The Creators Project Presents the Future of Art and Design, Brought to You by Intel and Vice Magazine

The Cre­ators Project, a col­lab­o­ra­tion between Intel and Vice Mag­a­zine, pro­duces behind-the-scenes short films with con­tem­po­rary artists, musi­cians, and film­mak­ers. Call­ing itself “a glob­al cel­e­bra­tion of art and tech­nol­o­gy,” the three-year-old project offers per­haps the best way to keep up with incred­i­ble advances in visu­al and audio tech­nol­o­gy in the arts. The project also spon­sors new work (from, for exam­ple, visu­al artists Mick Rock and Bar­ney Clay and musi­cians J. Space­man and Karen O) and hosts glob­al events and meet-ups.

I per­son­al­ly check in with the project’s YouTube chan­nel on a semi-dai­ly basis, and I nev­er fail to find some­thing cap­ti­vat­ing, whether an intro­duc­tion to a new artist or new work from an old favorite (if you pre­fer Vimeo, they’ve got you cov­ered there too). Most recent­ly I’ve dis­cov­ered the aston­ish­ing work of a per­for­mance artist/photographer from Bei­jing, Li Wei, whose work involves Buster Keaton-style stunts—or, more pre­cise­ly, Kung Fu-film high-wire action—captured on cam­era in ver­ti­go-induc­ing images of impos­si­bil­i­ty. In the short film above, Li Wei walks us through his process and his phi­los­o­phy, which begins with the unset­tling notion, “We are all con­trolled by some­one else. Our thoughts and actions are con­trolled by unseen forces.” His work is a high-tech attempt to out­wit one of those forces for brief moments, ren­dered time­less by pho­tog­ra­phy and the mag­ic of Pho­to­shop.

In the video below, a for­mer aero­space engi­neer for NASA, James Pow­der­ly, now occu­pies strange ter­ri­to­ry between design and engi­neer­ing. Inspired by anoth­er cor­po­rate engi­neer­ing dropout, Pow­der­ley left aero­space engi­neer­ing for a res­i­den­cy at New York art and tech­nol­o­gy cen­ter Eye­beam to refine his visu­al aes­thet­ic, which he’s tak­en all over the world.

Final­ly, in the short video below, The Cre­ators Project vis­it­ed Min­Suk Cho, founder of futur­is­tic Seoul archi­tec­ture firm Mass Stud­ies. Cho describes the vision and pur­pose of Mass Stud­ies over a mind-blow­ing series of images of archi­tec­tur­al designs from worlds you’ve nev­er seen before but (if you’re like me) always hoped exist­ed some­where.

http://vimeo.com/44749711

Josh Jones is a doc­tor­al can­di­date in Eng­lish at Ford­ham Uni­ver­si­ty and a co-founder and for­mer man­ag­ing edi­tor of Guer­ni­ca / A Mag­a­zine of Arts and Pol­i­tics.