Joshua Davis was born on June 13 1971. He is a New York based artist, designer, and technologist producing both public and private work for companies, collectors, and institutions. A proficient illustrator and painter with a passion for technology, Davis’ work brought an entirely new dimension to art. He established a new and unique perspective on visual communication and creative expression, pioneering an area previously unexplored in graphic design. Davis creates electronically generated graphic compositions of almost unimaginable complexity and individuality. Equally at home with print and electronic media, he builds his own Flash-based programs to combine and recombine colors borrowed from nature with forms that include organic shapes, text elements, and other symbols. Joshua Davis is another artist that I am not hugely interested in and I don’t really like his style, however a lot of his images do look good and interesting. He uses a range of colour and makes his images very complex. I guess the reason I am not hugely interested in his work is because it just looks all the same. I look at his work and think yeh that looks good, how did he do that? However none of it excites me or drives me to do better with my own work. Below is an example of his type of work.

I do like the use of colour he uses and the complexity of his images, but I am not interested in his style of work.

Having just read Chris Brogan’s excellent blog on ‘No locks No Gates’ (link to blog) I was reminded of when I started my design business, KMiDigital, and the amount of people who said, “did you know such and such has a very similar company?” No I didn’t and to be honest I wasn’t really that bothered as this was MY company and MY ideas on how it would operate and function.

So with this in mind are all businesses the same, churning out the same dull things day after day or has individuality came to the top and entrepreneurs are now the ones setting the standard, or has this always been the case.

Just like some of the art work Joshua Davis (link to site) has produced using flash, who would have thought this possible 5 or 10 years ago? Or that Hillman Curtis would transcend from designer to filmmaker (link to site) or has he, it could be that they have both just taken their chosen medium to greater heights and if these guys can do this then why can’t the rest of us?

Photo Credit: cogdogblog

I feel very fortunate as I look back on my career and recall some of the amazing adventures and experiences I’ve had.  There is so much to appreciate in being able to travel the country, orchestrate press events, mingle at trade shows, and manage photo shoots.  For me, those once-in-a-life time events are well worth the longs hours (and weekends), red eye flights, swollen ankles and buffet breakfasts (actually, I won’t complain about all-you-can-eat bacon).  While I could fill a book with my bounty of memories, the several days I spent with Joshua Davis go into my mental archives as one of the reasons that I love PR and journalism.

Joshua Davis has one of the most diverse backgrounds of any journalist I’ve met, and personifies the true essence of classic investigative journalism.  We spent several days in a hospital as he chronicled the treatment of a patient dependent on heroin for a multi-page story in Wired magazine.

My job was three-fold – ensure my client, the developer and practitioner of the exclusive treatment, was appropriately portrayed, help Joshua and his photographers get a compelling story and ensure that the patient, in such a vulnerable time, was treated with dignity and respect.

I’ll never forget watching Joshua sitting on the hospital room floor.  It was very easy to see he was becoming engrossed in the scene, taking copious notes, and mentally constructing a story which fairly portrayed the challenges, stereotypes and emotion behind drug dependency.

That was years ago, and I’m thrilled that he agreed to be interviewed here. To give you some background, Joshua is a contributing editor for Wired, and has also written for GQ, Maxim, Men’s Health, Outside and others.  One of his most memorable pieces was sneaking into Iraq to cover the war for Wired.  Josh also completed a documentary called “The Beast Within,” which documented his attempt to become the lightweight armwrestling champion of the world.

You can learn much more about his prolific journalism career, which spans television, film and print, at his Web site.

RK: You’ve covered a diverse and eclectic mix of stories during the course of your career.  How do you decide on your subject matter? Is it important to you that you actually take something away from each story you immerse yourself in?
JD: I follow my curiosity. Sometimes I look at a globe and put my finger on a place I want to go. Then I’ll think of subjects that are associated with the place and begin to do some research to see if there is a story there. Sometime I will just sit in my office and type random thoughts into Google to see where they lead.

My aim with my articles is to tell a gripping story that draws the reader in. My goal is to have the reader remember the experience.

RK: Which projects that you’ve worked on do you consider to have been most exciting?
JD: I’ve done a number of stories that have gotten my heart racing. I covered the war in Iraq, spent time in Southern Colombia during a rebel uprising, and followed a group of maritime salvage experts into the Dominican Republic in the wake of a hurricane. I’ve also written about advances in cream cheese technology and found that pretty exciting too. If the story is good, it doesn’t really matter what the setting is – the subject matter can get my adrenaline going.

RK: In addition to magazine writing, you work with a number of other types of media as an author and television and film producer, and stories of yours are even being adapted to film. Did you set out to be a jack-of-all-trades or did your career evolve over time? What interests you about journalism in all its forms?
JD: My career evolved. I never intended to be a journalist; I just kind of stumbled onto it. I was making documentaries at the time about unusual contests. At first, I just filmed them but then I started to compete. I entered the U.S. National Armwrestling Championship and surprisingly ended up 4th in U.S. in the lightweight division. That made me an alternate for the U.S. National team and when the 2nd and 3rd guys couldn’t make it; I was invited to compete at the World Championship in Poland. I ended up 17th in the world and made a doc about that experience. That film got me signed by an agency in LA and led me into the TV realm.

At the same time, I wrote an article for Maxim about my journey to Poland and that was my first long-form magazine article. I also ended up writing a book about the contests for Random House (the book is titled “The Underdog“). So it’s all been a bit of evolution starting with armwrestling!

RK: Have you incorporated any social media elements into your reporting? Do you use social networking professionally or personally?  How do you feel that tools like blogs and Twitter impact the way news is consumed as opposed to traditional vehicles?
JD: I have Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace and Twitter accounts but I don’t use them that much. I feel like I spend most of my time working and don’t want to get too distracted. There’s only one occasion that I can recall where I came across some interesting info on a social networking site. It was actually a Russian site dedicated to introducing Western men to Russian women. I was writing a piece about a man who had built a pirated DVD empire in Shanghai and he was using the site to meet women. He listed a bunch of personal info on it and I quoted that in the story. The moral, I guess, is be careful what you post.

RK: What qualities/traits do you value when working with a publicist? What attributes have deterred you from working with a PR practitioner?
JD:  For me, I appreciated a publicist who will point me towards good interview subjects. Plus, I like PR people who understand what I need to make a story work. That means understanding the nature of the publication and understanding what makes a great story.

RK: What can a PR person do to help you to obtain the information you need for a good story?
JD: Arrange uncoached interviews. There’s nothing worse than a canned presentation.

RK: Do you receive PR pitches?  Do you ever use pitches for story fodder? If so, what kind of pitch catches your eye?

JD: I receive PR pitches every day. I have only written one story based on a pitch in 8 years and it was a short 200 word piece about an Italian sewage agency that was testing their sewage to determine the amount of drugs the population was doing. What appealed to me was how unusual and strange it was.

RK: What’s next on the horizon for you?

JD:  Finding a wild, wonderful and surprising story!

Rachel Kay

I HEART JOSHUA DAVIS.

Terminó el cada vez más popular festival internacional sobre cultura y creación post-digital Offf (arf -arf), este año celebrado en Oeiras. Cómo siempre, un programa más que interesante e invitados la mayoría de ellos referentes mundiales en su campo. Siempre es interesante conocer el último trabajo de gente de la talla de Neville Brody, Kyle Cooper, Aaron koblin (del que ya hablamos) o Cris Milk estre muchos otros, y por supuesto, conocer todo aquello que tengan que decir, pues siempre se aprende algo nuevo de ellos. Para quiénes (cómo nosotros) les hubiera apetecido ir, y disfrutar de todos los actos, dejamos unos cuantos vídeos de esta reciente edición.

plus+ crónica

Kaleidoskop vom electronic Arts Guru Joshua Davis! Sehhr cool – erinnert an Kindertage und regt zum spielen an…

“Not all artists are depressed,” is quite possibly be best tag line we’ve heard in a while. BMW’s latest Z4 campaign, Expression of Joy, has recently rolled out across several platforms, attempting to reach affluent customers of all of ages and interests.  BMW’s roadster has always been synonymous with intelligent design and has collaborated with select artists in the past to express this priority. Using GSD&M Idea City as their creative backbone, BMW has opted to jump into the driver seat this time around and let their product become the paintbrush, “While the original idea was to use the car to create artwork, over time, our thinking evolved from the final product to the process,” says David Matathia, VP and Idea Team Director at GSD&M Idea City. The results are both stunning and effective, as this vibrant spot translates seamlessly across all media platforms- be it print, tv, web, mobile or on premise entertainment.

In an effort to embrace the concept, Expression of Joy, we decided to explore a few other products that inspire controlled chaos and negative space.  This Corallo Bag, a current feature on MoMA’s retail website, is an elegant, non-ending doodle that’s a durable alternative to the plastic throwaway.  Moving in a more literal direction, Hudson-Powell’s patterned rug mimics tire tracks in the snow. Emulating tracks of another sort, Walter Onion’s wool and linen bed spreads are a minimalist and high-end interpretation of this trend.  This painterly Hurley bikini looks as if the roadster rolled over it while creating its 240 yard masterpiece.

Additional Contributions by Emily Gup.

I was born on The Internet in 1994.

As lavishly expensive as my small liberal arts undergraduate college was to attend at the time, it was a bit late to connect members of its student body to the world wide web. My friends from prep school who had matriculated at Amherst, Swarthmore, Vassar, and Williams boasted .edu email addresses from their first days on their respective campuses; I did not receive my official “abartelby@mail.slc.edu” email address until close to the end of my sophomore year, in the spring of 1994. I remember the occasion as if it was only yesterday, however: the newest building on campus, the Science Center, had just been completed and opened for business. But the lines of students snaking out of the building’s main entrance on that first day were not there for tours of the new science labs, they were there for the assignment of email addresses, and to finally explore the new and expanded collection of Apple Macintoshes in the Academic Computing Center.

My friends with whom I lived that year and I were among the first students in the lines. We collected our new email addresses and passwords with the excitement of Christmas morning, and spent our first strictly limited hours during those first few weeks in our little adjacent workstations, emailing each other back and forth.

From: Kramer @ mail.slc.edu
To: Atherton @ mail.slc.edu
Date: Thu, Apr 23, 1994 at 8:13 PM
Subject: Re: Re: OHMYGODISTHISNOTEXCITING?!?!
Mailed by: slc.edu

This is kind of retarded. You do realize we’ve been here nearly an hour sitting right next to each other but emailing instead of talking, right?

Write me back.

Love,
Kramer

+ + +

From: Atherton @ mail.slc.edu
To: Kramer @ mail.slc.edu
Date: Thu, Apr 23, 1994 at 8:15 PM
Subject: Re: Re: Re: OHMYGODISTHISNOTEXCITING?!?!
Mailed by: slc.edu

WHO CARES?! ISN’T IT FUN?! WE HAVE EMAIL, DUDE! IT BEATS WRITING THAT PAPER ON 17TH CENTURY METATHEATRE, OK?!?!

Write me back, too.

Love,
Atherton

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From: Kramer @ mail.slc.edu
To: Atherton @ mail.slc.edu
Date: Thu, Apr 23, 1994 at 8:16 PM
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: OHMYGODISTHISNOTEXCITING?!?!
Mailed by: slc.edu

OH, TOTALLY! I wish we could smoke in here. I need a cigarette. Where the fuck is Amory? Why is he on a WINDOWS machine?! He’s such a loser. Wanna go to Bates after they kick us out of here?

Write me back.

Love,
Kramer

And so on.

It was exciting, because it was new: this foreign mode of communication.

Time spent at the Academic Computing Center became even more exciting, however, during the first semester of my junior year, when, after befriending the 1337 g33k students who staffed the Center, I acquired access to flatbed scanners, the single Macintosh workstation that housed Photoshop and Pagemaker, and advanced knowledge of the world that existed in the tubes beyond those of our college’s mail servers. It was not long at all before I was exchanging emails with friends on a site called “Hotmail,” developing my very first (of, tragically, far too many) Internet crushes on the “Intellectuals” “floor” of a chat site called “Gay.com,” and, perhaps most exciting of all, establishing my very first home on The Internet, on a site called “GeoCities.”

WANDERING THROUGH SOHO

GeoCities - Circa 1996

I seemed to understand intuitively that my GeoCities page would be seen by “everyone” on the world wide web, and therefore took great care in selecting which “Neighborhood” I would “move into,” knowing that this would be “everyone’s” first impression of me. “Athens?” I did adore philosophy, and Plato, and…no, no, no, because then “everyone” would think I was an uptight, too-serious academic and wouldn’t “get” that section of high resolution scans of pages from Madonna’s Sex book that I intended to “feature” on my “page.” “SoHo?” I did have an internship in the neighborhood that year, and that was where I invariably hung out when I was in Manhattan. Trendy. Cosmopolitan. Artsy. Yes, totally, “SoHo” is so me!

And so, “SoHo” it was.

My “page,” as I remember, was hideous. White text set in Times New Roman on a black background. Garishly hued, animated navigational buttons. Graphic headers that I “designed” in Photoshop: thick, indelicate text banners, that I embossed, outer glowed, drop shadowed, and lens flared the hell out of, each color-coded to match the content of each section. (I still give myself props for at least being consistent in the color arena, despite the hideous aesthetics of the rest of my “page” architecture.) Aside from the Sex book scans, I can remember precious little other content. I can vaguely remember a “Literature and Philosophy” “section” in which I posted my course syllabi each semester, as well as a few seminar papers, and there was almost certainly a “section” devoted entirely to gritty, scanned, pseudo-sexy self-portraits over which I imagined my Gay.com crushes would drool, but that’s about all I remember.

I was always embarrassed to mention my very first GeoCities page, once I settled into my own personal design style and graduated to CSS and a properly designed and self-hosted site from my early, clumsy HTML coding and GeoCities hosting, until a few weeks ago, when I stumbled upon a screen grab of noted designer Jeffrey Zeldman’s web page circa 1996, which made me feel a whole lot less embarrassed. Now, I wish I had had the foresight to take screen grabs of my own, all throughout those first laughable infant steps of mine into the world wide web, if only to be able to laugh at their hideousness when held up to the clean, minimalist white tundra of my current blog theme.

I mention all of this, of course, in response to Yahoo!’s media release yesterday stating that it will shut down GeoCities entirely before the end of 2009. I know, right? It was still around? I forgot all about my once-treasured GeoCities page after I was graduated from college in the spring of 1996, once I entered “The Real World” of living in New York City on an Editorial Assistant’s salary, when I no longer boasted constant access to The Internet.

But I remembered it, yesterday, and became, I dare say, a bit nostalgic for the old pixelated “SoHo” in which I used to “live.”

THE DEATH OF THE REPUBLIC

The Designers Republic - Angryman

This most recent occurrence of Internet nostalgia, however, is only the latest in a series that began back in late February, when I first read of the death of The Designers Republic. February has for many years been a month of death for me, following the death of my father in February of 2002, and the death of my mother in February of the following year. So it seemed fitting, somehow, that this most recent February should herald the death of not only my most recent romantic involvement, but also that of one of my most revered design studios.

But for me Ian Anderson’s Designers Republic was far more than an important design studio whose work I admired and whose business practices and client list I sought to emulate and achieve myself. It was also, much like Joshua Davis‘ Dreamless.org before it, of which I was also a member, an international community of designers who met in its forum, Neue.DR, to socialize, brainstorm, and share work and music. In those early days of the new millennium, when both my personal and professional lives were constantly in flux, Neue.DR was my one constant, my one home, the one thing on which I could always depend. I could escape into its tubes, away from my hectic job, away from my relationship that I knew was nearing its end, to find solace in the conversations I had with the other designers, humor in the flirtatious antics between the Icelandic woman and the French dude, and inspiration in the latest Photoshop battle.

It was my haven on the world wide web.

So, even though The Designers Republic had (again, much like Joshua Davis had done with Dreamless.org before it) long since shuttered the Neue.DR forum before its own ultimate demise at the end of this January, I still felt a bit of nostalgia when I read of its passing during my dead month. Because, much like GeoCities had, Neue.DR marked a specific time in my life, and became, like any of the physical senses will become, a trigger for memories of events, and of work, and of people: a road marker on the map of my life’s experiences.

The passing of both online “homes,” for me, really does signify, if one will pardon an oft-employed phrase in these Curious Affairs, “The End Of An Era.”

THE ONLINE MAPPING OF A PERSONAGE

In some ways I feel that these words and ruminations that I am recording here are only the beginning of a more expansive project, inaugural notes for an endeavor that will eventually record my life and experiences, not only in words or images, but also in the URLs at which I have left traces of myself, and which have left their own traces on me. As an individual who almost obsessively records his experiences and memories based on sights, sounds, scents, and other senses, it seems only natural to begin recording them also based on my online activities. Because, much like I can vividly recall the scene outside of my apartment’s balcony when my brother told me over the telephone that our mother had died, or describe in minute detail the scents that filled my nostrils as I lost my virginity, so too can I recall precisely which design forums I was frequenting when my father died, or which blog I was maintaining when I was told that my first friend to die of AIDS had just been diagnosed with it, or exactly how many subdomains resided on my website when I experienced the most soul-destroying breakup of my life.

And, as someone who, almost quite literally, lives online, I think it is important to document these sojourns throughout the great white web as faithfully, and as thoughtfully, as one records his experiences IRL. If only to be able to, many years and several lifetimes later, look back on design forum conversations and Photoshop battles, and on the hideously designed pages of his first “home” on the Internet, and marvel at just far one has come.

And at just how much one has changed, as the URLs have gone by.

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RELATED ARTICLES FROM ACROSS THE WEB

• There Is Always A City by AV Flox: “Perhaps more than places of residence, spaces online are like lovers. We enjoy many people who touch our lives, but there are only a number of them that really change us so deeply, and teach us so much, that we remember them forever. In a sense, GeoCities was that. It may not have been the moody codependent relationship I had with Diaryland, or the drama-filled, torrid affair I had with LiveJournal or the wild, no-strings-attached fling I’ve been having with WordPress, or the warm marriage I enjoy on this self-hosted blog—but it shaped me. Maybe it was my first crush.”
• RIP GeoCities by Maria Diaz: “What this ending of Geocities does make me realize is, for all our scary talk of how we need to watch what our slutty, drunken selves put online because oh no someone who may pay us to do something might see it, is how not permanent so much of the web truly is. This is why I think talking about the Internet’s history is so important. So much of what happened is gone now. We have to discuss it, there’s so little evidence of it but our memories and a few pages with dead links.”

Tá quaaaaaaase! E começa já dia 7 de Maio! E eu já tenho bilhetes ohoh!

Este ano vão cá estar (estes são os meus favoritos):

Stefan Sagmeister (WOW!!!!!)

Neville Brody

Paula Scher

Joshua Davis

and manyyyyy more!

check it OFFF

can’t waaaait!

It is difficult to predict the future of  new media such as YouTube and video blogging.  However, with the development of the Lonelygirl15 blog and its new found fictitious plot, one must wonder whether this is the future of entertainment.

Indeed, if done correctly, video blogs enjoy a great amount of popularity and success.  It is much like reading someone’s diary, oftentimes even more than reading someone’s blog is, because the viewer is able to see the blogger’s emotions in their facial expressions.  Blog writers usually focus on a specific subject, while video blogs seem to be more focused on personal matters. 

Mesh Flinders, the writer of the Lonelygirl15 series, took advantage of the video blogging phenomenonand created Bree, a teenage girl who struggles with the trials and tribulations of the everyday high  school-er.  She fights with her parents, questions her faith,kisses boys, and more, all within a few days or even hours.  Bree is the every-girl, who seems to have a lot of experience with iVideo.

I hadn’t seen or heard about the Lonelygirl15 video blogs until I was assigned to read Joshua Davis’s article ”The Secret World of Lonelygirl”.  Perhaps this is why I found it hard to see how people believed that these videos were non-fictional.  To me, it seemed to mirror Lizzie McGuire a bit too much, with all the side thoughts and stuffed animals.  Bree seems like a slightly cartoonish character, her facial expressions extremely innocent, and her involvement of Purple Monkey in her life is at times disturbing.

At some point, Bree’s friend (or boyfriend, or friend with benefits, or whatever), Daniel, began a blog also.  Danielbeast is the name of his video blog.  Daniel blogs about Bree’s too-strict parents, hangovers, kissing Bree, fighting with Bree, and Bree in general, while Bree blogs about how weird it is that Daniel told her that he likes her.  As I studied the story of their love between their two blogs, I wondered how they aren’t bothered by the world knowing all of their intimate secrets.  Each watches and responds to the other’s video blogs, but nothing is ever said to be the wrong story and nothing is deleted or edited. 

I do not believe that YouTube will revolutionize television.  Though this media has gained a lot of attention and many viewers through video blogs, humorous videos, and recordings of television shows, I don’t think this media will ever replace television.  Viewers will never want to give up the comfort of the couch and the boob tube.   Viewers would miss the art of television shows and the intrigue of large screen tvs.  YouTube leaves the viewer to searching for their preferences, weeding through video after video until they find a good one.  Although YouTube allows the freedom of whatever you want, whenever you want, channel surfing will never die.

Joshua Davis also wrote about the Kaminsky internet bug late last year in Wired Magazine. Davis is the author whose two most recent articles for Wired were optioned as movies by major studios in Hollywood.

De te kraken brandkast (illustratie: Wired)

J.J. Abrams (Lost, Star Trek, Cloverfield)  zal een verfilming van de ‘Diamantkraak van de eeuw’ voor zich nemen. Dat melden De Morgen, HLN en MTV.

In 2003 ontvreemden Leonardo Notarbartolo en kompanen tot 100 miljoen dollar aan diamanten uit het Antwerp Diamond Center (Antwerpse Diamantkring). Het verhaal zal gebaseerd zijn op het Wired Magazine-artikel van Joshua Davis.

Dat is van een ander kaliber dan Jan Verheyen of Erik Van Looy.

Kottke reports that the latest Joshua Davis piece on the 100 million diamond heist has been optioned into a movie. I linked to it through Andy’s Waxy Links. It might be directed by JJ Abrams himself. Joshua Davis also wrote High Tech Cowboys of the Deep Seas: The Race to Save the Cougar Ace, which has also been optioned for film.

That’s really cool, since I use both of these texts in my advanced ESL classes. They are great and it’s astounding that these articles are being made into movies. I didn’t know that this actually happened.

The 2009 AIGA Student Portfolio Review is a chance for you to practice your interview skills and get valuable feedback from professionals about your portfolio and resume in a no-risk, non-competitive environment. Get the inside scoop from the industry’s finest and find out what it takes to land the perfect job! While this event is not a job fair, some reviewers may be looking for potential employees or interns. This is a great opportunity to learn who’s who in South Louisiana’s design community and start making connections while getting critical feedback on your portfolio.