Jeremy Williams

Moses parts the Red Sea, Google looks on

Part of an entry for the Miami Art Fair, by Australian collective The Glue Society.

Michael’s music

My brother’s been writing songs, and they’re available for listening on amazingtunes.com, and buying too if you’re so inclined. I’m obviously biased, but I think they’re good – laid back beats, piano and lots of harmonies.

I’m also biased because I wrote a few songs myself a few years ago and never did much with them, and Michael’s taken a couple of pages out of my notebooks and turned them into proper songs with tunes and choruses and everything. But you’ll have to guess which bits are mine.

My favourite is ‘happy side‘. Taken a listen…

the fourth plinth

I’m a big fan of the fourth plinth. No, not Dan Brown’s new novel, the empty plinth in trafalagar square, erected in 1841 for a statue that never got built.

As far as I’m concerned, it’s the best showcase for public art in london, and has been host to some brilliant pieces in the past, including Mark Wallinger’s Christ figure, and Marc Quinn’s Alison Lapper pregnant, both sculptures that quietly subverted the colonial grandeur of trafalgar square.

So, passing the square the other day on the bus, I was quite excited to see a big sheet over the plinth, and that evening, coming back, the new commission was in place. And here it is:

This is Thomas Schutte’s ‘Model for a hotel 2007’, made of coloured glass. The press release says it’s a utopian architectural vision that is “multi-layered, mysterious, and promising to sparkle like a brightly-coloured jewel.”

Now, I’m no stranger to utopian architectural vision, but try as I might, what it reminds me of most is Rotastak’s ‘space command unit’ for hamsters, a “fantastic space themed unit that has all the necessary components to provide out of this world housing for your pet.”

Perhaps I’ll warm to it.

Good question

Interesting installation by Robert Stadler in a Parisian church. When you come into the building it looks like this:

As you move around to the back it resolves to this:

christmas resources from lifewords

Thought I’d better give a little plug to some work stuff. Every summer I end up spending a fair chunk of time working on Christmas materials, which is always a little bit strange. The lifewords christmas site for 08 is here, and it’s looking good.

The basic idea is to supply free christmas resources for churches, so we’ve got powerpoints, audio downloads, posters, invites, a rather nifty advent devotional thing, and bunch of other stuff.

We’ve also got the little story booklet, A Little Story About Something Big, written by yours truly and illustrated by very talented Japanese artist Chinatsu Sunaga.

the world’s worst forger

This article amused me this morning:

A gang are currently being prosecuted for attempting to redeem £1000 and £500,000 notes. You can’t blame them for aiming high, but they should at least have forged notes that actually existed.

Celsias

I’ve just starting contributing posts to Celsias, and my first two articles are online. Go and have a look:

The forest cannot be bought – how the land rights of indigenous tribes are key to forest conservation.

Ecosocialism – a more green red, and a more red green.

Singing in church

I was talking about singing in church the other day with my brothers, and I was reminded of these cartoons, courtesy of ASBO Jesus. (Because if Jesus were alive today, he’d probably get one, in case you’re wondering).

Helvetica

I went to see this rather nifty little movie on my way home last night, partly because it tickled my repressed inner geek, but mostly out of curiosity – how do you make a film about something as simple and unassuming as a typeface? And what kind of person would go and see such a film?

Anyway, it was more interesting than you might imagine, a celebration of 50 years of Helvetica, a font that engenders passionate responses from the designers interviewed. Some think it’s perfect, wonderful, the apex of simple legibility. Another declares ‘I am morally opposed to Helvetica’ and goes on the blame the font for the Iraq war, albeit in a tongue in cheek fashion.

Best of all though, it’s one of those movies that changes the way you see things, draws your attention to things normally overlooked. Although it’s about Helvetica, it’s also about global design culture, about the ideology at work behind our visual communication. And that, I find quite fascinating.

Anyway, here’s a sample, and I recommend it. If you’re in London, it’s showing at the ICA until the end of the month.