Jørgen Leth website

It has been a long time underway, but finally the Jørgen Leth website is launched! With a career spanning more than 40 years, 40 films, 20 books, 2 albums and numerous other creative adventures, documenting the work of Jørgen Leth has been a large undertaking. But together Elvira Lind, Mille Haynes, Andreas Hesse, Mikkel Würtz, Morten Hoffmann and myself managed to create a virtual space for Jørgen's amazing track record.

ArtRebels event at TRAIN

The wonderful Århus-based club-night Who Is The Pussy Now invited us to do a unique ArtRebels event for the lovely TRAIN crowd - and we jumped at the chance! So we called in the troops and Friday Feb 27th 2009 we filled up a bus with 30 cool cats and ventured to our nations second largest city.

The line-up will consist of Fagget Fairys, Ladybox, Ung Flugt, Dullen & Dyken, JaConfetti and Specktors who will all be performing an intertwined 6 hour mash-up set!! Visuals will be done by Naja Anker and Simon Væth and we even brought some cool ArtRebels merchandise. I spend most of the night shooting photos, video and doing a lot of dancing!

Penguin Army nominated for an Index Award!

As one of the project managers in Penguin Army I am very happy that it has been nominated for an Index Award.

Penguin army salutes index design award for looking at design not only as a beautiful and aesthetic matter but also as something that can make life better.

About Index Design Award: International design awards are generally assessing design only according to form. INDEX: on the other hand – because of our focus on design to Improve Life - assesses design also according to its impact and its context. We do this to highlight the true potential of design and the broader scope of the design discipline.

Playground Europe is the title of the application and bid for Lund to become the European Capital fo Culture in 2014. I worked as a concept developer and international coordinator during 6 months of 2008. We just found out that the our application was a hit and we have moved onto the next round in the race! We are down to two cities now. Read pdf of concept here.

ArtRebels moves to the Meatpacking district. Want to join us?!

We are moving from our Islands Brygge-based garage to an old butchery and we have a few spare workspaces! The ArtRebels Factory will consist of a fashion and art shop, a café, office spaces, music studio, art studio and much more! Contact carla@artrebels.com if you are interested.

ITU presentation

Today I gave a talk at Copenhagen IT University for a group of post-graduate students. The talk was about cultural communication and social software.

TRAILER PARK FESTIVAL

For the second year running ArtRebels hosted the TRAILERPARK FESTIVAL and luckily it was a huge success for us. Thank you so much to everyone who helped! I've written about the concerts, taken photos and filmed some video - have a look at www.trailerparkfestival.com.

Schools Out Forever!

This is a viral ad we (ArtRebels New Media) made for Diesel as a lead up to the Copenhagen Fashion Week in August. The actual set of the video will be part of the Diesel display at Øksnehallen where they will be showcasing the Spring/Summer 2009 collection entitled Schools Out Forever!

The film features Elena Cosovic as the angry schoolgirl, the set is made by Henrik Nielsen & Morten Plesner and the video is shot and edited by Carla Cammilla Hjort & Mette Ohlendorff. A big thanks to everyone who helped out!

Trailer Park Festival

I recently made the website for our upcoming festival: TrailerPark 08 is a three-day music and arts festival running from Friday 22. August, Saturday 23. Sunday 24. August 2008. TrailerPark 08 is a Copenhagen-based event organized by ArtRebels. The location of the festival this year will be in Copenhagens Skatepark with outdoor and indoor spaces.

HeartRebels

I recently made this website for one of our ArtRebels' divisions: HeartRebels is a Foundation for Social, Artistic and Creative Projects. HeartRebels works toward breaking barriers between cultures, focusing on local micro-processes in an attempt to build global platforms for communal growth through creative cooperation. HeartRebels want to contribute to the world around us through social innovation and artistic processes. HeartRebels is an independent foundation run by ArtRebels.

Downtown Magazine

As editor-in-chief of Penguin Army I did an interview with Copenhagen's Downtown Magazine that turned into a cover-story. You can read the article here (in Danish).

SYG LYD

My darling friend David is having a huge party at Bolsjefabrikken with a great line-up of Copenhagen DJs - alongside our good friends from Palms Out Sounds, New York: Boody B & Chaz! Don't miss it! And enjoy the flyer I made for David's special night ;o)

Lund 2014

Lund is a city in Sweden. It is the home of the oldest university in Scandinavia, has a beautiful cathedral and is now in the race to become European Cultural Capital 2014. Friends of mine have been working on the project for a while and now I am on board! For the next 6 months I will be taking on the role of Project Developer & International Coordinator in this huge EU-project.

Penguin Army

For the last few months I have been working on a project with Onesto Mong, MTV, RAUXA and Morten.dk called Penguin Army - an anti-global warming community project, that want to create awareness about environmental issues in a fun and gonzo-like style :o):

Penguin Army is a community for anyone who wants to help change the scary environmental problems happening all over our planet. Everyone can help stop global warming and raise awareness - and it doesn't have to be boring!

The Penguin Army website is for everybody! Here, everyone can write posts, share photos, videos, graphics and links related to global warming - in particular we hope you will inform each other of things you do to help the environment and how you do it! We hope you will post info about events or activist actions you are doing so that other army-members in your area can join in!

Are you replacing all the plastic bags at the super market with recyclable ones? Are you having a screening of An Inconvenient Truth at your local café? Are you putting up awareness posters all over your neighborhood? Are you turning off the lights at your school to save power? Write about it, film it, take photos and post it on penguinarmy.dk!

You can also join us on YouTube, Flickr, Facebook and MySpace.

The FaggetFairys vinyl is here!

My darling girlfriends Ena & Carla Cammilla aka FaggetFairys have released a 12" vinyl in collaboration with Palms Out Sounds, for which I did the label design. And it has finally arrived from NYC! It can be bought through our music store at ArtRebels.com.

The one in the above photo is from the girls to Chris for his birthday today ;o)

Blast from the past...

In the spring of 2002, me and some of my friends from New Media Design school were asked to go to Malta to shoot a documentary about the water issues on the beautiful Mediterranean island.

The trip included a weird insight into the world of reverse osmosis, my 23rd birthday and an obscene amount of footage that took us over a month to edit.

Shortly after we got home from Malta I received the above video as a birthday present and reminder of a fantastic trip... and today I found it in a pile of old cds!

Contributor for Wonderlandonline

Our neighbors from the ArtGarage Wonderland Magazine, has asked me to contribute to their new online portal Wonderlandonline. My very first contribution is a post (pictured) about the opening of Karriere Bar on Thursday.

Sony Bravia #3

Another Sony Bravia ad has seen the light of day - this time the balls and paint have been replaced by Play-doh!

I still prefer the first ad directed by fellow dane Nicolai Fuglsig, but I really enjoy watching them re-interpret and transform the same simple concept "colour.like.no.other" in different ways.

As with the previous ads you can watch a "making of" on the website. Enjoy!

CONTROL by Anton Corbijn

Anton Corbijn is one of my favorite photographers. From his works of Herman Brood, David Bowie and Depeche Mode to Lou Reed, Kurt Cubain and Clint Eastwood, Anton has created a unique and personal rock photography style.

One of his first jobs in the UK was of Joy Division. And here the fascination with Ian Curtis began. Now Anton pays homage to Ian with his first feature length film: Control. And the result is amazing. Intense. Interesting. Sad.

Control tells the personal story of Ian Curtis life and brilliantly juxtaposes his banal and trivial homelife with the success of the band and life on stage. It takes you from teenage love to suicide in one beautifully executed narrative. The cinematography reveals Anton's still photography roots and lets the viewer linger on the perfectly framed scenes. Best film I've seen this year.

Jørgen Leth blog

Been working on the Leth website for a while and am a bit tired of waiting for other people to deliver or produce specific content that is needed. Luckily Jørgen has some writer friends that have started to do "that blogging thing", so he emailed yesterday asking if maybe he should have a blog too.

A day later is is pretty much done. I re-cycled some of the general design from the website, but gave it a more personal, intimate look. Look forward to see how much he will use it - welcome to the Blogosphere, Jørgen!

Social Media Workshop

Last week I held a workshop for the staff of Copenhagen's Music Theater PLEX. They are working on their upcoming play GO TO GATE - a part roleplay, part play, part live installation. The setting will be an airport in which various things occur - as spectator you are part of the show and it is your task to get to the gate - despite the challenges that the "globalized post 9/11 culture" entail.

The workshop consisted of an introduction into the Social Media / Web 2.0 world, a discussion of the pro's and con's of our digitalized culture and practical work with RSS-feeds, wikis and blogs. The intend was to teach them how to use Social Media as internal work tool to work with shared documents and document the process as well as external marketing tool.

Blog banner for ArtRebels.com

The ArtRebels site is almost up and running, so I made this little banner to promote the blog on the website. Here, the banner is obviously rotated to better fit the post.

I've been wanting to do a design with air-freshners, but needed a random purpose. For some reason I find them fun in a quirky kind of way. I would love to get my hands on some real ones and do some weird photo shoots starring The Air Freshner ;o).

FaggetFairys vinyl design

The US music blog Palms Out Sounds have been big endorsers of ArtRebels Ena and Carla Cammillas MC/DJ duo FaggetFairys and are putting out their very first EP!

The girls asked me to design the vinyl label and I made two designs for them to choose between. The top one uses photo-cut-outs of plaster breast from an image used on the FaggetFairys MySpace. The cut-outs have been slightly pixelated to enhance a homemade/ indie-look. I chose a font that evoked a playful, circus-like feel, but still had sharp edges - like the music.

The second one uses multiple ArtRebels harlequin-stars on a black background meant to resemble the night sky - a reference to the late-night -clubbing style of music. The ArtRebels harlequin-star is a sign of diversity and multiculturalism, which are also characteristics of the FaggetFairys sound. The font is Peter Saville's New Order font from the early 80s - an iconic electronic music typeface.

1962

A few posts ago I wrote about the 50 Years of Helvetica exhibition - and the concept inspired me to give my students the same task, as the designers of the exhibition:

Each artist was allocated a random year [1957 - 2006] from Helvetica's lifetime. From this they were asked to create an image based on an event of creative or cultural significance which occurred during their allocated year.

A few years were left over when the students had picked, so I was convinced to do one too. I picked 1962 - the year Marilyn Monroe died and Warhol did her portrait, JFK announced that the US would have a man on the moon before the end of the decade, Niels Bohr dies and Baz Luhrmann is born and Sean Connery stars in Dr. No - the first Bond film. But I chose another significant cultural event to portray: The birth of graphic artist Stefan Sagmeister.

Each element in the design is a reference to Sagmeister and the overall concept is inspired by his design style. Of course, the Helvetica font is used, and the use of triplus fineliners and pink spray are little personal statements ;o)

Photo session

Rebellious, Feminine, Narcissistic, UnReady are the titles of these photographs. I needed some head-shots for the 46h website and used the opportunity that all the students were having their portraits taken for their student-cards.

This was also "paint your table"-day - hence the space-outfit. In true TV-School style I went for a "a character in a room with a prop"-set up. According to my friend Thomas, the result is very The Perfect Human /
Jørgen Leth-esque... ;o)

Copenhagen by Mads Nørgaard

Danish fashion designer Mads Nørgaard didn't do a typical fashion show this season, instead he teamed up with e-Types and created an audio/visual concept starring danish top models Freja Beha and Eddie Klint.

Visuals for Fashion Week

It's fashion week in Copenhagen and there is a lot of activities going on! I am personally involved in creating some visuals for designer Ouafa Mouna and a still photography slideshow as part of an ArtRebels showing at Unfair.

50 years of Helvetica

2007 is the 50 anniversary of the Helvetica font. To celebrate this BLANKA and CANDY have invited 50 leading designers and graphic artists to produce 50 images. Each artist has produced 50 editions of a 50x50 cm print available for £50.

Each artist was allocated a random year [1957 - 2006] from Helvetica's lifetime. From this they were asked to create an image based on an event of creative or cultural significance which occurred during their allocated year.

The prints will be exhibited at the London Design Museum from July 19 – September 2. The exhibition will also visit Edinburgh, Leicester, Newcastle, Paris, New York, Sydney, Berlin and Copenhagen.

Hopefully Helvetica The Movie will also come to Copenhagen soon...

User-generated Yves Saint Laurent

24 HOURS: A unique chance for users to influence the narrative of a high-end fashion shoot to create a catalogue and film for Yves Saint Laurent’s forthcoming ‘Edition 24’ collection.

Film: Last week SHOWstudio invited open submissions for a twenty-four-scene screenplay that forms the basis of a twenty-four hour, live fashion broadcast over that was shot the night of 15 July, during which Nick Knight and Stefano Pilati transformed the participant's ideas into imagery.

Graphics: The competition also called for useres to create "political graphics to reflect Nick Knight and Stefano Pilati's initial Godard reference point for the project and also YSL's continuing association with the socially-engaged woman..." to be used across the set of a YSL catalogue and film shoot.

Soundtrack: During the 24 hour livefeed shoot 50 mobile phones where placed on set, and through the livefeed the producers send out a signal (( CALL US )) when people should ring the phones. The ringing phones thereby created the background audio for parts of the shoot.

Trailer Park Festival 2007

At ArtRebels we are in the midst of creating a 3-day festival hosted at Madeleine's Madteater, Islands Brygge, Copenhagen. The festival will feature various camps such as Christiania, Vibskov, Soundvenue, Lækker Lytter and food is catered by Madeleine's and the drinks by my very own Chris Doig from Brilliant Cocktails.

The line-up includes: Mr. Oizo, Planningtorock, Who Made who, Trentemøller, Bjørn Svin, Booty Cologne, Djuna Barnes, FaggetFairys, TOM, Mary Mary, Dullen & DYken feat. Ane Trolle + MC Balkan, Ohoi!, Yo!had crew and many more! Check out program and further info here.