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petapixel.com: To celebrate its 20th birthday, Old Navy has created what it’s calling a #Selfiebration machine. What is a Selfiebration machine you ask? Why, it’s a 15 foot contraption that turns Twitter selfies into ephemeral pieces of balloon art, à la halftone stylization.
5 comments:
Sasha Mieles
said...
I don't understand the sudden obsession with taking selfies, but the technical side to this machine is so interesting! I am impressed that the entire process of rasterizing a low quality photo for the machine in order to fill up balloons with air to the correct pressure without breaking them all in 30 seconds. I feel like the balloons wouldn't be able to handle that stress for 8 hours straight. Hopefully they don't break, because that machine is ingenious.
Really cool idea! I'm interested in knowing more about how the machine automatically turns each photo into a dual-tone map for the balloons to interpret. This reminds me a lot of the "Wooden Mirror" art exhibit. From a business standpoint, this is a perfect idea for Old Navy, it goes along very well with their aesthetic. Also curious to know how much money it took to develop a machine like this, I feel like the balloons would eventually break unless the latex was of a really high quality.
More and more I am starting to see advertising promotions and gimmicks that are centered or focused on a specially built gadget. Whether it is a large scale Rube Goldberg machine or a sophisticated interactive machine placed in a largely populated area and filmed in secret.
What is most exciting to me is that it seems like this departure from animated spectacle to malleable and physical displays of wonder has created a new industry of fabricators. Magicians and tinkerers whose final creations will only exists for a mere moments. And what seems to be the running trend is that the most creative and unusual use of materials is what is valued the most and seems to make the most impact. It promotes so many wonderful ways of thinking about the world. How best to recycle items into other purposes, how to dismantle things into their core components and reassemble them to make something entirely new.
This is beautiful. It reminds me of Daniel Rozin's wooden mirrors which work similarly but instead in live. It also reminds me of Philip's Lumiblade installation https://vimeo.com/6315769. The common thread between these works of art and the selfie is our obsession with our image, or essentially, our narcissism. American culture is very individualistic and the selfie is a manifestation of that. I love the way the machine looks like a halftone print, which pairs antiquity with modern tech.
I have to agree with Feldsberg, companies are really loving these interactive installation machines recently, and I think that is really really cool. I was at the Calgary Stampede this summer and Coca Cola was there advertising with their "Share a Coke" campaign with machines that printed custom coke cans for you with any name you entered. Personally I really love these cool gimmicks, which seem to be equal parts sculpture and machine. They present a cool new form of art which I thoroughly enjoy. I would love to know more about who is actually building these machines for these companies, because they seem like places I might like to work in the future.
5 comments:
I don't understand the sudden obsession with taking selfies, but the technical side to this machine is so interesting! I am impressed that the entire process of rasterizing a low quality photo for the machine in order to fill up balloons with air to the correct pressure without breaking them all in 30 seconds. I feel like the balloons wouldn't be able to handle that stress for 8 hours straight. Hopefully they don't break, because that machine is ingenious.
Really cool idea! I'm interested in knowing more about how the machine automatically turns each photo into a dual-tone map for the balloons to interpret. This reminds me a lot of the "Wooden Mirror" art exhibit. From a business standpoint, this is a perfect idea for Old Navy, it goes along very well with their aesthetic. Also curious to know how much money it took to develop a machine like this, I feel like the balloons would eventually break unless the latex was of a really high quality.
More and more I am starting to see advertising promotions and gimmicks that are centered or focused on a specially built gadget. Whether it is a large scale Rube Goldberg machine or a sophisticated interactive machine placed in a largely populated area and filmed in secret.
What is most exciting to me is that it seems like this departure from animated spectacle to malleable and physical displays of wonder has created a new industry of fabricators. Magicians and tinkerers whose final creations will only exists for a mere moments. And what seems to be the running trend is that the most creative and unusual use of materials is what is valued the most and seems to make the most impact. It promotes so many wonderful ways of thinking about the world. How best to recycle items into other purposes, how to dismantle things into their core components and reassemble them to make something entirely new.
This is beautiful. It reminds me of Daniel Rozin's wooden mirrors which work similarly but instead in live. It also reminds me of Philip's Lumiblade installation https://vimeo.com/6315769. The common thread between these works of art and the selfie is our obsession with our image, or essentially, our narcissism. American culture is very individualistic and the selfie is a manifestation of that. I love the way the machine looks like a halftone print, which pairs antiquity with modern tech.
I have to agree with Feldsberg, companies are really loving these interactive installation machines recently, and I think that is really really cool. I was at the Calgary Stampede this summer and Coca Cola was there advertising with their "Share a Coke" campaign with machines that printed custom coke cans for you with any name you entered. Personally I really love these cool gimmicks, which seem to be equal parts sculpture and machine. They present a cool new form of art which I thoroughly enjoy. I would love to know more about who is actually building these machines for these companies, because they seem like places I might like to work in the future.
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