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CONTENT

Selah Sue 4

Interview Poschauko-brothers 14

Vertical Farming 38

Jan Verschueren 26

The Simplicity of life

Grafisch Nederland

Snowboarding

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VIBESCRAZY

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by Selah SueVIBES

CRAZY

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A good friend of mine looks like Selah Sue, she’s got the same cra-zy but beautiful style of hair and she can even sing amazing as well. That’s what I say to her but she doesn’t want to hear about it. She doesn’t want to be a look-a-like, and that’s what makes her have the same vibe as Selah Sue as well.

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She turns her doubts into soul, funk and reggae melodies, trying hard to be worthy of her idols, Lauryn Hill, Erykah Badu and Bob Marley. She sings in local clubs on the weekend and attends high school during the week. She records in home-studios, at friends houses, and publishes drafts of her songs on Myspace, without a thought of making a career in music. What happens next seems almost unreal. Thousands of fans re-spond to her on the net, attracting the attention of professionals, and the interest of ‘Because Music’, which eventually leads to a record deal for the young musician.

Her songs remind me of when I was little, when trying to be cool, to be “one of them” at school. Later I relised the people I hanged out with weren’t those who would be there for you. Those were at home or at my place in the weekend.

Alwas be who you wan-na be, not who others want it. Stay true to your own VIBE. ///

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SCHOOLTRIP ‘11 @ Københaven

Hope this year will be as good as it was back than, with as much intresting museums and cities to visit.And may the parties be as pleasant as they were than because we had a blast of a time, with all my classmates and other friends.

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NEA MACHINA

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NEA MACHINAby Thomas and Martin Poschauko

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What happens when you can just keep on putting creative vibes onto one photograph? How can free experimentation lead to creative deisgns? These are two graphic designers and artists who know how. They’ve created an artistic process with over 1000 different graphic designs, which is, together with

their working methods combined in the book ‘Nea Machina’. The book, which became an unexpected great success, was published in 2007.

Nea Machina is a creative book based on a creative experiment by the twinbrothers Thomas and Martin Poschauko. They’ve set themselves the task to create, within a period of four months, as many different versions as possible, using manually cutting and placing pieces of the photograph, drawing, painting and using photoshop. They use two con-stants as formal elements, a human portrait and the title of “Nea Machina”. Within these four months, they created

over 1000 different graphic design and countless different styles, which are all shown in this book.

How did you both become graphic designers?

“We’re born as twins in Rosenheim, a little town in Ger-many in 1980. We’ve both studied Communication De-sign at the Fachhochschule at Würzburg (University of Applied Sciences). We’ve graduated in 2007 with our shared project ‘Nea Machina’. We became freelance de-signers since 2001 and worked for various projects (mu-sic, culture, economy and social affairs) in the fields of illustration, graphic design and corporate design. In ad-dition, we are also active as a freelance artist (drawing, painting, printmaking). This double identity ‘Designers and Artists’ is for us a very breeding situation.”

Why is the book de-vided in two parts, it doesn’t only contain the different designs, but also a (let’s say) theoretic part.

“First there’s the formal experiment: This shows the history of the indi-vidual variants, plus our live commentary. We give out all the background knowledge and make the creative process more transparent. You have the ability as a reader to wit-ness it lively and to use this input for your own work. Next there’s the ‘Theses on design and creativity,’ From the crea-tive experiment, we’ve distilled our own ‘theories of design and creativity,’In the center of this thesis is the self-developed crea-tive method ‘head - stom-ach - source - computer,’

which allowed the large output of the project Nea Machina and is therefor important to understand the working process of the first part.”

How did you get to the idea of making a crea-tive process instead of one design?“Basically the idea was very quickly ... because we wanted to create a kind of sketchbook-style with our complete reper-toire, because we felt that our former stylistic range was too low. And in order to ensure comparability, we needed a consistent theme. We chose a human portrait, because it’s just a very strong and worthy of interpretation and sub-ject us to recognize it also facilitates real feelings in different styles.

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BASICALLY WE JUST TRY TO

INCORPO-RATE MUCH

OF OUR WORK TO

MAKE WATH INSPIRES

AND FASCI-NATES US

IN PERSON. AND THEN

IT’S ALL NOT THAT

HARD.

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From our experiment we were hoping for new insights, beyond concept and repetitive styles, we wanted to go beyond the norm and reinvent ourselves again, so do more than the usual three drafts, which can justify it by design. That was our main intention. That it would become an analysis of our whole creative process was, we couldn’t refrain in this form.”

the combination of old and new techniques, digital and manual. It refers to the fact that we try something new.”

“DO FIRST, THAN THINK” AND “THINK BEFORE YOU DO”

‘Do first, then think’ is the main method of the book. What are the advantages and disad-vantages of this meth-od?

“We can’t predict from the start witch variations will come out good, that’s a rather negative point

What’s the idea behind the name of the book?

“The term “Nea Machina” was for us only a superficially interesting typographic combination of letters, but it also defines the essence of our work. The Greek translation says “The new ma-chine,” a reference to

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about this method. The advantage here is what you get by making all these new variations. We stumble across unpredict-ed, new varieties of whom we’d never thought off be simply sketching out a few examples and make one final design.”

“We think, the active by-pass, to try and play with a theme, is the best way to understand it really. And

making as much varia-tions you can is already an important, even sensual inspiration. It makes you think or if, as Otl Aicher said, often ‘a condition of thinking’.”

If you never reflect the methods you use to get something new, isn’t it difficult to find any structure in your work-ing process?

“Basically, we use both methods but anyway al-ways change our method to get a new variation,

Well do first, then think, AND Think before you do.”

“If we were only the meth-od ‘do first, then think to use’ that would be for a well planned targeted visual communications safe enough. But we think that the danger is rather that when designers, too cerebral and structured to be as freely and playfully. The structure of the pro-fession then brings on its own.”

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Where do you get all those new ideas to keep on designing one single photo?

“Often we read it easily into our environment ... most of the good things lie ahead of us on the road. The most important finding for us was to make our head the source of all ideas, but the ideas that surround us. Piet Mondrian, says: ‘The position of the artist is humble, he is essentially a channel’ that is a passive, rather humble position.”“As young students they gave us this tactic of an overwhelming number of paths and possibilities. As we have already lost one time or another. But if we have a concrete, structur-al imaging project (at that time were mostly the CD cover) edited, that was never really a problem.”

Is this kind of ap-proach something that you can learn for ex-ample at school?

“Hard to say. Everyone has a little different skills. We already think that an-yone can learn the “other side to consider” in them. Because we all think emo-tionally and rationally.We train the cerebral but not right away, because our processes are in be-tween some very pragmat-ic. We try only from them-selves and to make small traps, which take the control out of the hands and give your head a cer-tain extent no chance. For example, high speed, random principles such as cubes or materials that can be controlled not re-ally.”

Unlike many design-ers and creatives did you decide not to live in one of the typical big cities. Especially cities like Berlin or Hamburg by designers for their creative pos-sibilities and inspira-tions ... Why? Was that a conscious choice or rather coincidence?

“We are aware returned to our hometown. This is a small village in Upper Bavaria, in which no one really has anything to do with graphic design. Won-derful to us, because we don’t constantly want to be flooded with the design of others. We believe that one of the ever-present creativity of others, as may in Berlin, may slain your own creativity.”“We have certainly not the impression that we are missing something if we are not in the vibrant design cities. Even though Berlin is just an incredibly fascinating place that we like very much. As well as our rich TYPO 4 days and our source is back for a year. Basically, however, we have chosen especially for this place, because we like to live in this en-vironment and because our family and friends are there. So ostensibly it’s a completely “un-ideologi-cal” decision.”

As last question, I’d like to ask what ad-vice you would give designers to be able to remain creative and to think “out of the box. The everyday work of a designer is usually characterized by dead-lines and short am-punts of time, how can that be avoided?

“We believe the greatest courage we must have in our profession, is the courage to be unprofes-sional. To give a break, to go out or in general: do what is good for us. Although the life of a graphic designer is always stressful.But constantly run along in this rat race, affects us somehow illogical. Be-fore, for years we were working around the clock, always at the last minute deal, but did not even have a few hours a month for inspiring and crea-tive breaks outside of the screen and the office.”

What will help ensure it is in calm phases you should keep a sketchbook and everything to hold on to ideas wherever you are. Then you have a creative fund during stressful pe-riods, and can rely on it. But without specific phas-es of trial and error free, the danger is that you only have repeated be-cause it is always the tried and tested ways.” ///auk

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Hans Hofmann - 1993

‘’ The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak.

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Hans Hofmann - 1993

The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak.

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JAN VERSCHUEREN

SCHONE SCHROOT

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JAN VERSCHUEREN

SCHONE SCHROOT

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Hoe roest mooi kan zijn.Hoe schoonheid kan roesten. Hoe constructief destructie is.Hoe chaotisch structuren zijn.Hoe structureel chaos is.Hoe men observeert en geobserveerd wordt.Hoe dicht grote idealen bij kleine kantjes liggen.Hoe anekdoten vereeuwigd lijken.Hoe eeuwigheden veranekdotiseren.Hoe humor is.Hoe dicht zwart bij wit ligt.Hoe dicht de beeldhouwer bij zijn liefde ligt.Hoe dicht de beeldhouwer bij zijn werk staat.

Verschueren recycles scrap objects, let’s say dirt to create art. In his spare-time he drives around the local neigh-bourhoods to collect scrap metal and pick up useable or meltable pieces at peoples houses. Other than that he uses terracotta, newspapers and found objects to create these art-pieces.

In 2008 Verschueren startet to create the first pieces of “Schoon Schroot”. These artworks are all made of found and collected scrap. With this he tries to give people the message that scrap isn’t always garbage. We have to re-cycle things and if not, he’ll make something beautiful out of it.

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In 2011 he started to use another type of recyclable ob-jects, using prints, old newspapers, magazines, caland-ers and so on as background for his paintings. Although not all of them are painted on steel, they all have this old, rusty character. Therefor collection was named “Rusty Flatscreens”.

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“De Nieuwe Ark”(The New Ark)

“Onthaasten”(Slowing down)

“Het spel van de engel” (The angel’s play)

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GRAFISCHNEDERLAND

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The book “ Nederland Published 2007” is a collection of de yearly Christmas-editions of Nederland Publishing. The let’s say “catalogue” contains about 100 edi-tions about graphic de-sign in the Netherlands.

Although the catalogue has a nice cover itself, it comes with a cardboard-cover. Not a usual pack-

age you’d throw away when putting the book on

your shelf.

The actual cover has a transparent overlay-cover wich fills in the number zero. When closed the cover looks like a zero, cut in two. When spread-ing the cover a zero ap-pears. By opening the book at the first and last page you notice the num-bers “2007”,

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SNOWBOARDING: My favorite sport

Here’s a picture I took at my snowboard holi-day last year. The dude in the green pants was an Italian, passing by when I was taking pictures of my friends. After seeing I was tak-ing pictures of him he passed by the jump several times, just to show off. I even ex-pected him to come to me and ask if I could send him the pictures or whatever but no, he just wanted to show off and be proud of him-self. Italian macho, but damn he could snow-board, be shure of that.

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Ready to jump...

Here’s a videocapture of Ben, one of the “crewmembers” at my boardtrip last year. I had a knee-injurie so spend some time tak-ing pictures while the others were freestyling. He stands here on top of a little hill, shakes his board to get the snow off and waits to take a shot at the big air.

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VERTICAL FARMS

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VERTICAL FARMSskyscrape-farming in the middle of the city

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The Problem

By the year 2050, nearly 80% of the earth’s population will reside in urban centers. Applying the most conservative estimates to current demographic trends, the human population will increase by about 3 billion people during the interim. An estimated 109 hectares of new land (about 20% more land than is represented by the country of Brazil) will be needed to grow enough food to feed them, if traditional farming practices continue as they are practiced today. At present, throughout the world, over 80% of the land that is suitable for raising crops is in use. Historically, some 15% of that has been laid waste by poor management practices. What can be done to avoid this impending disaster?

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A Potential Solution: Farming vertically

The concept of indoor farming is not new, since hothouse production of tomatoes, a wide variety of herbs, and other produce has been in vogue for some time. What is new is the urgent need to scale up this technology to accommodate another 3 billion people. An entirely new approach to indoor farming must be invented, em-ploying cutting edge technologies. The Vertical Farm must be efficient (cheap to construct and safe to oper-ate). Vertical farms, many stories high, will be situated in the heart of the world's urban centers. If successfully implemented, they offer the promise of urban renewal, sustainable production of a safe and varied food supply (year-round crop production), and the eventual repair of ecosystems that have been sacrificed for horizontal farming.

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