I guess now we know what flares taste like. Cool name choices dudes. Flare? Really?

Wrigley's made a horrible choice in establishing 5 gum as their new premium lifestyle marketing venture in my opinion. It looks like some terrible student project in branding gone wrong. It's like the whole AXE deodorant marketing ploy. Take a crappy product and make it look cool, hype it up and people will eat it up. "Take these new flavors we came out with that appeal to a younger crowd and give them new packaging, hit a higher pricepoint and make it look like an Apple branding assignment." Totally bogus in my opinion, because it's just your run of the mill stick gum. But they are doing some cool things with their internet marketing experience. (I loathe marketing) In France anyways. Another 'Augmented Reality' Project allows you to print symbols which your webcam recongnizes as synthesizers, drum pads and audio samples, and mix them in front of the computer to create electronic music. I have tried it, and it requires some level coordination but the result is suprisingly fun and refreshing. (via 5gum.fr)

So BMW does some pretty insane stuff when it comes to advertising and keeping things fresh.

They have developed a computer program called 'Augmented Reality' thru which you can project a virtual car onto a sheet of paper and view it on your computer screen at any angle. You can also use the paper to slide the car around the screen and create artwork via colored tire tracks. Try it out for yourself. I was floored with the results. (via BMW 3D Paintbrush) Also, most recently they have been keeping their cars under wraps during test drives in cities worldwide by using a patterned vinyl sticker over the entire body of the car, which hides all the curves and mutes the aesthetics to keep people guessing what the car might look like til it's actual release date. Those Germans are quite the interesting forward thinkers (via Invisible BMW).

Somewhere along the line, we rediscovered what it means to be futurist, placing value in speed, chaotic visuals and an emphasis on flow, pattern and constant data. What's most curious is how this state has become the default cultural condition, rather than the eccentric preserve of a group of death-obsessed bon viveurs. Modern futurism is rampant with confusion, praising victory over the enemies of speed, yet also in denial about the staunchly fascist overtones implied by an ever-accelerating age, where the weak are left behind and the strong succeed. Our fetishism of speed is increasingly detached from the physical realm - we crave the speed of download delivery, instant communication, mobile blogging, latency-free servers, intercontinental video calling, swift screen rotation, and instant messaging. The physical manifestations of speed still exist, of course, but are being slowly stigmatised.

Tetragram for Enlargement (2009)

The mysterious boys over at Apparati Effimeri just started up their experimental video studio last year but already are being hyped up and respected by the likes of Fast Company, Fabrik and Gradient Magazine. They work primarily with a technology called Projection Mapping, which synthesizes cad programs, stage lighting and dramatic animation by way of projection onto surfaces. One projector is all it takes to produce some completely insane effects. In their project for the Itinerario Festival in Spain, they took a castle and completely threw out all preconcieved notions of what devastating effects large scale projection can have on an audience. The video has been cut down into clips, but I assure you that everything you are seeing is done purely with projection and an immense amount of time programming the mapping onto the building.

This technique has been around for a few years and a vjay/graffiti artist crossbreed has come of it. Many of these artists only need a projector and some skills with projection mapping, and they can apply these effects to skyscrapers, and monuments with virtually no harm done in the style that someone might spray tag a building. Much more fun to look at than graffiti and no jail-time. Other operations besides AE include ANTIVJ, NuFormer, and NeoProj. Check them all out! But be sure to check out that video of Apparati Effimari's Tetragram for Enlargement if you missed the link above, click here. Be sure to watch it all the way through because the last few effects are absolutely filthy.