The 2nd installment of Interesting Vancouver is taking place this Friday, October 23rd at The Vancouver Rowing Club. Those of us who attended last year were treated to one of the most refreshing and inspiring gatherings that you could hope to experience. This was ultimately due to the fact that the evening was not centered around any particular industry, nor was it trying to get us to upgrade anything, jump on bandwagons or subscribe to hidden agendas. As Brett McFarlane, the founder of IV, states, it is “a multi-disciplinary conference …

Starting in ’09, along with my sporadic duties on this blog posting about design, art and culture, I will also be sporadically contributing to a new site that focusses on another one of my passions: food. The Foodists describes itself as “a collective of like-minded food worshipers. We breathe and sleep in order to eat and drink.”
Seeing as I don’t get out all that much these days what with the new family and all, I am planning on posting recipes that reflect the type of meals that I make …

4 teams. 4 charities. 48 hours to make a difference. Karyo Edelman’s The Little Give kicks off today. Check back to the site as the event progresses for on location Twitter updates and of-the-moment Flickr coverage.

The team over at Coudal.com are back at it with the launch of the 2008 edition of Field Tested Books, a collection of book reviews by a variety writers, each with an interesting twist. As Jim explains:
“We had this notion that somehow through experimentation we could identify how our perception of a book is affected by the place where we read it. Or maybe the other way around. Maybe it’s possible to determine how a book colors the way we feel about the place where we experience it.”
This year, the …

On June 13th, 2006, artist Jeroen Witvliet bought a number of newspapers and proceeded to cut out images from their pages. From this collection, he would select those which he responded to most and paint them. In doing so, they became something new; stripped of its context and caption, the painting forced you to confront the image for what it was.
As Jeroen writes:
“I come across images of people described as insurgents and a mention of their nationality, no other description given. Persons are being categorized and abstracted by …

“I’ve been somewhat disappointed with my creative output as of late. So, with a day off of client work, I set out this morning to make something interesting before the end of the day.”
So begins Jer Thorp’s entry over at blprnt introducing his latest personal Flash project, Plumage which takes a Flickr tag and creates a set of feathers from the colour data in the image. Very cool.

Jeroen dropped me a line today to let me know that he has a new series posted on his site called Untitled Days. As timely and thought provoking as ever.
More info on Jeroen can be found here.

• As a follow-up to my review of Vidfest, I met up with Ben Burden Smith, the producer of Tony Hawk and the Boom Boom Sabotage after its world premiere screening and got his take on what is was like working with the Hawk, the local pros, and the challenges of capturing all of the action for 3D. The interview has been posted on the Industrial Brand Blog.
• Also, it seems that the Industrial Brand Blog has won another award. Well, two in fact from Portfolios.com. We received a Bronze …

For the next couple of days (June 15 – 16), Ben and I are covering Vidfest for the TAXI Design Network out of Singapore. Our review will be posted on their site later next week but in the meantime, for images and a few infrequent postings check us out at Industrial Brand Creative.

The Field-Tested Books project is our version of the Heisenberg principle: reading a certain book in a certain place uniquely affects a person’s experience with both. The writing you’ll find here is grounded in that idea. You won’t find any book reviews here. You’ll find reviews of experience.
My experience: Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha on a train between Madrid and Barcelona. Check it out here.