#gasbook

In the 1990s and early 2000s Britain enjoyed a cultural resurgence, British music was amongst the best in world and was accompanied by groundbreaking visual works in part due to the relative strength of local infrastructure. Like Central Saint Martins today, in the 1990s other UAL schools were top of their fields as institutions like London College of Printing were producing students to enter into the burgeoning visual fields of art and design. Firms like The Designer's Republic(Warp Records), Farrow Design(Spiritualized, Pet Shop Boys), and Tomato(Underworld) were all intrinsically linked to the music industry and a massive part of their catalogue has gone on to define a generation of British electronic music. An equally notable although slighter lesser known design firm of the era is directing team Shynola. Their film for UNKLE's track Guns Blazing(Drums of Death, Pt.1)(1998) was a partial collaboration with graffiti artist Futura 2000 and Ben Drury(more on that film later) and propelled their career. About two years later Shynola directed a series of shorts,referred to as Blips for Radiohead's seminal, critically acclaimed album Kid A(2000). The blips served as promotional material and made the rounds through various art,television, digital and physical publication circuits. Each Blip featured short bits of music from the album accompanying a mix of film, motion graphics and animation. The compilation excerpt shown here was featured in Gasbook 10;Movement. An .ISO copy can be found here and the entire collection has been backed up on Youtube. You can read more about Shynola's body of work here.

紙＞樹脂

Andy Martin's 2002 look at the future of space travel "Out There". While primarily making a living as an illustrator and being published in the New York Times, The New Yorker,The Atlantic, The Guardian, Time, Newsweek and many more Andy Martin has also dabbled in animation since at least the late 1990s. In 1999 he was included in Gasbook 9;Insect for the music video Throwing Down a Shape by Fila Brazillia. Later in 2002 he followed it up with his ode to budget conscious space travel with "Out There" which combined simple 3d shape renders with live film footage of outer space. Music is Familiar Ground feat. Fontella Bass by The Cinematic Orchestra from their 2007 Album Ma Fleur. The second single To Build a Home has gone on to garner cult like status and has appeared into numerous TV shows,productions, and a notable feature during the 2018 Olympic figure skating competition.

In addition to being a showcase for the most cutting edge in motion graphics, macromedia flash, film, and design Gasbook often included royalty free design assets in their issues. Seen here are a series of 200 patterns in .eps and .jpg format displayed through the Adobe Director .exe included on the CD-ROM that came with Gasbook 5;Paradise. Often these issues would also include fonts,photos, and music to serve as starting point for would be designers who wanted to apply the inspiration Gasbook provided to their own work. Gasbook 5;Paradise can be found here for download. Music is Groovetube by Flipper's Guitar from Doctor Head's World Tower(1991).

Showreel of The Designer's Republic graphic design presented as a series of short motion graphic clips stitched together in one video for Gasbook 8;Futurevision. TDR also provided visual content for the accompanying book and T-shirt that came bundled with the issue which was based around various designer's viewpoints facing towards the future. You can find a digital copy of Futurevision here. Music is Loop 2 by Kenny Larkin off of Metaphor(1995) whose album artwork and design was handled by The Designer's Republic.

Another flash program taken from Gasbook 10;Movement. This one was created as a mini showreel for design firm onedotzero however in somewhat unusual manner they embedded external work into the program such as a clip of a film by Koji Morimoto. This program makes use of 3-D models in an interactive digital gallery environment where users can interact with various films or follow an external link to onedotzero's own website which is similar to how Gasbook's earlier issues were created. It appears Gasbook decided to double up on content for this issue as they integrated these flash programs with the DVD video content that made up much of the later issues. Also intriguing about issue 10 was the launch. The issue was accompanied by a physical gallery hosted at the then recently opened Sendai Mediatheque in Sendai,Japan. The Mediatheque is a library designed by Toyo Ito and completed in 2001 although it first opened in August of 2000. However, more on that and Ito's work later. Music is Forever Ravers (ANNA's Raving in Space Mix) by Miss Kittin and ANNA off of Speicher 112(2019).

Hollister had this say about the video in an interview with shift.jp in 1999: "Architecture always fascinates me and I think that modernist buildings such as those by Saarinen and Niemeyer (even though he seemed to a have certain level of disregard for how some of the buildings would work in practical use) are beautiful studies of form and contrast in space. I thought that it would be interesting to explore these ideas of form and space through the live action using different architectural icons, vast spaces and minimal action from the model/actress to enhance this. We used the white fields of color to anchor the visual theme, restricting the palette to white and blue." You can read the complete interview here,view Hollister's contemporary work at his design firm We Are Plus's website and watch the film in its entirety here.