13.1.16

Playscapes: balls, bubbles and balloons

Teatime has always been all about encouraging play. Which is why it hasn't escaped our notice that we've been seeing more and more of the sort of thing we love: witty, entertaining, often texture-rich ways to interact with your environment. This is part one of a three-part roundup of some of our favourite 'playscapes' - today we're focussing on balls, bubbles and balloons.




Balloons have been popular with event organisers for some time: they fill a lot of space, cheaply. They remind your guests that they were once kids, which makes them happy and a little silly, and people don't seem to mind the smell of the latex or the inevitable static. Specialist suppliers can deliver balloons up to 6ft+ in diameter (though do watch out for them indoors, I've seen one take out a chandelier), so you can achieve really dramatic swipes of colour and contrasting scales.



Martin Creed's Half the air in a given space showed at the Hayward recently - people queued for hours to step inside. It was a surprisingly claustrophobic experience, with the balloons liberally coated in people's hair and bits of fluff. But it was also an amazing photo opportunity, so team Teatime loved it. Except for Polly, who was totally squicked out and left, but you can't please everyone all the time.



William Forsythe's Scattered Crowd (most recently shown in Buenos Aires in 2014) is a more sedate piece, less of a frenetic whirl of excitement and more a dreamy walk through a sea of bubbles.

Yayoi Kusama Dots Obsession. Love Transformed into Dots, 2006. SKMU 2013. Photo: Aptum,  Jon-Petter Thorsen (cut)

By contrast several of Yayoi Kusama's installation works feature giant polka dotted spheres in bright colours, often with mirrors used to give a greater sense of depth and space, for example Dots Obsession - Love Transformed into Dots.



While on the subject of balloons we should also give an honourable mention to Charles Petillon's recent installation at Covent Garden. While you couldn't exactly play with/in it, it was certainly a playful use of materials and available space. 



Moving on to smaller spheres, there has been a bit of an obsession with ball pits lately. Yes, those childhood favourites which have emotionally and physically scarred many parents forced to fish around at the bottom of one for their errant child. Creative agency Pearlfisher was first off the mark in January with charity effort Jump In, featuring 81,00 large white plastic balls.



They were one-upped by Snarkitecture over the summer with The Beach, located in the (very) grand hall of the National Building Museum in Washington DC, taking up 10,000 square feet and containing nearly a million clear recyclable balls.



Which brings us to the tiddly-widdliest of spheres: bubbles. We don't like bubbles much, for health and safety reasons (they make floors super slippy) and also because they remind us of foam parties. But they do still have the power to work on an impressive scale in rather a transgressive, invasive way that's quite appealing. Case in point: Michel Blazy's foam installations in a cistercian monastery in France, entitled Bouquet Final.



Another notable example is Kohei Nawa's exhibition in Aichi, Japan. Basically a big dark room full of bubbles fixed with glycerin, the scale of the work is truly impressive.

And with that we complete our round up of balls, bubbles and balloons. Next up: fun furniture...





30.4.15

Creating spaces with light

Olafur Eliasson

Light is magical stuff. It can change how you feel, give the impression of safety (or danger), demarcate space, decorate it or completely change it. It leaves no trace, can cost a fortune to set up and is difficult to do well... but when it is, it delivers an unrivalled impact.


Yayoi Kusama

In events, when presented with an unhelpfully large, unattractive or somehow difficult space there is a tendency to either do as little as possible (rope off the problem) or to spend a fortune literally building a room within a room. But we like to think there is a third option: creating a space with light.


Bruce Munro

It doesn't have to involve a lot of lights, sometimes one well placed piece of lighting can change a whole room:

Conrad Shawcross


Anila Quayyum Agha

Sometimes light changes the idea of a room, like Katie Paterson's light bulb which perfectly replicates the spectrum, temperature and amperage of the light of a full moon...

Katie Paterson

Sometimes a simple trick changes everything, like Olafur Eliasson's Model for a Timeless Garden, where he sets a strobe light onto a series of water features, creating a series of otherworldly snapshots of water frozen in time:


It works on the most inherently unattractive spaces...

Liz West

... making the mundane otherworldly and exciting.

Bill FitzGibbons

Ivan Navarro

It can deliver messages, imbuing a sense of significance:

Jung Lee

Rob Montgomery

Jung Lee

And of course it can section off space.

Ehlenberger

Massimo Uberti

Jeongmoon Chi

Anthony McCall

Anthony McCall

Oh and don't forget projection mapping, which doesn't have to be irredeemably naff (though mostly it is).

Agathe de Bailliencourt

Vivid Sydney

Antivj


So the next time you're stuck looking at an unprepossessing space, think twice about how to deal with it. Or call us, and we'll do it for you.

17.12.14

It's beginning to look a lot like...


Hooray! Christmas! We were full of festive feeling yesterday as Tin Man PR used our 1,000 sprig mistletoe installation at Borough for a most appropriate purpose: a world record breaking kiss. The installation is in situ until early January, so if you're passing pop in for a look. We are particularly pleased with the way the breeze makes the red ribbons seem to shimmer... beautiful. Here are a few pics from the installation process to give you an idea of the end result:





Now, if you're anything like us you're running around like a lunatic trying to get everything sorted out for Christmas while rounding off the work for the year. And it's even more complicated when it's your turn to host on the big day... Not enough chairs! Vegan cousin! Granny only drinks one type of port that's very hard to get hold of! Well, Polly has partnered up with Aviva to offer some top tips to help you negotiate the festive minefield - you can find the full list here and on Twitter.



Speaking of final bits of work in the Christmas run up, our very last job of the year is a lovely one: a collaboration between Now TV and Edible Cinema. You can find out more - and win tickets - here.



12.12.14

Where inspiration ends and copying begins


If you're an 'ideas person', and you do reasonably well with those ideas, there inevitably comes a time when some kind soul points to someone else's work and says 'aren't you cross about this....?'

It will become a familiar experience over the years: irritating and deeply, boringly, predictable. Even more so because the prevailing attitude is that if it's not completely protected by law, it's fair game. So you will not only have to explain to supporters why you can't just sue the pants off the offending person, you'll also get to listen to said person justify the production of a direct copy of a distinctive piece of work with 'legally we sort of can, so shove off'. 

Intellectual Property is a complicated business, even when you have technical drawings and patents to back you up. When it comes to events, it's useless. You can't own an idea, just a name, a look and a 'feel'. Legal stuff boils down to a battle of wallets in such situations: who has the resources to be the bigger bully, as you wade around in the grey area. Even if you're the winner, it's a bullshit win.

The nature of our work means that a lot of the time we're at the front of a trend. Then we'll start to see the signature feature of an event we started a year ago wedged into all sorts of formats, making varying degrees of sense. Or the whole format appropriated, with it's content and workings re-arranged, sold under an almost identical tag line. This happens after you've shown it works, it's engaging and it can turn a profit, of course. 

To an extent, that is the price you pay for being ahead of the curve: people catch up sooner or later, and because you work in the public arena, suddenly your work is 'public property' and it gets pulled apart and recycled by less skilled, less gentle hands.

To be clear, we're not talking about the people who are doing their own thing. Those people whose work is sometimes similar, but also completely different, because it comes from their own experiences and point of view. It's as individual as a fingerprint. Give 20 of us the same starting point, and you'd get 20 different results. There's plenty of room for anyone with an idiosyncratic world view and a bit of time on their hands. Those people tend to feel uncomfortable about similarities - they'll even ask you if you mind, should they make any changes? They're not a problem at all.

No, we're talking about the people who are more comfortable a few steps behind. The borrowers, the recyclers. Whose ideas aren't formed around the scattering of interesting, random bits that creative people magpie together out of habit, but around Google searches that throw up other people's work. Second hand stuff.  


We've learned to live with this, if a little unhappily. But recently we had our first (and hopefully only) carbon copy. Something we've worked on for years, lifted. Complete. Concept, workings, every small detail - that part rankled, the hard won solutions to small problems, the moments of elegant thinking - the language used around it, the packaging, the design. Probably the nicest thing we could say is that you had to sort of admire the chutzpah required. But only once all the other responses had quietened down a bit.

So it occurs to us that perhaps we all need to consider for a moment where inspiration ends and copying begins. And what happens after you've decided to opt for the conceptual five finger discount.


Now, we've all seen an idea and wished it was ours. Sometimes it's being done by people who seem a very long way away, in every sense. You think 'I could have a go at that, there's no possible harm in it'. It's really tempting. You convince yourself that doing it 'your way' would make it new work, you're just 'taking inspiration'. They'd never find out anyway. But here's the thing: it's a bad move.

First, if you admire someone's work enough to 'take inspiration', they've probably been around a bit longer than you. They know what's going on in their field, there are Google alerts set up so they can follow their own press. They know lots of people, and everyone talks. The second your re-hash gets a little exposure, they are going to know about you. And do you know how those people whose work you admire are going to feel about your little homage? Sad, disappointed and angry. Not a surprising reaction when you consider that you've decided to kick a stranger in the teeth and tell them it's a compliment.

Second, much as you may have told yourself otherwise, the moment your re-hash popped into existence you damaged the original's brand. Because you made a poor version (it is inevitably poor, because yours hasn't got the integrity that working from scratch brings) which people will conflate with theirs. You made it crappier and open to a million further, even crappier copies (no-one wants to be the first close copy, but being the 22nd is super easy). You single handedly called time on the idea you loved so much. But that's fine, because you will get a few quid and some second hand glory out of it. Well done you.

Third, your re-hash will always be derivative. If you become even slightly successful with it people will be quick to point out similarities, and you won't look so great. Maybe the general public won't notice or care, but your peers and your clients will. People are quick to draw simple conclusions from obvious situations and they don't aspire to work with skilled copyists. They aspire to work with people who deliver original content. 

And of course, there is the question of where you will go next. If you picked a good idea to rip off and you didn't do a terrible job with it, you'll soon be the big fish in your local pond, but you can't live on someone else's idea forever. You're going to have to have a new idea! Back to Google! How many times will that happen before people start to notice?  

So please, think twice before treating our portfolio like the Woolworth's pick 'n' mix counter. It's easily avoided: be honest.


We've seen this on every scale imaginable, from performers copying each other's costumes to major clients shopping around for cheap copies of a successful person's signature style. It gets tolerated because it's not clearly defined legally, no-one wants to be seen as a paranoid weirdo who thinks they own the colour red and the nature of creative process means that two people can come to the same conclusion on different sides of the world with no contact. There are lots of places for lazy, derivative 'creatives' to hide.

One thing we know: the person copying always knows better, deep down, no matter how sweetly they talk themselves into it. The person being copied always, always minds, no matter how benign the intention. It is never a victimless 'crime', even if the only damage is to a friendship or someone's feelings. It's taking something you want, because you think that being aware of it awards you co-ownership. It's a selfish, destructive action and to characterise it as 'creative' is both misleading and patently untrue.


So, be honest with yourself: do you know better than this? And if the answer is yes, no matter how attractive the idea, how delicious the re-arrangement already brewing in your head, how fat the cheque, walk away. Because it's so much better when you get to where you want to be on the back of an idea that's entirely your own. You deserve to know how that feels, and we hope that you never have to deal with some arse copying it because they think their wishes and needs are much more important than yours.

If you'd like to know more about where we think good ideas come from, have a look at this post on the subject and this book, which largely informed it.






5.11.14

Remember, remember the 5th of November

Bonfire night is the best, our one true love. Partly because we love all the ceremonial hoo-ha involved in the super old fashioned celebrations and partly because no-one can resist an epic musical firework display, even if a lot of then do seem to have a music curation policy that requires each track to either be a) a classical piece once used in a TV advert, b) an actual TV theme tune c) a Bond theme.



Our favourite display in London is the one at Battersea Park. It has music, it has endless hotdog stands , sometimes it even has aerialists suspended from cranes. The music is obviously picked by someone's granny but we've been having an amazing time there for years, and it's so romantic walking back over the gorgeous Chelsea bridge to jump on the bus home. If that's sold you on it, it's this weekend and tickets (£9 for adults, free for under 10s) are still available.



If you want to see a 'proper' Bonfire night celebration then Lewes is the only celebration of it's type and scale in the UK. Talk about value for money: there are actually six different Bonfire Societies celebrating in Lewes each with their own processions, traditions, costumes, fires and fireworks. There are 30+ processions between 5pm and 1am. 



The most notable feature of the event is the 17 burning crosses which are carried in the processions. These are for the 17 martyrs burned at the stake in Lewes between 1555 and 1557 (to give context, the gunpowder plot happened in 1605).




The Lewes celebration actually happens on the 5th of November - tonight - so if you want to get to see it you'll need to hot foot it to the train station tonight or put it in the diary for next year.

Dia de los Muertos

Early November is our favourite time of year. Not only do we have the very British tradition of Bonfire Night, we also have the not remotely British Dia de los Muertos just beforehand. 

The nice thing about Dia de los Muertos is that it's got such a lovely sentiment: it's all about re-connecting with loved ones who have passed away. So much better than trying to scare the pants off each other. It's also a super versatile theme, as demonstrated by two parties we had a hand in recently: at one end of the scale, an lavish 30th birthday party in Shoreditch and at the other a DIY kids party.







For the 30th: live gypsy/rock band, giant glitter skulls, clouds of silk hand painted butterflies, updated classic Mexican cocktails in jam jars and a Lily Vanilli cake crawling with edible bugs and dripping with flowers.



For the DIY kids party: all sorts of amazing free printables, including Pin the Bone on the Skeleton, skull printables for illuminated jam jars and skull papel picado, mariachi musical chairs, a pull tab burro pinata, colourful napkins from Tiger, multicolour striped straws from Fred Aldous (waaaay better value for money than anywhere else), face painting and lots of silly dancing.... so. much. fun.

 
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