Wonderful intro screens on Bjork’s new site. Site design by MM Paris. Love the galactic type.
I’ve heard two versions of her Biophilia intro with either Bjork or David Attenborough narrating the same text. It sounds like a manifesto and it seeks to unite nature, music and technology. Nancy, since you have an iPhone, maybe you could look at this app in total? Might be worth the investment at $13, available here: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/bjork-biophilia/id434122935?mt=8 =====================
Tree of Signs, MM/Paris collaboration with sculptor Gabríela Friðriksdóttir. http://www.flickr.com/photos/buddah/2509630239/sizes/z/in/photostream/ 5 meter tall bronze sculpture using the font created for Bjork’s album Medulla, and erected in a yet to be developed swath of land in Iceland.
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MM Paris received the Tokyo Type Directors Club award in 2012 for Björk’s Biophilia CD artwork, book and iPad application.
http://creativereview.co.uk/cr-blog/2011/july/the-return-of-bjork
more intriguing is Björk’s Biophilia app, which was created in collaboration with interactive artist and app developer Scott Snibbe, and the musician’s long-time design collaborators M/M (Paris). The app opens with a kind of manifesto on nature, music and technology, written by Björk and the Icelandic poet and author, Sjón, and narrated by Attenborough. Once the intro has finished, users can interact with the cosmos shown by using the standard Apple stroking and pinching techniques. There is also a menu that allows access to the individual songs. Like the Radio Soulwax app, Biophilia makes good use of the unique aspects of the iPad and iPhone, particularly their interactive elements. It again places visuals at the forefront of the music experience, providing yet more proof of the creative possibilities that technology is opening up for artists and musicians.
Not that Björk is entirely turning her back on the joy of analogue, however. In the shop on her website, you can pre-order a copy of Biophilia: The Ultimate Edition. For a cool £500, you will receive a lacquered and silkscreened oak-hinged lid case, containing the ‘Biophilia Manual’ along with 10 chrome-plated tuning forks, silkscreened on one face in 10 different colours, stamped at the back, and presented in a flocked tray. Each fork is adjusted to the tone of a Biophilia track, covering a complete octave in a non-conventional scale.
“…but much of nature is hidden from us, that we can neither see nor touch. Like the one phenomenon that can be said to move us more than any other in our daily lives: sound. Sound, harnessed by human beings, delivered with generosity and emotion, is what we call music. And just as we use music to express parts of us that would otherwise be hidden, so too can we use technology to make visible much of nature’s invisible world. In Biophilia, you will experience how the three come together: nature, music, technology. Listen, learn, and create.” — Sir David Attenborough, intro to Biophilia
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collaborative alphabet with inez van lamswwerde and vinoodh matadin http://www.mmparis.com/thealphabet/index.html
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collaborative scarves with Kanye West
Last Fall, Kanye West asked m/m (paris) to design the album packaging for My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. West had commissioned George Condo to create a series of paintings featuring the characters who populate his musical fantasies.During the creative process, m/m (paris) created a series of hand drawn ornamented frames to adorn the powerful and iconic Condo paintings.Playing with the many possibilities of combining the paintings and the frames, m/m (paris) and Kanye West wanted to find a luxurious expression of their creative efforts —and decided to use the most striking combinations and transform them into voluptuous silk scarves.
From a published interview with M/M Paris (Michael Amzalag and Mathias Augustyniak) (Design and Art, Alex Coles editor, Whitechapel and MIT, 2007):
Mathias Augustyniak: “…the more you are a specialist in your field, the closer you get to the essence of things. Only then can you start to have a possible relationship with another field — and this is where things start to become interesting. Being specialists gives us a point of entry — a keyhole through which we can look onto the world. It is in this spirit of specialism that we meet and work with artists.” (188)
On their collaboration with artists Huyghe, Parreno, Gillick: “As graphic design is situated at the crossroads between many different activities it seemed the perfect place from which to establish this kind of fulfilling exchange with practitioners from other disciplines.” (190)
Augustyniak: “From one field to another, there should be respect.” (190)
Augustyniak: “We are interested in dialogue between specialists” (191)
On p. 191, Augustyniak describes a collaboration they did with artists Pierre Huyghe, Phillipe Parreno and Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster for the Venice Biennale 1999. Each of the three artists was given a room, but when the artists decided to band together and project a single film in one room, the other two rooms were left empty to the dismay of the curators. M/M jumped in and created title sequences as paintings on the walls in the flanking two rooms, so the public would have a pre- and post-viewing experience, while seeing the film in the middle. This is such a nice and concrete explanation of the collaborative process. Designers are concrete, we speak in terms of things and actions!
Designers seem to constantly worry about whether they are equal to artists, or simply their “butlers,” as M/M say. They argue that true interdisciplinarity can only happen when designers are elevated to become equals, and not subordinates. That’s another theme of the profession, moving from service to autonomy.
These amazing silk scarves were made by MM Paris (2011) when they were commissioned by West to design his new album “My Beautiful Dark and Twisted Fantasy”. The artist George Condo contributed paintings of chararcters that populate the songs
Of course, design and photography are closely related disciplines. But MM Paris worked with photographers Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin to mesh the two disciplines in a fresh new way, in designing “Alphabet” (2001) and “Alphamen” (2003). This seems novel because the letterform and the photo-fill are so closely intertwined, giving a result that is greater than the sum of its parts. By contrast, in a traditional sense, a photograph is still a photograph without being included in a layout, and conversely, a layout maintains its identity even if the photos on it change. With these MM projects, the photos and the graphic shapes transform so radically into the letterforms, that they would not have the same “identity” as separate images.
