Cutlery Use Dev Org, tablecloth Amandine Alessandra during A Dinner with DesignMarketo at the Barbican Gallery.
In Rainbow Veritas is a new edition of In vino Veritas, a plain white bistrot tablecloth that reveals its pattern as wine, blueberry juice, curry sauce or tea is spilled on it, diverting the attention away from an awkward situation, as an irregular pattern of flowers blossoms in the stain.
The new collection was recently launched in London at the dinner hosted by DesignMarketo
at the Barbican Gallery.
I was also part of the 2010 edition of the Emerge show during London Design Week.
During the opening, guests were invited to pose as human letterforms/numbers
and were given a polaroid of their mini-performance (instant typography deserves
instant photography, doesn’t it?).
Roudoudou is the name French kids give to a sort of red hard candy cast in a sea shell.
Deluxe Roudoudou is a silver and coffee lollipop specially commissioned by DesignMarketo for the Coffee & Friends edition of FoodMarketo during the London Design Festival 2010. It combines the idea of a cheap sweet with the English idiom “born with a silver spoon in one’s mouth.”
Like Super Natural, FoodMarketo was in the Brompton Design District, one of several such districts in the festival. A joint effort by Apartamento magazine and Design Marketo, a company that allows young designers to get their products (from greeting cards to tables) to a wider audience, this engagingly ad-hoc basement installation, designed by Max Lamb and Lars Frideen, was half cafe (selling coffee from Coleman Coffee Roasters) and half pop-up shop. The cafe furniture was for sale, as were objects like the irresistible lollipops flavored with coffee and tea that were cast in silver spoons by Amandine Alessandra.
Pilar Viladas, NY TIMES, T Magazine, September 2010,link here
Coffee & Friends is a plain white bistrot tablecloth that reveals its pattern as coffee or tea is spilled on it: designed after the circle stains left by coffee cups, hundred of tiny smiling round faces appear on the fabric, sympathising with the clumsy guest.
In vino veritas(wine reveals the truth) is a plain white tablecloth that only reveals its damask pattern as wine is spilled on it. (Perfect for clumsy guests!)
This is part of a research on ephemeral stencils, looking into “programming” a shape or word to appear, evolve and disappear according to changesin its environment. Traditionally, damasks were woven in a single colour, with a glossy warp-faced satin pattern against a duller ground, causing the thread to reflect the light differently according to the position of the observer. I liked the idea of a pattern that would only be revealed under certain circumstances, just as truth and secrets would.
The tannin can be fixated by washing the tablecloth in cold water with 1kg of salt instead of laundry powder, although this may cause the color to change accordingly to the wine used. (See below)
In vino veritastableclothes will be shown and sold during the Milan Furniture Fair, in the Foodmarketo pop-up shop/gallery. FoodMarketo is a joint project by Apartamento magazine and DesignMarketo. Where: Milan, Via Masera in front of n.10
at the Kaleidoscope space. When: 13-18 April 2010
“All is flux, nothing stays still, no man ever steps twice in the same river“, observed Heraclites.
This intelligent (because human) letterform allows a message to change from an instant to another, in an attempt to reflect on the fleeting quality of the moment.
It is flexible enough to keep the message relevant and up to date as its context changes, but also has the visual presence of a giant billboard.
In this phase of the project, ephemeral typography is used to induce people to feel the weight of passing time,
with its flow symbolically interrupted by halting the traffic.
This typographic performance was only recorded by taking screenshots of the images transmitted by a public webcam (showing the iconic Abbey Road crossing) onto a computer.
As this medium displays one “real-time” image every 4 seconds, a fraction of second seems to be extended
for the length of time necessary for the image to be refreshed.
Using a public webcam to display a message also considerably broadens its audience.
