It all sounds so futuristic. It sounds like a little slice of cyberspace has gouged it’s way into real life. As if some hipped-up collection of uber-cool computer and video artists have plucked from the pages of a William Gibson novel and given a platform to showcase their 21st Century freaky-deakiness to the world.
Fresh, solid and fingering a vast array of juicy pulses, the Creators Project is a cross-platform media channel that will give artists of all kinds – from film and art to gaming and fashion – a base from which they can show off their work, network with other visionary types and access a jamboree of media – from the Creators Project website to TV and exhibition events, such as the one the rolled through London last Saturday.
A collaboration between those achingly hip Vice people and silicone powerhouse Intel, the Creators Project certainly comes with a fair set of credentials and the sort of stability it will need to carry though on its mission statement to act as a content creation studio and looseleaf arts foundation for future artists. LWLies got an eyeful of what all this might actually mean in practice when we went along to a preview of the exhibition late last week.
Slipping into the vast, white-tiled expanses of the basements of Victoria House on Southampton Row, we found ourselves in a stark netherworld dotted here and there with plots of art-harbouring shrubbery, fiendish, batshit wall-projected video games and – lurking somewhere – a pyramidal art installation by Radical Friend charged with nothing less than creating a ‘collective digital being’. Gulp! There were panels discussing the nature of the project and the exhibition and even a chance for LWLies to ‘find itself’ rubbing shoulder with the stupidly good-looking Mark Ronson, who along with DJ sets from people called Crispin Dior and Tinchy Snyder would be providing the musical element to the show. But on to the films…
There was a fairly broad, crowd-pleasing feel to the selection of films lined up, which – whether that was the intention or not – should be instrumantal in getting all the more people interested in what the Project is doing. Pixels by Patrick Jean – which you may have already seen – is a great example of something that’s both accessible and cutting-edge creative. A strikingly shot computer character crossover gem, it can be viewed either as a fun slice of aimless retro cool or a sly commentary on the heavy impact that entertainment culture is having on our daily lives, but it’s effortlessly watchable whichever way you dice it.
Equally charming is Sun Haipeng’s food fight face-off Super Baozi vs. Sushi Man, a homage to Bruce Lee delivered via the medium of an animated Chinese dumpling going postal on gang of evil sushi warriors.
Spike Jonze’s vodka-shilling robo-heartbreaker I’m Here also received an airing, alongside a dose or two of the usual brand of full-tilt, breathlessly imaginative lunacy from the onedotzero crew.
Striking a slightly more sober note was Ladj Ly’s troubling documentary on the gangs, injustice and cannabis trafficking of the Paris suburbs, Go Fast Connexion. Stark and uncompromising, it’s a welcome sign that the Creators Project is allying itself with stouthearted documentarians as well as noodling video artists.
Truly international, artistically diverse and – your personal opinion about corporate sponsorship notwithstanding – carrying enough muscle behind it to give it the feel of something that’s really here to stay, the Creators Project looks set to actually do what so many of these collectives and would-be networking operations merely claim to in remapping at least one corner of the artistic landscape into a place where the practitioners can get busy cooking up a storm and the public are as included and involved as they want to be.
