He has a small studio in New York. They work with local clients, such as Time Magazine. Working together with writers, they have designed spreads and cover for Time. Creative Time Inc. is another client they’ve worked with. Public Art ~ Art Book is a project that came to fruition in this collaboration and led to the Urban Visual Recording Machine. It took 4–5 months to build the machine that would record the immediate environment, colors, noise, and weather conditions, and ultimately print the book. Thousands of prints were generated in a week. The final recording shows the changing environment in colorful data form.

Inside the Studio: The playfulness he found in America was missing for him in Germany. He brought that playfulness into his studio culture. Liquifying the output, they create a product that transpired from playing with software. With no research phase, it is just making. Having fun. Using music in animations, the covers for magazines are designed, making the entire process fun and unique.

For the MINI car project, they used the original CAD drawings and melted and merged them with actual people. Doing a photo-shoot with up and coming fashion designers, the final product combines models with cars with unclear boundaries for where what begins or ends.

Far Away project is 12 Days in Serbia. For a project in Serbia, they flew there for 12 days. Each day was to be recorded.

All over Belgrade were huge billboards and other surprises to welcome the team when they arrived, put on by the client. Working from 8:30am to 4:00am, it was an amazing experience with a lot of eating, drinking and parties. There was a lot of media with 4–5 interviews a day. They were all over the local TV channels. Working at a fast pace, they transposed each day’s visits to book form. The Calendar was produced and then the book was generated. They flew back for the release of the calendar. The element of the project that Jan liked was to be able to fly down to the place. They followed this project with a similar project, 10 Days in South Africa. This was a collection of 10 posters. The third installment was 12 Days in Jerusalem. They saw West and East, and were blown away by the experience. One shouldn’t over-think. Sometimes it’s a miss, but lot of times it is a hit.  A common phrase used there is, It’s Complicated. The project posters were later shown in Jerusalem Museum. The plan is to do another such travel project in 2014.

 

By Deepika Padam