BCNDesign

It can’t be the weather. I don’t think it’s the nightlife, either. The food? I doubt that Batman and The Wheelman will be able to spare any time for tapas while they chase the bad guys down the dark alleys of the Gothic Quarter. But come March, they’ll both be in Barcelona doing their stuff, joining Vicky and Cristina in the latest trend of celebrity tourism: that of film, comic book and video game characters.

This recent spate as a leading city of pop-cultural narrative imagination marks a turning point in Barcelona’s steady climb towards global recognition. In the case of Batman and The Wheelman, these latest representations of Barcelona will reach an audience that might not care much about architecture, design and molecular gastronomy. And as the image of the city slips away from the tight controlling grip of its institutional and high-cultural minders, we might all be able to reclaim a more open, more complex version of our city – or drown in the endless rehash of half-baked Barcelonese stereotypes.

La cuarta noche de Pecha Kucha se celebrará en uno de los lugares más auténticos y creativos de Barcelona, el Palo Alto de Poblenou. Gracias a la Fundación Palo Alto, celebraremos el Vol.4 en su Nave XYZ el día 6 de Febrero. Apertura de puertas 19.30. Inicio de las ponencias 20.20.

Mercedes Quevedo, illustrator
Guim Valls Teruel, Electric Bicycle World Tour
Cristina González Gabarró, photographer
Xavier Font Sola, structural engineer
Patricio Abreu, Vaho recycled design
Niall O Flynn, industrial designer
Ignasi Pérez Arnal, sustainable architect
Marcus Willcock, designer & researcher
Stijn Ossevoort, fashion designer
Bailo + Rull, ADD Arquitectura

Pecha Kucha Vol.4
Palo Alto, Calle Pellaires 30-38, Poblenou
Metro: Selva de Mar (L4)
Apertura puertas: 19.30h
Inicio: 20.20h
Cierre: 23h
Foro limitado, ven pronto!
Entrada: 5€ (incluye 1 bebida)

I told you about the video game The Wheelman in an earlier post. It’s the one where Vin Diesel trashes everything and everyone in sight in “exotic” Barcelona. It’s due out anytime soon, we’re being told, and while we wait with bated breath we’re being teased with a new trailer. What I’m really liking about this game, is that for once a global product that commercialises the “Barcelona Brand” shows us something other than the usual suspects. There are plenty of those (Sagrada Familia, Plaza Real, waterfront and palm trees), but thanks to the exacting requirements of the script, bursting with car chases and criminal behaviour, we are paradoxically offered a more realistic version of the city, which includes nail-biting ring-road action, dreary mass-housing neighbourhoods, dusty parking lots and abandoned construction sites. Now there’s a Barcelona I can recognise!

In 2007,  Gary Hustwit directed Helvetica, a small budget, feature-length documentary about the 50-year old typeface. A niche film with an undeniably nerdy topic, Helvetica soon became a global phenomenon. One of the film’s greatest achievements was the way in which it managed to convey both Helvetica’s extraordinary designer status and its truly impressive universal success as possibly the most ubiquitous and generic typeface in common use.

Now Hustwit is at work on stuff. Moving from graphics to objects, his next project, due to premiere in Spring of 2009, is aptly called Objectified. Here’s how the Objectified website describes the project:

Objectified is a feature-length independent documentary about industrial design. It’s a look at the creativity at work behind everything from toothbrushes to tech gadgets. It’s about the people who re-examine, re-evaluate and re-invent our manufactured environment on a daily basis. It’s about personal expression, identity, consumerism, and sustainability. It’s about our relationship to mass-produced objects and, by extension, the people who design them.

And here’s the trailer:

Objectified looks set to become another runaway success with the design crowd, but the trailer really makes me wonder whether it will manage to provide us with any interesting views on our everyday relationship with things – with generic things. The beauty of Helvetica was that through the passionate and obsessive following of one font, the film took us deep into what most of us experience daily as no-design-land, the land of cinema tickets, road signs, TV news – just life, no designer tag. Objectified seems more concerned with designers and their creative process, a hardly innovative approach to the world of objects that yields little real insight into the average human relationship with manufactured goods, but lots of talk about ‘good design’ and ‘user needs’. But I might be mistaken. I really hope I am. I guess I just didn’t like the trailer. That’s funny, because I thought I did.

Pixelscatalans.cat takes up Alex Tew’s Million Dollar Homepage idea and turns it into a concerted exercise in nationalist propaganda. ‘A promotion of Catalunya’, states their manifesto. They aim to provide international projection for Catalan production and graphics, to push up the search engine ranking of Catalan websites, to ‘make the country’: ‘Fer pais’. Only my second post on BCND, and already the frustration of coming face to face with localist pettiness is raising its head. Will it become too much to bear (again!)?

The original Million Dollar Homepage was set up by Alex Tew, a cash-strapped student about to start his first year at university in Nottingham.

The index page of the site consists of a 1000×1000 pixel grid (one million pixels), on which image-based links were sold for US $1 per pixel, in minimum ten by ten blocks. The purchasers of these pixel blocks provided tiny images to be displayed on them, a URL to which they were linked, and a slogan displayed when hovering the cursor over the link. The aim of the site was to sell all of the pixels in the image, thus generating one million dollars of income for the creator. (Wikipedia)

The result: a young millionnaire who had to drop out of uni to keep on top of the site’s success. Most importantly, though, Tew’s open-ended agenda created something really special, a graphic, interactive snapshot of internet history – now on sale as a limited edition print.

Tew’s million pixel grid is vibrant, brash and loud, immensely varied in tone and content. In it one can find skater gear and online gambling, language lessons, business reviews, personal messages, high street retailers and domain hosting, dodgy job offers, e-publications and baby gifts, quick miracle diets and Jesus. It’s a perfect representation of cyberspace. While mostly Anglo-based, clickthroughs will land you in France, Italy or Hungary.

And what about pixelscatalans? All I can hope is that it’s not a perfect representation of Catalunya. What it shows is a fairly desolate landscape, still pretty empty three years after it went online. The pixels are mostly of corporate and institutional brands, some local, some global. At the very least, the pixel-sellers at Catalanpixels could have stood by their catalanist principles and denied access to international corporations.

What it is a perfect representation of, unfortunately, is the dead weight of identity politics on all fields of endeavour in Catalunya, the idea that we have more than enough with what we have ‘at home’ to create a vibrant cultural landscape, that the aim is not to open up to external influences but to preserve and project what we are (and what is that??) to the world.

Personally, I couldn’t care less what the world thinks as long as what is going on near me is entertaining and stimulating enough. If it is, the world will take notice. And being lazy by nature, I’d rather have the world come here so we can party.