SOVRN STATE

Professional management for independent creatives. 

[sovrnstate]

Layered Landscapes

Japanese artist Nobuhiro Nakanishi has been experimenting with unique ways of displaying his panoramic photography. Using a combination of photos taken over a certain time period, Nakanishi brings selected images together to create a piece that can be appreciated both individually, as a single image, but also as part of a multi-image sculptural collage. 

Not only does the work play with our perception of the intersection between these mediums (photography and sculpture), but it also looks at the idea of time and how that’s changing across the individual panels. Each panel represents a timelapse photographic moment, while the combination of panels bring it to life as a longer experiential activity (such as a sunset). “When we look at the photographs in these sculptures, we attempt to fill in the gaps between the individual images,” says Nakanishi. 

While his work in these photographic experiments has mostly focused around nature thus far, we think this concept may have many different avenues to explore further. It might be interesting to see cityscapes or crowds of people. Each direction would surely bring a new life to the installation style. Regardless, we’re a fan of Nakanishi’s sculptural photographs piece by piece or altogether.

[sovrnstate]

Sweet Lullaby Ride

Putting babies to sleep, and keeping them asleep, is no easy task. Whether you’ve experienced it yourself as a parent, babysitter, or bystander (or have seen it on movies or TV shows), you know that parents often lose sleep over this problem. 

Car rides often help babies fall asleep. Maybe it’s the boredom of the ride or the white noise hum of the engine. Regardless, car rides work better than lullabies. Ford recognized this phenomenon and decided to put their auto-engineering minds to work for families to invent a new type of crib. 

The answer is a baby crib, Max Motor Dreams, that acts like it’s a backseat - even though it doesn’t go anywhere except the corner of a bedroom. Max Motor Dreams creates a simulated car ride for a child, such as the sound of a muffled engine, subtle rocking movements that a vehicle would make, and even includes LEDs flashing by at points to replicate street lights.

For the company we know for being “Ford Built Tough!” it’s kind of sweet, and a little funny, that Ford is “Rocking The Cradle!” and conveys that the brand is built for families, too. 

Kudos to whoever green-lit this project gave the engineers something fun to work on that also uses the in-house expertise and creativity to invent a new product. You can see a video of the crib in-action here. 

[sovrnstate]

Making Healthy Food Accessible

Farmer’s Fridge is a startup company founded by Luke Saunders in 2013 with a mission to make it easy for everyone to quickly get delicious food. The company created their own custom vending machines stocked daily with healthy food. We first saw one in the Chicago airport recently and were compelled to check it because of the “hero” shot of a layered salad, in a clear jar, featured on the machine’s touch screen display. The software UI was simple/intuitive and we loved the menu selections. And the jar was perfectly portable for taking on a plane and tasted great.  

Afterwards, we were intrigued to see their company as a prime example of a circular design approach. First, they deliver fresh foods every day to environments that don’t normally have healthy food options. They often source local ingredients, supporting sustainable farming. The jar is made to be re-used and recycled, encouraged by the company to be returned directly into the machine’s recycling slot. Then, at the end of the day - they bring the leftover food to food banks for those in need. A virtuous product cycle each day.

Airports and office buildings in particular are known for their unhealthy, overpriced, and limited food options. Farmer’s Fridge is a perfect solution. They are currently only operating out of the Midwest, but they are planning to expand this year. We would love to see these in New York soon, maybe in our office building lobby? Or even better, on a subway station platform - making a true grow, grab, eat and go experience for 8 million people!

[sovrnstate]

An Evolution Of The Concert Experience

Did you ever learn to fold a paper plane? You would take a sheet of construction paper and fold it in a specific way to create the lightweight aerodynamic vehicle. Toss it and let it fly to everyone’s amazement.

Now imagine taking the paper plane concept and translating it into an origami contraption that bends on LED-lit edges. The contraption, designed by Es Devlin, is made to follow a flight path from lift off, cruise, mid-flight complication, crash landing, and then relaunch all over again. All of the action and light orchestration set to the music of The Weeknd’s Starboy tour.

When people go to concerts today, the majority of them pull out their phones and take pictures/videos to post on social media. Devlin and The Weeknd recognize there is an opportunity to not only serve as an experience within the concert itself, but also as a marketing investment so that when people post the images online, it motivates others to buy tickets for themselves.

Es Devlin takes production design far beyond traditional stages to create truly artistic, immersive experiences. While she may have amazing collaborators in the music world, Devlin may be as much of an artistic treasure herself.

[sovrnstate]

Plug In Outside Of The Box

Wires are usually hidden in the walls of our buildings, but what if the architect designed the wiring to be seen in a beautiful external way.

Conduct is a test of this idea, turning everyday building elements like fans, lamps, and speakers into connected objects that can be turned on by just touching the external wires by embedding circuitry in wallpaper and using conductive inks. 

The design is done in a clean, minimal, geometric manner in conjunction with the rest of the wall’s pattern - making the case for this type of a system even more appealing to imagine appearing on a wider spectrum. But be advised, the conceptual wallpaper is not recommended as a DIY project, it is a collaboration between Flavor Paper and UM project - designed by professionals with a keen eye for color theory and the right balance of line/form. 

[sovrnstate]

Google AutoDraw - Like Pictionary With A Computer

One of the newest websites and projects from Google is a new tool that turns your rough sketches into fully realized professional graphic icons. It even has the ability to add color within the objects. Your sorry stick dog drawing becomes the perfect pink poodle within seconds. 

For one, Google Autodraw is just plain fun to see what you can draw. But also, if those icons are fully license free - which we have yet to see if is the case - it could be an easy new way to get custom graphics to include in a presentation or a website. A newer version of ClipArt, if you will, and one that is only limited by your imagination and not your drawing skills.

[sovrnstate]

Infrastructure Automation Makes A Splash

Getting around cities often revolves around cars or trains. However, one big city falls under an exception: Amsterdam. Filled with canals, the city uses those channels to its advantage to shuffle goods and people around the city. While transportation in general is moving in the direction of being automated, and mostly that discussion also is with cars, Amsterdam’s circumstances, has led to discussion and planning of self-driving boats too. 

MIT’s Senseable City Lab and the Amsterdam Institute for Metropolitan Solutions (AMS) are in the midst of a five-year research initiative to investigate the different possibilities of these “roboats” - which are said to be more straightforward (compared to autonomous cars) because of slower speeds and waterways being less crowded and dangerous. 

One of the ideas that they’ve also considered is to have these boats be able to act as pieces that could be put together to make temporary bridges or stages that could be formed and disassembled in a short amount of time. Prototypes are scheduled to be floating in the canals as soon as late 2017. Wouldn’t these be great around Manhattan and Brooklyn, too? Let’s test ‘em out!

[sovrnstate]

Shining A New Light On Sculpture And Animation During SXSW this year, a unique artist by the name of Akinori Goto presented a set of kinetic light sculptures at his SXSW “Toki” installation. The stop-motion animator transforms his images into 3D data to create physical forms. Goto uses 3D printing to print a wire-mesh representation of the animation’s movement with surprising results.

For example. in his recent work (“Toki”), one of the sculptures was a circular object that was loosely based off the traditional zoetrope toy device in form, but recreated with modern technology and animation with light projections. Goto created a circular wire mesh that continuously rotated. Multiple light projections created singular dancing forms of ballerinas.

The ability for 3D printers to make things smaller and super precise enabled this concept to come to life. We were on hand at the installation at SXSW to witness this ourselves and were very impressed by how it creatively used technologies like 3D printing to create a new kind of art.

[sovrnstate]

Capturing Ideas With David Lynch

“Everything we do starts with an idea,” begins the start of an interview clip from David Lynch, now 70 years old, who is one of the most distinct and off-the-cuff directors of the past half-century. This clip, alongside beautiful animations related to his work and the points he’s making, talks about the process of finding an idea. It’s worth a watch to get some inspiration. 

Lynch is also the subject of a new documentary David Lynch: The Art Of Life, which has been making the festival circuits - including last weekend at SXSW - and is opening at the IFC Center on March 31st. The new season of Twin Peaks, directed entirely by Lynch (over 25 years after the original series finished airing), will also premiere on Showtime on May 21st.

[sovrnstate]

Light And Color, Blended

Digital art collective teamLab out of Tokyo - who aim to blend the walls between art, science, technology, and creativity amongst their work - created a new exhibition called Transcending Boundaries at the Pace Gallery in London from January 25th to March 11th.

The installation uses projected animations that flow through the space from one piece of art to another, while sensors allow people to interact with the animations. For example, if you’re walking through the installation and stand still in a spot, the virtual stream of water running down along the wall and into the ground will redirect its flow around you, only to be filled again after you move away. Or if you stand still long enough, flowers may bloom - or butterflies may flutter - from around various parts of your body.

If you’re in London during the upcoming weeks, you may want to see how galleries are being re-thought with digital art.

[sovrnstate]

Mechanically Marvelous Chair Worth Seeing And Sitting

RockPaperRobot is an engineering design firm based out of New York City. The newest invention in a kinetic furniture piece called The Ollie Chair. They just started a Kickstarter for it, which includes a great video that shows it in action. It’s a foldable, beautiful chair that doesn’t need to be hidden. The chair can be used wherever you need it (both indoors and out), transported (only 16 pounds), or even hung for storage on the wall like a piece of art.

There’s plenty of clever features here to “ooh” and “aah” over the design. The chair has an elegant form and function that is both durable and beautiful. The fold-out seat is made of tambour, a flexible teak wood surface made up of slats that are adhered to a textile canvas. The way it’s shaped is purposely designed to provide strong posture, no matter your build, with lumbar-supporting slats. Even unraveling and returning the chair to a flat position (of two inches) is a fast and simple process.

The Ollie Chair is great for small spaces, too. If you’re a space starved apartment dweller in NYC, you can surely recognize the need for seating and storage. You can even have silk screened custom artwork and colors that appear both when seated and when hanging on the wall. Limited quantities for The Ollie Chair are available for pledging support on Kickstarter now.

-

*SOVRN STATE management proudly represents Jessica Banks, Roboticist / Inventor / Creative Technologist and the CEO + Founder of RockPaperRobot.

[sovrnstate]

Protecting The Next Step Forward

The Netherlands have created a new innovation for pedestrian crosswalks. A light line system of a strip illuminated by LED, embedded into the sidewalk right before the intersection, connects to its corresponding traffic light to display either a green or red light. The purpose for this new lighting installation is to protect people crossing the road who are too busy engrossed in their phones while texting or on social media, aka blind zombie-walking smartphone users. 

But not everyone thinks the inattentive zombies deserve special treatment. A representative for Veilig Verkeer Nederland (VVN), who are a Dutch road safety lobby group, said it “rewards bad behavior” and encourages those habits.

We’re all on our phones constantly and can be guilty of not paying attention to friends, family, and our own safety. This is our reality right now. The project, known as +Lightlines, is being tested in the town of Bodegraven and is not too complicated, expensive, or obtrusive in its design. And if this light system can protect pedestrians and save even a few more lives, it’s worth it.

[sovrnstate]

Half A Century Old Landmark, Refreshed

The World’s Fair was once a big deal to showcase a nation’s accomplishments and innovations across art, architecture, and technology. The 1964-1965 edition in New York City was a particularly good year with presentations from big companies like GE, Pepsi, Ford, IBM, Disney, and more. Technology there included a Picturephone by the Bell Telephone Company that gave people a chance to look at who they were talking to (although it didn’t catch on as it wasn’t advanced or affordable enough at that point, like Skype or FaceTime now does), the debut of what would become the classic Ford Mustang car, replicas of the rocket engines that would launch the Apollo and Moon missions, and a debut of the design model of The World Trade Center. However, the legacy structures created for the Queens-based event have laid mostly dormant since they were initially built for the fair. The Phillip Johnson designed pavilion, in particular, had been calling for a request for proposals to call for a re-imagined purpose. The National Trust and People for the Pavilion put together a competition to ask people for creative ways to transform this landmark. 

The winning design by Aidan Doyle and Sarah Wan (pictured above) is a futuristic biodome with local native plants inside to give it a new life. The main section rests above the ground, standing on tall straight pillars holding up its circular base. Visitors climb up a spiral staircase at the center of the bottom to get inside, where - once inside - visitors could see the space from a variety of angles and tracks. The actual dome shape itself is filled with sharp curves with three different rounded pointed tops, two around the same height and one almost double the height. You can see right inside the space from miles away and see all the green trees and nature, with a clear transparent surface covering the whole dome with lines that follow the shape and flow of the structure.  Doyle and Wan seem to have taken inspiration for the elevated greenhouse from Sci-Fi film visions of the future. And if something falls through with their designs on this, this structure is so interesting that it could even be built from the ground up.

Originally written about on Dezeen.

[sovrnstate]

Jamboard: Exploring The Intersection Of Hardware And Software

Google is arguably the king of cloud collaboration tools for the office. Its new product, The Jamboard, mixes hardware (it’s the first G Suite hardware product) seamlessly with its own software (like Gmail, Google Drive, and Google Docs) to re-invent the whiteboard, a creative company stalwart.

The Jamboard allows teams to brainstorm and edit together in the same room on multiple devices, or other participants to edit from remote locations in real time, too. So whether your colleagues are with you or overseas in Japan, you could be working on the same board either way. The files live in Google Drive. Photos, text, drawings, and maps can all be added - you can even snap a selfie right from the device itself if you want. 

The 55 inch, 4K touchscreen display can be set on a wall or transported around on a rolling display stand. The price is expected to be less than $6,000. You can sign up for updates on their site. It's already been spotted in offices of Netflix and Spotify, and it probably won’t be long to see at a workspace near you.

[sovrnstate]

Future Calendar Of Peak Innovation

Technology development has been exploding over the past decade (or two), and there seems to be no slowing down. Imagining what technologies will mature in the years to come is no easy task. 

Futurism, a site that covers the breakthrough technologies and scientific discoveries shaping humanity's future, and Editor Todd Jacquith have made some bold technology predictions. With a brand new infographic, they provide estimated year of peak innovation for each new technology. 

Jacquith’s predictions include some things that we’ve covered ourselves that we’ve been excited about like Smart Clothing. Some of them may even come sooner than they’re expecting, such as Cheap Solar Power, according to the updates from them we’ve been seeing thus far. 

But what we’re really excited to see are some of these new technology concepts that we are not familiar. This includes Undersea Cities coming in 2055 (which Elon Musk and Tesla already seem to be getting ready for in a way with their covert underwater mode) or even something mind-boggling like the feat of Evolutionary Enhancement in 2047 (which could lead to bigger brains and larger heads - and, as a result, mascot-sized baseball caps?). We’ll be sure to be keeping our eyes ahead of the evolution for these new technologies. Happy 2017!

[sovrnstate]

Stores Mixing IRL / URL

Bookstores have been figuring out how to adapt in the digital age. Fortunately, physical retail establishments and books are not disappearing. Instead, they’re evolving into an entirely different consumer experience. In Paris, there’s a famous bookstore called Les Puf that recognizes people still like physical books so they’ve come up with a retail concept to meet that need while maintaining their retail costs. Instead of large expensive stores filled with shelves of books, they offer customers to select a title and instantly print a physical book via their super fast in-house bound-book printing machine. Les Puf has over three million books on a tablet within a small footprint store that fits the printer and a simple seating area for reading. 

Since everyone’s ordering their books online or reading it directly on their devices, you have to wonder what happens to the community feeling of a local bookstore? Small town bookshops have traditionally been a de facto gathering place for neighbors - a friendly and knowledgable proprietor, curated and hosted author readings, as well as other community events. However, bookstores have become an unsustainable business model in small towns and the suburbs. Maybe this on-demand book printing model from Les Puf could be a solution for the future of small independent bookstores, providing a deep inventory of choices, a friendly personal atmosphere, and a physical book to enjoy with like-minded readers.

 to still have a big selection but maintain the service and understanding. It’s important that the books have to be beautiful and designed nicely - with great fonts, paper, and style. It can’t look like one bound at Kinkos. 

It comes at a crucial time in the trajectory of bookstores. Especially in France, where over 25% of bookstores have closed during 2000-2014. With these small stores, Slate said, “Their only hope is to match the commercial innovations Jeff Bezos has brought to shopping.” While this may not be that extreme, it could help them remain an enjoyable place to go in your area to have a read and interact with your community - in an old fashioned way with a modern twist.

Originally written about in The New York Times.

[sovrnstate]

The Netflix Of Pain Management

The usual medical tradition has been taking some pills with a glass of water to manage and relieve pain. Virtual Reality (VR), however, may be ushering in a new option for pain management. Elliot Krane, the chief of pediatric pain management at Stanford Children’s Health, says that VR could be a big tool for maintaining the attention and cooperation of kids during medical procedures - but more importantly, managing their pain. He also states, however, that it’s rare to find software developers who are interested in working on technology that go after specific medical problems. 

Luckily, there’s a company who has begun to take on the challenge. AppliedVR, born out of one of the 25 largest global market research firms, has been developing content to combat these issues for medical operations in alleviating pain and anxiety. Eventually they also want to combat depression, autism, phobia, and addiction.

Applied VR worked closely with a Cedars-Sinai group on the research for the product. Select hospitals, doctors offices, and clinics have already been putting some of the initial developments to use. Thus far, they have found that people of all ages are into it and pre-clinical results showed a 63% reduction in anxiety and a 41-50% increase in pain tolerance with a clinical 25% reduction of pain.

VR in the medical field is a novel idea for pain management and it may take time to get hospitals to adapt and patients to accept. However, as more information is learned from the results of those trying it out, it sounds like a very promising avenue that could easily grow into a new market of medicine. This could lead to interesting projects around film and creatives getting involved with content that could truly change lives. It will be interesting to see what genres may be most effective. We suspect more comedy than horror films, but all of this certainly feels like a SciFi story.

Originally written about on MIT Technology Review.