City of Sound is about cities, design, architecture, music, media, politics and more. Written by Dan Hill since 2001.

Kapitaal

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Kapitaal is a quite lovely animation by Holland’s Studio Smack. Commissioned by Museum de Beyerd, Breda, it was created by Tom Meijdam, Thom Snels, Béla Zsigmond and is available for download at their site. (It’s also available on YouTube, but go to studiosmack.nl for the higher-quality version.) As Jim Coudal says, it’s "a brilliant vision of the world stripped bare of everything except corporate identities and signage". Formally reminiscent of Antoine Bardou-Jacquet’s classic video for Alex Gopher’s "The Child", spatially it also recalls the faux-perfect Euro-urban ‘Tativille’ of Playtime.

Despite the possible critique suggested by the title, it’s actually an incredibly seductive little film. Inadvertent perhaps, but pulled back to high contrast, monochrome vectors and smooth, fluid movement and transition, it has little of the jittery, poorly-printed, vibra-colour, jump-cut harshness of real urban centres. Anyway, it’s wonderfully executed, with or without interpretation. Some grabs below, but you really have to see the thing move to do it justice.

Kapitaal

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Studio Smack: Kapitaal

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2 responses to “Kapitaal”

  1. Andrew Avatar
    Andrew

    That’s wonderful. Amazing to realize that you could pretty much navigate this context–a train station–entirely by media/logo/ui.

    Like

  2. mrpommer Avatar
    mrpommer

    It’s reminiscent of (an inversion of) the type-free altered photographs by Canadian artist Robin Collyer. You can see some samples at:
    http://www.susanhobbs.com/artists/Collyer/RCimages.html
    and http://tinyurl.com/ku7c2
    Beautiful work.

    Like

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