Ambiwho? Ambiwhat? AMBIGRAM!

One of Tara and I’s obsessions while traveling was creating ambigrams. They first came onto our radar when we were discussing the design possibilities for our next circus venture, Downside-Up. With a name like that, there are so many graphic possibilities, but I realized an ambigram would be the most apropos.

What is an ambigram?  According to Wired, ambigrams are the hottest trend in typography since Helvetica.  An ambigram is a word-image that can be read from multiple vantage points, most commonly by flipping it 180 degrees.  Ambigrams were popularized a few years ago by Dan Brown’s book Angels and Demons, which features several ambigrams as plot points, including this one to the left.

Now, the complex gothic ambigrams from Angels and Demons were the only ones I was very familiar with, and I believed them to be for advanced artists, mathematicians, designers – not for amateur typographers and doodlers like us.

ambigram in progress

NOT SO!  Ambigrams are fun AND easy to make!  Tara and I made loads of them on our many long train rides around Europe.  It’s pretty simple – I just start with writing the word below itself upside down.  Then look at each of the letter pairs, think about the key components in each letter necessary to define it, and start doodling different ways those letters can be combined.  Think about how to turn necessary letter strokes into decorative elements.  It also helps to consider both upper and lower case letters, I thought ‘SEATTLE’ would be impossible, until I thought to try it with lower case letters.I’m in the process of digitizing the Downside-Up ambigram for a logo now, but meanwhile here’s another one I’m working on.  Try making them sometime!  And don’t go looking for any lame ambigram generators on the internet – get out a pencil and pad and do it yourself.   It’s like solving a logic puzzle.

For more on ambigrams, check out:

http://www.johnlangdon.net/ – the website of the Prof who’s one of the leading ambigram scholars, he also made all the ambigrams for Dan Brown.

http://www.ambigram.com/ – online magazine about everything ambigram.

 

CATAPULT!

Last Sunday, t&M, along with a fellow circus friend & collaborator, went to see STREB‘s latest SLAM show, CATAPULT: 

We work our way through the increasingly trendifying Williamsburg neighborhood of murals, bookshops, and cafes, down industrial-looking side streets, and finally  stopped outside the  large metal door of a semi-abandoned looking building from which we could hear music and cheers leaking. We walk in, get our hands stamped club-style, and scramble onto an enormous red mat as big as my living room.

We locate the performance, happening among the packed crowd, where dancers are flipping along a row of mats, landing in full body slams onto the ground and each other, then sliding along a parallel strip of slippery flooring, shouting the name of each move before they perform it. The crowd cheers at the highest flips and giggles when the dancers playfully bump into each other, gasping when they narrowly miss each other’s flying bodies. I stand up for a better view and wobble on the cushy mat. It feels like I’ve walked into a party, not a performance.

STREB is a dance company in Brooklyn, NY specializing in an energetic, dynamic, extremely physical form of experimental dance called popaction. They also use custom-made apparatus like trusses, frames, low- friction floors and spinning wheels to play with the bounds of physicality. SLAM, which stands for the ‘Streb Lab for Action Mechanics,’ is their HQ and primary performance venue, a converted warehouse garage by the banks of the East River. It’s stocked with mats, mechanical russes, and a flying trapeze rig (in fact, STREB is where I first trained as a flying trapeze instructor my last year of high school, as it was for a while the only indoor rig in NYC).

CATAPULT! was similar to other STREB shows I’ve seen, broken into a cabaret-like string of act/pieces, interspersing longer, demanding dances with video projections, mini-dances, and even a short demo of a multi-jointed dancing robot toy. The pieces are wildly inventive, playful, full of risk and excitement. In one piece, a heavy slab of I-frame metal hangs suspended from a single cable as the dancers shove, swing, spin, and push it around, running around, hanging from, and ducking under it. In another, three dancers abseil up and down a wall, leaping and turning as a vertiginous video projection behind them creates the illusion that they are astronauts, jumping tens of feets with each leap as the planet recedes and returns behind them. There’s even a group of young trapeze artists (full disclosure: that’s one of the other reasons I went to see the show – I’m friend of the catcher’s) who do a short piece during intermission. The finale centers around a rotating catapult, a sort of counterweighted hamster wheel, that the dancers ride in and on, climb up and down, and are flung from. It reminds me of the Wheel of Death act recently being displayed by bigger circuses like Cirque du Soleil in Kooza, only more intimate.

The space is so small you can feel the vibrations of the dancer’s thundering bodies as they perform, see the rest of the audience’s faces mirroring your own reactions. There’s a feeling of community, of  solidarity, energy drummed up by the dancers and tossed back by the audience. At one point, 3-, 4-, and 5- year-olds are invited up on ‘stage’ to do a short dance led by one of the company who teaches the youngest kids’ dance class. As they copy her simple movements, jumps, turns, and rolls, it becomes obvious that as adventurous and childlike the company’s pieces seem, it’s the high level of professional skill and roots in mature movement theory that make STREB’s work so engaging and interesting to watch.

 

Food & TED inspiration

Really tasty food I’ve made for dinner over the last two days:
• hummus, cheese, garlic, lentils, in a tortilla
• quinoa with onions and black beans

SO GOOD.

If you have 20 minutes to kill, I highly recommend heading over to TED (technology, entertainment, design) talks for some über inspiration.  There are dozens and dozens of 18-22 minute talks (I hesitate to call them lectures, because they’re so engaging and dynamic)…

“We believe passionately in the power of ideas to change attitudes, lives and ultimately, the world. So we’re building here a clearinghouse that offers free knowledge and inspiration from the world’s most inspired thinkers, and also a community of curious souls to engage with ideas and each other.”

I just watched this one of Larry Lessig, about the remix culture of the internet, democratic creativity, copyright and creative commons.

 

Quick! Catch that cupcake!

This afternoon I went to THE GREAT CAKE ESCAPE. I was clued in to it by a little article about the guerilla cake-droppers in the free commuter paper The London Paper a couple of days ago. For about a year, two lovely twenty-something women have been letting loose batches of cupcakes in the streets of London, with little tags encouraging passers-by to take them! This afternoon they hosted a scavenger hunt and street tea party in Hoxton Square, which is a block from The Circus Space. Arrived just as they were packing up – it was FREEZING here today – but got to have a quick chat & a cupcake before they skedaddled, leaving a fountain adorned in free sweet goodies…

http://www.myspace.com/thegreatcakeescape  

I’d love to emulate them… Molly, shall we create some Mysterious Muffin Mayhem in Amherst?

-Tara

 

reality hacking in london

Yesterday I went to an incredible Mobile Clubbing event at the Royal Exchange. The plan was simple: show up with your iPod, CD player, walkman, or other portable-music-device with headphones, and at 6.20pm, turn it on and start dancing. I got there 20 minutes late, and there was a crowd of people bopping around, mouthing lyrics, and giggling… it was a pretty odd sight, and if you weren’t clued into what was going on it took a minute to realize that the group wasn’t just a group of people waiting around, not talking to each other. 

There were babies, and men in suits, and cyclists, and students, and hipsters, and hippies… they were swaying, and rocking out, and popping, and skanking. I really wanted to see a couple slow dancing, but no dice. An idea for next time, I guess! Every once in a while a spontaneous cheer would erupt, people would throw their arms up and whoop and dance harder for a minute. So much fun to be among city strangers, staying warm in the chilly November night, all boogying down!

I took two really short clips (no pics of me, sorry, but the camera ran out of memory). I’ll put them up just as soon as I figure out where to house them online… Mol, how do I make use of my Stout student space?

-Tara

(more about Mobile Clubbing)

 

stop-motion grafitti animation

Mol,

don’t know if this is a new trend, or what, but it’s well cool. two artists i’ve come across recently:

BLU (this person must be ridiculously dedicated – the film is MINUTES long! watch the whole thing, the art is vaguely disturbing, but really cool and sometimes really funny)

Robin Rhodes (he’s got an art gallery here, i wasn’t able to find the best representations of his work online – but he does chalk-motion pictures, etc. from a review of the gallery: “Robin’s work presents life as a game, with fantastical scenarios that ask the viewer to trust in their own imaginations to bridge the gaps. But these seemingly light hearted works often disguise a darker subtext, including issues of urban poverty, freedom and personal space and the commodification of youth cultures.” )

Totally want to try making a short along those lines, now. Wish I could draw better!

-Tara

 

We Are One

I am SO GOING to the next one of these!

weareoneparty.org

The weareOne parties are free, and feature live music, short films, performances, shared food, dressing up and general foolery and fun. From their website: “Every party is an immersive experiment in harnessing the vibracy of and playfulness of living in the moment. People leave feeling in love with life, other people, and most importantly themselves.” My people!

-Tara

 

magazine fun time!

Okay, so you know how there are self-publishing printing-on-demand websites like Lulu, for books? 

Now there’s one for publishing magazines!  All you have to do is upload a PDF, and they’ll print it, ship it, and manage subscribers for you!  for free!

Do you understand what this means?  I am so very excited.  I love video and animation, but I seriously miss publication design so badly.  Just wait.  I will design magazines like there’s no tomorrow and one day you’ll look in your mailbox and say “oh!  why, what is this shiny new thing?”

-Molly

 

Treehouses Rock

Someday.

-Tara