We Are The Muzak Makers

And We Are The Dreamers Of Your Dreams!





A StellaVista re-branding for the troubled Muzak-Corporation. Unfortunately they went for the Sarah Palin-lookalike instead.

Bump!

Evolution of Scooter (or Bumper-) cars made by Reverchon in France. From top to bottom: 1950, 1958, 1960, 1962, 1980

Drivin´ n´ smokin´

I don´t know what she is trying to sell, but I can tell when she did it

Nice detail of a vintage scooter made by Ihle

Another classic Ihle-car: The Mercedes-scooter

Come To Gucci

What happened to Chris Cunningham? His short-films for "Come to Daddy" and "All is full of love" are probably some of the best promo-clips of all time. The latter was most likely the pinnacle of the music-video age. It all went downhill afterwards and even Cunningham himself could never live up to the promise of his artistic masterpiece.


He might have felt so too as he directed fewer and fewer music-clips. For some time he was allegedly set to direct a Hollywood version of William Gibson´s "Neuromancer", but he eventually opted out of the production.

Apparently, Cunningham is not the most ambitious person and he worked himself into a position where he can quietly chose to direct some advertisements and do photo-shootings to pay the rent while pursuing his obsessions. Something I find very sympathetic!


For the fragrance campaign "Flora" by Gucci he recorded a new version of Donna Summer´s "I Feel Love", complete with newly sung vocals by the Diva herself. According to Gucci the perfume is addressing "the sensitive, young girl."

The advertising face is Australian model Abbey Lee (who strongly resembles Vanessa Paradis), wearing a silk dress with floral print. Shot in a cornfield in Latvia, Lee is captured standing in the middle of more than 40000 silky flowers dancing in rhythm of wind and the (beatless) music.

It´s pretty pretty and has some typical Cunningham-moments (the levitating girl, the transforming, mirrored dress and dissolving body). Of course it is still a bit bland and underwhelming ( I heard many voices who say that the fragrance is also bland). I wonder if there is a law that every fragrance-ad has to end with a bored, female voice reciting the name of the product and the brand?!

Don´t Look At The Camera!

For quite some time I had the creeping fear that "Brave New World", "1984" and their celluloid remixes "THX 1138" and "Brazil" were not only painting a bleak and sarcastic dystopia, but that they actually were self fulfilling prophecies and a how-to-manual for governments to implement the "benevolent dictatorship" that is being created around us.

Boing Boing reported about the latest, incredibly creepy public awareness posters, which are currently popping up in London (see above). This craziness is paid for by the taxpayers who are in retrospect treated like complete idiots by the people who are behind this paranoid and pathetic attempts at mass-hypnosis. You could almost mistake if for satire.

Not only do these messages tell you that it is o.k. to sniff through other people´s trash and report them if you find anything that is beyond your way of understanding, they also expect you to unsee the millions of CCTV cameras that are suspecting you to be a potential criminal. Observing the observers is suspicious! Don´t notice the man behind the curtain!



This really screams for a "Improv Everywhere"-stunt! Thousands of identically dressed people with hats and sun-glasses need to show up in front of every open CCTV camera and stare at it for a few minutes.


The other, much easier reaction already happened in the comments section of the thread: People created instant piss-takes of the posters! I guess this shows how deeply unsettling these posters really are.

Fear makes advertisers happy!


While I was typing up this post, a follow-up article appeared on Boing Boing that reported the remixing of the posters. The comments are full of great, sarcastic takes on the governMENTAL idiocy.

It´s More Fun To Cloud-Compute

Back in August of last year I posted about the computerised kinetic sculptures of Joe Gilbertson and the similar, very sophisticated advertising installation at the BMW museum.

IBM has borrowed the same idea for a presentation at this year´s CeBIT fair to explain the concept of "Cloud Computing" in a graphic way. The scale of the presentation is a bit smaller (yes, it´s got less balls) than the BMW version but the balls are magically changing colour!
However, the thing I like best about this is the female voice that talks in this very soothing, Westworld-voice with ambient sounds playing in the background.


found on Basic Thinking.

I-Joy Riders

This commercial for the iJoy Ride is...erm, strange and hilarious! I guess this caters to the women who are feeding Extenze to their husbands only to find out that it doesn´t work as advertised. But hey, it only simulates a gentle horse ride...

Pull a Card

Make sure to watch in high resolution


This charity campaign ad for "Shelter - The Homeless and Housing Charity" from the UK was done for free by Outsider and Framestore. Music was provided by Radiohead.

Even years after Pleix perfected this "dissolving architecture"-style, I am still amazed by these "drive-by" cgi effects. They are really getting better and better with these slo-mo, one-shot techniques.

Thank You For The MUZAK

I was always fascinated by the bogus scientific stories about MUZAKs ability to turn potential shoppers into mindless consumer-robots. Never underestimate the power of subliminal easy-listening.


Originally invented in the 1930s to silence the creaking noises of elevators with soothing, nerve-calming music, Muzak Inc. soon applied the magic of pseudo-science to sell their background music. Make people stay longer and spend more, heighten the productivity of your work-drones, clear your train-stations of junkies: Muzak promised all this and now, in their 75th year of existence, they had to file for bankruptcy. The day the Muzak died!


To celebrate the company that would have loved to make us believe that they shaped the 20th century more than they actually did, have another listen to one of the only pop-songs that is about muzak:
Moonlight and Muzak by M.
And remember: Muzak mixed the bourgeoisie and the rebel!

Ballard Beat Box

No, this is not the new Pet Shop Boys sleeve!

It´s taken from a funny and technically amazing viral ad-gimmick that turns you into a human beat-box. You can chose between four templates, upload your (or any) portrait and within a minute your avatar will perform some wicked things to your face.

Since we here at StellaVista Towers have no great entertainment value with a pot warmer on our heads, I tried to upload pictures of some iconic friends.
Both, Liberace and Warhol didn´t work that well. Once morphed by the progeam they looked like Thunderbird puppets. It´s amazing how exchangeable they look when their hair/wig is hidden by a hat.


Anyway, it was much more fun to use a J.G. Ballard picture and it worked surprisingly well. Click here to see and hear JG Ballard aka MC Crashbox putting a donk on it!

MC Crashbox

Well, it´s in b/w but the morphing program is very picky and it was impossible to find a usable colour portrait of the man.

Andy MC


Then I had the smashing idea to use a (fake) image of the Damien-Hirst-Diamond-Skull. But again, the program wouldn´t accept the picture. I tried to modify it several times, but it didn´t work. Too bad, it would have been such a great contribution to this great Hirst-bashing project. Thanks to Jocko for bringing this great Jimmy Cauty project to my attention.

Last try was a screenshot of Kraftwerk´s "Musique Non Stop", since I wanted to see how an early, literally beatboxing CGI would look make the transition.
Boing Boom Tshack

Below you can try your own thing. It´s mostly in German but I think that it is possible to navigate the site anyway. Enter your birthday and location and it will play the Kraftwerk-video. If you want to start your own creation, click on the bottom left "werde Beatologist".

Japandering Bananarama

Early Bananarama japandering their cuteness (and Boy George hair) to sell Canon cameras. Sweet in the first degree.

Design 8 Itself

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The Designers Republic announced last week that they have been forced to shut down due to several unlucky occurrences that all involve money.

Well, during the last years tDR has grown into a very large enterprise that had to run after corporate money in order to keep itself alive. It might have looked strange to their early followers that they were designing the international look of Coca Cola since 2006. According to founder Ian Anderson, he was also aware of this break in ethics and he plans to bring tDR back, probably on a much smaller scale. Design ate itself!

But anyway, If you look through some of their record sleeves (and other works in public spaces from the last 20+ years, it is safe to say that no other company (or single designer) has had such an enormous and lasting impact on graphic design as tDR.
There was Hipgnosis in the seventies, followed by heroes Neville Brody, Peter Saville, Russell Mills and 23 Envelope in the eighties. Designers Republic took all this, wrapped it up and ran with it. You can still spot a good tDR sleeve from one of the countless imitators that followed them.

Of course, thanks to tDR we now have loads of annoying graphic designers who like to have their photographs taken while holding up a fresh din a0-print, most likely sporting a stupid calendar-wisdom in a wacky type face.

Hee hee hee, yes! Wipeout!