New Frank Ocean video, I fox with this

My song from our Midori game created by TEAMLAB. TEAMLAB is a group of Ultra Technologists that have been active in Tokyo since 2001. The group consists of a wide diversity of specialists including; Programmers, Network Engineers, Designers, Robot Engineers, Architects, CG Animators, Mathematicians and more. TEAMLAB carries out activities across a range of media, from developing web and robot technology, to installation art, video art and spatial design, making the border between Technology, Art, and Design more ambiguous.

We did a little interview with their leader Toshiyuki Inoko to explain the project, see below:

What is your approach towards “interactive design”?

People often say that men who are good at listening are popular with women but people actually enjoy talking more than just listening “if they could speak well”. To take it one step further, people enjoy expressing something more than just viewing a representation produced by someone else “if they could express it well”.

In the era of the mass media, the job of a designer was to attain a form of expression that was perfect in its quality. That was because the only point of contact with consumers was through mass media channels. However, the advent of the Internet and the networked society is changing the role of the designer. Since consumers enjoy expressing something if they could do so well, I believe that design should be about creating tools that enable people who are not professional creators to create things that make them want to “share it with friends”. It should be about tools that make the process of expression itself, something that they once struggled with, into a process that’s fun and enjoyable. It should be about constructing an environment that allows users to share their creations with friends. That is what I think interactive design is.

How did you work on the Midori concept?

Personally, I believe that in Japan, dichotomies such as nature and high-tech, or traditional and contemporary become mingled up, and it is exactly that which makes Japan interesting. For this project, I focused on creating a world with the Japanese “midori [green]”, that green which colours the ambiguous season when spring turns into early summer.
When I was a child, I felt that I could change the world in any way I wanted with my own hands using my imagination. I was always thrilled and excited. Just like when someone buys a new pairs of sneakers and goes out into the world running. It’s that excitement which I’d like players to be able to feel.

How do you and Team Lab regard Onitsuka Tiger’s values?

In a pre-Internet society, I think the priority was to let consumers know about a product or to induce yearning for it by utilizing the mass media and famous celebrities, or by placing products in big retailers. In a society where the Internet takes the centre stage, users consciously collect and evaluate information and share their experiences with the world. Team Lab believes that by focusing on the essential issues, and creating mind-blowing things that address them, users will support products and that will generate distribution. For us, mind-blowing things are an aggregate of details. That is why the values that Onitsuka Tiger upholds resonate with us, and we believe they are crucial for the coming society where users will begin to play a central role.

Please tell us about the Sketch Piston series (about its background)?

I talked about this for the approach to “interactive design” already, but we believe that users have more fun expressing something “if they could do so well”.

We wanted to create a tool that would make drawing and scribbling as fun as it used to be when we were children. When we were young, we let our rich imagination free and drew worlds which we enjoyed exploring. The reason I started the Sketch Piston series was my desire to create a drawing tool that would work to compensate for the lack of that bustling imagination, one that would make adults who are not good at drawing create works that they would want to share with others.

The Sketch Piston series includes a diverse array of works. Some focus on animation while others present comedy-show-like humour. For this project, our focus was on music and the concept was to create a musical instrument that could be drawn and played. I want people to enjoy creating music freely just like when we were children, when everything around us like plates and cutlery could instantly turn into musical instruments.

I want people to draw freely led by their creativity and mischievousness onto the green Midori world of Japan, and enjoy playing with different sounds.

Black Apple Spring/Summer 2011 Featuring Machine Gun Kelly from LightUp Film on Vimeo.

LightUp recently partnered with Black Apple and up and coming Cleveland based rapper Machine Gun Kelly to create a promotional music video for the brand’s latest season. Look out for this online and off.

MANY STEPS from Takayuki Akachi on Vimeo.

The latest story from our Made Of Japan initiative: Many Steps by Takayuki Akachi.
We asked Akachi-san to travel around the world and show us the many ways that steps, metaphorical and literal, unite us in a single, human experience. Akachi-san and his Mexicos went on several adventures that you can check out on his blog. The result of his worldwide journey was the film we’re proud to present you with today. “Many Steps” shows Akachi-san’s journey from beginning to end, in his unique “lone backpacker” style of film that features rhythmically edited visuals that show how humanity as a whole is united, not separated by our differences.
Without getting too meta, this was really a labour of love and a piece of work I’m extremely proud of, hopefully the passion and adventurousness of all involved shines through in the final product. Thanks again to Takayuki Akachi and his assistant Akiko in making this happen.

Bolivian Strings from Takayuki Akachi on Vimeo.

A short piece of documentary filmaking from Akachi-san’s Onitsuka Tiger-sponsored world tour.
Follow him on twitter
and on his blog

The full film, “Many Steps” is coming very, very soon.

Jesse Boykins III | Prototype 3010, a short film from LightUp Film on Vimeo.

A short film by Mr. Jesse Boykins III, don’t forget the III

Also find more of this at LightUp Film’s facebook page

This is really happening

SWAG SWAG SWAG…AAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!..AAAAAAAAAAAAAH!

-Mos Def

Everything Is A Remix: KILL BILL from robgwilson.com on Vimeo.

Rza makes music out of music
Tarantino makes movies out of Movies

The Tarantino Mixtape from Eclectic Method on Vimeo.

As part of our Made of Japan campaign, Onitsuka Tiger is working with Japanese-influenced creatives from around the world who embody the idea of East Meets West. Our Ryoshis, as we are calling them come from a diverse spread of personal and artistic backgrounds that all reflect a sense of artistic purity and focus on craft that is at the core of Japanese creative culture. Throughout the year we’ll be bringing you content from our Ryoshis as they give us their interpretations of our history, products and values.
When it was time to begin work on the campaign, the first person I wanted to reach out to was my friend Emeric “Takeshi” Trahand. Having worked with him during my agency days, I knew not only how talented he was but also how important Japan was to his artistic process. I’ve always considered what Emeric does a certain type of magic, when you view his pieces, you’re almost immediately overwhelmed by the vivid colours and the surreal combination of divergent elements he puts together. Once the “whoa” factor goes away, your eyes begin to explore the intricacies of each piece, putting together the visual story, seeing that every element is perfectly placed in a way that illuminates the meaning of the whole, which always contains a greater narrative meaning.

For Onitsuka Tiger, I wanted Emeric to take one of our more overlooked silhouettes and create something stunning that expressed an important part of our brand history. We talked about a few different subjects related to the LimberUp, which was created as a warm-up shoe for the Japanese Olympic team that was supposed to compete at the 1980 Olympic games. I found it interesting that we created a shoe for a team that never reached the Olympics due to the US-led Boycott of the games. Which led to a discussion on the boycott and the controversy around it.
I think that focusing on the boycott would have been taking the easy way out, since that is the first thing that comes to mind when you think about the Moscow Olympics. We decided to look at that time in sporting history in a less obvious way and ended up finding out that one of the biggest stories at the Games that year was the emergence of female athletes at the Olympics.

In many ways the 1980 Olympics were a turning point for women in sports: 21% of the Athletes at the Games were female, which at the time was the largest representation of women in the history of the Olympics, three of the world records that were set at the 1980 Olympic games still stand today and all three of them were set by women, and individuals like Ines Diers, Caren Metschuck, and Romanian gymnast Nadia Comaneci all received multiple medal honours.

With that in mind, Emeric came up with what you see here, a dedication to the female athletes of the 1980 Summer Olympics, that incorporates the silhouette of the sneaker and Japanese-style ikebana flower arrangements. The bursting flourishes of the flowers mirror the burst of feminine talent and energy at the Games, while the shoe anchors the arrangement to that time period. Of course the presence of the Ikebana arrangement is Emeric’s dedication to Japan and its influence on his art.