It's Nice That

Jenny Hval

2010-09-02T12:00:00Z

For far too long experimental poetry has been isolated, from both the poetry mainstream in the UK and from practises in the visual and sonic arts which share its primary concerns. Experimental music and sound poetry, and collage / conceptual art and concrete poetry has so much in common and yet they are divided. There are younger artists breaking this divide, and Jenny Hval, a brilliant singer, musician, poet and theorist from Oslo is doing some groundbreaking work at the moment.

www.myspace.com/rockettothesky

George Lois

2010-09-02T08:30:00Z

It’s fair to say I probably wasn’t as familiar with George Lois’ work as maybe I should have been. Among a plethora of big jobs he was responsible for the ‘I Want My MTV’ campaign as well as the initial advertising campaign for Tommy Hilfiger but what you’ll probably best know George Lois for are some of the 92 covers he designed for Esquire Magazine, including these two iconic images pictured here.

www.georgelois.com

Zut Alors

2010-09-02T07:43:00Z

This ambiguous little link was attached to an email I received this week from Zut Alors in New York. I won’t say much more about what happens when you click it other than stick with it because it’s sort of brilliant. Their website is a covertly overt (or vice versa) place where the work is as surprising and varied as it is playful. ”! is for!”.

www.zutalorsinc.com/float

World Basketball Festival: Make Something Workshops

2010-09-01T17:00:00Z

Just over two weeks ago, Nike, Converse and the Jordan brand launched the inaugural World Basketball Festival in New York. The creativity went well beyond the basketball court though and saw the most recent series of the Make Something workshops take place.

Started in 2008 the The Make Something Workshops bring in some of the world’s best artists and designers working today and gives local teenagers a once in a lifetime opportunity to participate and learn from them. We caught up with founder Aaron Rose to find out more. (Read more)

www.makesomethingschool.com
www.nikesportswear.com

It's Nice That Issue #4

2010-09-01T12:05:00Z

It fills us with immense pleasure to announce that our fourth printed publication, Issue #4 is now available to pre-order. Full details are listed on our dedicated Issue #4 page.

We can reveal that we have interviews with the likes of Nick Knight, Neville Brody and Miranda July as well as features by Adam Buxton and Sara de Bondt among others. The work section is brimming with top work and to continue the trend with previous issues, all orders placed in the next month (before midnight on 30 September) will receive a special screenprint from James Jarvis, commissioned especially for the issue.

Pre-order Issue #4

Márton Koppány

2010-09-01T12:00:00Z

Márton Koppány has been producing work of immense quality in the field of visual poetry for over thirty years. His work is led by a suspicion and engagement with the limits of language and verbal expression, and maintains a incisiveness that always attracts me. There’s really great work coming out of Europe at the moment, there is a renaissance in visual poetry and he is at the forefront.

www.logolalia.com

Inventory Studio Updates

2010-09-01T08:30:00Z

Fantastic website re-jig from Londoners Inventory Studio. A scary amount of work being down by these two, very talented young guys and well worth a good chunk of your time this morning. I’m sure they’ll be many envious eyes at various design studios the world over this morning.

www.inventorystudio.co.uk

Kim Høltermand

2010-09-01T08:25:00Z

Nice and fresh update from Kim Høltermand and his rather beautiful portfolio. Reminiscent of sci-fi and fantasy landscapes, his new series Tuve includes a collection of brilliantly captured rocks that hang suspended in an air-water ether like satellites.

www.behance.net/gallery/Tuve

The Artist Is Present—Portraits

2010-08-31T17:00:00Z

Earlier this year, performance artist Marina Abramović did surprising things to people by doing nothing much at all. And while she sat in a chair in a MoMA gallery, sometimes staring, sometimes not, Marco Anelli went about photographing everybody who visited, creating a body of work hugely appealing in the way it captures human variety, both physical and emotional. (Read more)

www.marcoanelli.com
MoMA’s Flickr

Ragnhildur Jóhanns

2010-08-31T12:00:00Z

Ragnhildur Jóhanns is a unique craftswoman, and a really exciting poetic presence emerging from Iceland. She creates poem objects, pure concrete poems, that is literally fashioning books out of her work and embodying the text. A really gifted and vital approach to poetry.

www.raudka.blog.is

Lissie Weather

2010-08-31T08:30:00Z

My weekly music video has been a little delayed this week due to the bank holiday weekend, but to make up for it I’ve got a corker. American singer/songwriter Lissie’s new track, Cuckoo, has been masterminded by creative directors Phil Clandillon and Steve Milbourne in the form of an interactive music video, which is controlled by live weather data.

The video uses the Google Maps API, a live weather feed and (optional) HTML5 geo-location, was shot in-camera with no post production and looks pretty sparkling. We were exctied to know more, so we grabbed Phil for a little chat. (Read more)

www.lissie.com/weather

Chris Milk: The Wilderness Downtown

2010-08-31T08:30:00Z

This has been doing the rounds on social networking sites as well as many of the popular design and music blogs over the last 24 hours and rightly so. Written and directed by Chris Milk The Wilderness Downtown is an interactive, data-driven Chrome Experiment using HTML5 video, audio, and canvas. More than that it is a stunning example of a viral campaign that is engaging beyond 30 seconds and actually surprises you. It’ll take no more than five minutes out of your day but I guarantee you’ll be talking about it for the rest of the week.

www.thewildernessdowntown.com

Bob Cobbing

2010-08-30T12:00:00Z

Cobbing is one of the greatest British poets of the twentieth century and without his work, concrete and avant garde poetry as it is today would not be wholly possible. I have always been indelibly drawn to the humour in his poetry, how it accompanies his verbal sophistication and irrepressible energy. He achieves what so much smarmy mainstream poetry cannot – a true sense of Britishness, the banality, the irony, the fugue of England.

www.ubu.com

Aakash Nihalani: Updates

2010-08-30T08:30:00Z

One of our favourite New York street artists Aakash Nihalani has updated his site with some new works including Starecse I, Around from earlier this year situated in Brooklym (pictured). Since I last checked his site he has installed as far a field as Delhi and Vienna as well as getting magkinetic.com up and running featuring three series of digital artworks. Well worth a check.

www.aakashnihalani.com

Steven Fowler

2010-08-30T08:30:00Z

This week’s guest post is a bit of an unusual one for It’s Nice That. Instead of plucking someone from the design world, we turn this week to poet Steven Fowler. An advocate of concrete poetry, which is verse in “the typographical arrangement of words is as important in conveying the intended effect as the conventional elements of the poem, such as meaning of words, rhythm, rhyme and so on.” (Thanks Wikipedia) As an authority on the subject and respected pensmith, we’re excited about a week full of words.

Read interview and see posts

Things

2010-08-28T09:00:00Z

For your weekly helping of Things we have an unintentional homage to all things hand drawn… (Read more)

Sac Magique

2010-08-27T17:00:00Z

The best sort of weird coming out in the illustrative powers of Sac Magique. From the real and imagined characters and beasts that populate his work, I can only bring to your attention all the lovely details and special use of colour – it’s up to you to make sense of it. Have fun!

www.sacmagique.net

Derek Boshier

2010-08-27T12:00:00Z

Derek became known as a 60’s pop artist, and has been prolific ever since. I think that his paintings and ink drawings are so inspiring. He also sends the most amazing hand drawn letters to his friends, in beautiful envelopes covered in his drawings. These would make a brilliant book.

www.derekboshier.com

Judith Seng

2010-08-27T08:30:00Z

Nice work from Berlin based artist and designer Judith Seng. Her Trift (pictured) and Rise projects both aim to “explore the idea of perfect, high-gloss surfaces by creating and destroying them within the same object. Each form and surface derives from the individual size, characteristics and gradual transformations over time of the underlying tree-log.”

www.judithseng.de

Simen Johan

2010-08-27T08:30:00Z

Poor rat. Poor, poor rat. Chances are you have no idea what I’m talking about, because the pictured photograph by Sinem Johan is so wonderfully abstract that you hadn’t even noticed that this was two snakes fighting over a furry feast. I thought it was some kind of odd cow’s tail at first, but I digress, you can find the shot in the Swedes 2007-2009 collection.