In the 1980s, video cassette technology made it possible for “mobile cinema” operators in Ghana to travel from town to town and village to village creating temporary cinemas. The touring film group would create a theatre by hooking up a TV and VCR onto a portable generator and playing the films for the people to see.

Cujo (Lewis Teague, 1983)

In order to promote these showings, artists were hired to paint large posters of the films (usually on used canvas flour sacks). The artists were given the artistic freedom to paint the posters as they desired - often adding elements that weren’t in the actual films, or without even having seen the movies. When the posters were finished they were rolled up and taken on the road (note the heavy damages). The “mobile cinema” began to decline in the mid-nineties due to greater availability of television and video; as a result the painted film posters were substituted for less interesting/artistic posters produced on photocopied paper.

Terminator 2 (James Cameron, 1991)

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December is gift-giving time, and if you're not very organized indeed, late November/early December threatens to be characterized not by a pleasant anticipation of quality-time-to-come and a much-needed respite from work and research, but instead by a certain existential dread, or at least a rather more ontic version, most often directed at visions of the mall parking lot.

Being the vigilant designers we are, Design less better organized in November under the auspices of creating some generative art for the holidays. We especially liked Jer Thorp’s idea of using letterforms as elements in a snowflake, but we wanted to personalize the results. In what even now we have to admit was a brilliant intuitive leap, we thought, "why not use the names of our loved ones? Then we can give them to our loved ones instead of going to the mall."

Once we knew we were making these as gifts, we decided we would digitally fabricate ornaments from our designs. This threw a structural requirement on top of the aesthetic one, but, remembering the mall, we plunged bravely forward.

A detail from a generated snowflake.

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December is gift-giving time, and if you're not very organized indeed, late November/early December threatens to be characterized not by a pleasant anticipation of quality-time-to-come and a much-needed respite from work and research, but instead by a certain existential dread, or at least a rather more ontic version, most often directed at visions of the mall parking lot.

Being the vigilant (and vigilante) designers we are, Design less better organized in November under the auspices of creating some generative art for the holidays. We especially liked Jer Thorp’s idea of using letterforms as elements in a snowflake, but we wanted to personalize the results. In what even now we have to admit was a brilliant intuitive leap, we thought, "why not use the names of our loved ones? Then we can give them to our loved ones instead of going to the mall."

Once we knew we were making these as gifts, we decided we would digitally fabricate ornaments from our designs. This threw a structural requirement on top of the aesthetic one, but, remembering the mall, we plunged bravely forward.

A detail from a generated snowflake.

Read More...