchy" comment. Sheroes might be just as cliquish (the Facebook group ?), but it seems like it's running on a different logic. 

LM: I was concerned about Sheroes GIF artists appearing cliquish. And that's a risk when you work with a regular crew. But I was always happy to hear from people who wanted to take part, especially if they came out of left field with great work I had never seen before. 

AB: I'm curious how strategic you guys were in who you invited to join in. Or was it just a friends of friends kinda thing? 

LM: Initially the invitations went out to artists that we were connected with on social media and who we thought might say yes. (That sort of thing is important, as we didn't want to deal with rejection). 

The only strategy I employed (that I'll admit to) is that this whole thing was a great opportunity to connect with artists I admired and to find out about younger artists who hadn't received much attention. The fact that almost everyone from the beginning wanted to continue contributing, shaped how this ended up being organized. 

AB: I like what you said about it being an excuse to meet and get to know some artists. I feel like the monthly rounds of contribution really got me acquainted with a bunch of really cool people, and had me paying more attention to people I was already aware of, because they would pull out some random thing that showed a whole other side of them or their methods. 

LM: My regret is that I'm now finding out about some more really good artists who would have loved to be involved. I wish I had known sooner. 

V. On “Sexiness” (part II) 

AB: To respond to Rea's earlier question about "sexiness" — I think it's hard to have an honest celebration/exhumation/invocation of female celebrities without dealing with the "sexy". 

I tend to think a lot about drag in relationship to Sheroes for whatever reason: the overt performance of absurd and at times disturbing sexiness, or some sort of mimicry of it. 

Dolly Parton, for that reason, was the ultimate Shero for me. 

LM: It’s all about drag and otherliness. 

RM: Drag and otherliness and Dolly were revelations. I felt like we were at a point where everyone was comfortable with the space that was created. The works by Manuel Fernández and Rollin Leonard in particular seem especially emblematic of that. I really enjoyed the work-in-progress jpegs folks shared. 

In fact, the “work in progress” tag was something I felt you actually kinda started, Andrew. 

AB: I guess maybe I did start the process screenshot thing, but that's sort of something I always just do now and then. I have this sort of superstition about my working process, where enough things have crashed or been accidentally deleted or hard drive busting where I often pull screenshots from whatever I'm working on. There's a really fleeting quality to a lot of things that I do, especially the more experimental video and programming stuff, so I have made a real discipline of constantly taking screenshots and doing recordings of whatever is happening in case that's the last I see of it. 

Anyways, that's how I started making GIFs in the first place, actually. 

RM: I really enjoyed the open process. It was like doing a residency, but instead of talking over breakfast or dinner the status of your written work or art piece, you'd see an image in the FB group or on G+. That kept me going with the documentation. I really enjoyed the generosity folks had with their artistic process, especially from the more established artists. 

AB: Sheroes really felt like a communal thing sometimes, and I was part of a conversation with other people struggling to meet their responsibilities. My favorite example was Rollin Leonard's painstaking struggle to do Dolly drag. It was obvious that someone had to do it, and felt like it was such a great morale thing to watch that take place. 

I work really hard on Sheroes things (partially because I'm procrastinating on other big scary projects and I'm a workaholic), but it's really cool that you can sense there are all these different levels of intensity that people treat Sheroes with, and it all has a place. The conversation around Youtube videos, process shots, and later on the Stan contributions really took it deeper for me. I liked that it felt like the conversation got started on G+ but then moved around to different online spaces (Tumblr, Facebook) and how the different spaces created different conversations. 

VI. On Being “An Event” 

AB: I sort of wish more art things functioned in these hybrid spaces. Are there any other ways where it being an (IRL) event created specific constraints? 

RM: There's an ease to the online aspect — the Tumblr, the interactions, screen shooting those interactions, capturing the process & work that occurred — that isn't there for IRL. It is an event that needs to be "sexy" the same way that the Shero has to be for their mainstream. Which is funny, because the IRL is the operating theatre that makes these performances, event GIFs, videos, etc. exist. It's the spectacle. 

That being said, the limitations and the hybrid space that was created definitely was the equivalent, of say, punk's three chords or that experience of being in an after-hours at 5 in the morning. When everything aligned — great performances, willing participants, good chunes, seizure-inducing GIFs, etc. — it was really magical. 

Follow the SHEROES post series at http://www.triangulationblog.com/search/label/sheroes

#0000FF - Facebook Art Gallery

Yesterday was the opening of #0000FF, an online gallery founded and curated by Georges Jacotey. The gallery is hosted on facebook, (it is a facebook page converted into a gallery). With the opening #0000FF launched its first show called Line #1, presenting four pieces, one by artist, and that's what I loved, how the artists presented their pieces through the facebook features. You can see two different ways so far, one is a kind of digital "flip book" by viewing an entire animation passing the pictures/frames one by one and the other one is a piece divided to be displayed as whole in album view.
It's interesting because the exhibition form depends on facebook and its layout updates, that makes me think about if facebook changes its design, the exhibition form couldn't work anymore or maybe it could provide new ways to present works.. I recommend to like it on facebook :), also to be noticed about the upcoming shows > #0000FF. See more;


"#0000FF Gallery presents Line #1, the first installment of a micro-exhibition thematic series featuring the work of Anthony Antonellis, Kim Asendorf, Manuel Fernández & Hugo Scibetta. Each artist will present a single piece inspired by and paying tribute to the 'Blue Aesthetic'.

The necessity for aesthetic interaction between users and online interfaces was evident ever since the appearance of the first social network sites. Our contribution, wheter it is an outcome of an online curatorial process or simply them alterations to satisfy our personal taste, has prove to be a vital factor for the success of any new media. By being a Facebook Art Gallery, #0000FF's goal is to enhance facebook users' visual experience and challenge the network's limitations by addressing aesthetic, social and political issues."

Blue Brightness by Anthony Antonellis

(36 photos) view mode: "flip book" see work

Asdfff by Kim Asendorf 

(48 photos) view mode: displayed as a full album see work

#0000FF Transition by Manuel Fernández

(16 photos) view mode: "flip book" see work

Untitled by Hugo Scibetta

(16 photos) view mode: displayed as a full album see work

0,1 by Michal Kohút

0,1 is a stunning interactive instalation based on arduino, made by Michal Kohút in 2010. Basically the lights in the room are temporarily turned off whenever the person wearing the glasses blinks. It all happens so fast that the person wearing the glasses does not even notice the change. See more;

Technical support: Jakub Hybler, Michla Matous.

via | CreativeApplications

The Tsiolkovsky Trick by Sascha Pohflepp

The other day Rhizome reminded me of this great work by Sascha Pohflepp called "The Tsiolkovsky Trick" which consists in a found 3D-models of space rockets from Google 3D Warehouse. They were ordered and assembled chronologically into one unbroken chain of our attempts to transcend the gravity well. The Tsiolkovsky Trick was created in 2011 and shown in the first BYOB London. See more;

RESPECTING Sascha Pohflepp's piece, I thought it would be great to see it also as an online scrollable object, by getting a similar visual looks than the video. See the complete object at Sascha's website.

          

The Wizard of Oz experiment & Book

Dennis Neuschaefer-Rube made two projects based on the "The Wizard of Oz" movie, one is a video/video-installation called "The Wizard of Oz experiment" which shows the movie 5829 times side by side. The movies are arranged in rows from left to right and time shifted by exactly one second each. The video starts at the top left, with the first second of the film and finishes bottom right with the last second of the film. The projection is in a continuous loop that repeats every 98 minutes. A computer voice speaks the whole subtitles of the film „The Wizard of Oz.“ in a 68-minute loop.

And the other one is a book, containing 98 pages where the images (frames) are arranged chronologically in rows from left to right. See more;

2 min excerpt video_

The Wizard of Oz – Book

In the book, "The Wizard of Oz", all of the 140,000 filmstills of the movie are published. On 98 pages the images are arranged chronologically in rows from left to right. One page contains 1440 pictures which correspond to exactly one minute of film. So the page numbers also show the minute of the film from which the stills were taken.

via | VVORK

Facundo Pires

Facundo Pires tells us about his work and its process;

"Some of my images consist in the photographic record of public space intervention, likely displayed on abandoned, torn apart places I would not see again (and hence I’ll miss any eventual public reception to it). Other times I work right away with broken printers, with their heads overloading ink in the reprinting of several images superimposed; random-work failed machinery standing as a counterpoint to the surgical perfection of digital devices. Intendedly I leave some photographs outdoors for several days, then I look back on them; the exposure of the materials to weather phenomena as time goes by in an uncontrolled environment challenges and my creation skill and thrills my ideas of control over my own production." See more;