Projects credited in
- UNICEF - A Child's TaleUnicef UK's brand film. It started as a simple 'explainer' video brief. To create an animated film that shows how UNICEF use charitable donations to protect children around the world. I saw a bigger opportunity. To tell the story of UNICEF and the amazing things they do from the perspective of a child in danger, set within a simple context of childhood - a pop-up book. We follow a central character, as each page turns we enter a new scene. The narration feels child-like, too. Almost a fairytale
- Kids Co: See The ChildKids Co: See The Child The campaign highlights the startling fact that a significant number of children in the UK – an estimated 1.5 million of them - are suffering neglect and abuse every day. They cannot change their situation as they do not have a voice – they cannot vote and they cannot petition for change. The vision for the campaign is to mobilise the public and generate outrage that the system is simply not fulfilling its duty in protecting the most vulnerable group in society by driving people to sign a petition to change the system. The campaign film is directed by Chris Palmer and tells the story of a vulnerable child’s life from the child’s perspective. The child voiceover describes the conditions that they live in, the food they eat, where they sleep, where they play. As the voiceover mentions each aspect of the child’s life we see the associated imagery on screen, demonstrating the horrific conditions that this child lives in.
- The Virtual Parallel World CONCEPT The virtual world is a rapidly growing mass medium, it’s significantly shaping our culture and society in the age of “simulation”1. The characters simulate an artificial and fictitious reality, where life itself becomes the optimization and experience2, rather than depict a real world. Entertainment implies addiction and obsession of adventure, seen as a repressing and hiding from society, those demanding to reinvent us, to fit-in perfectly and being constantly an infinite circular motion. The pre-image of man in the “flow3” is the playing child, which is located in the blissful state of being within-himself, implying freedom and total being-absorb of experiencing ongoing actions. Fictitious reality4 might be for man an escapism5 from fear and powerlessness as a consequence of the restrictions of social convention and a terrifying battle to survive6 in both real and virtual worlds. Others are seeking for social contacts with regard to love, affection and loneliness as expression for their absence in real life. Known as virtual parallel world, where man live-in a duplicated reality with endless satisfactions and possibilities. With games we fulfill our dreams8, adding omnipotence fantasies, “pretending as if”, constructing indications9 from our real life outside, because the people who are creating these games replacing emotions to dimensionalize the world they create. The technology of video games has allowed a true overlap in stimuli. Man, an interactive pixel in a virtual simulation confounds with reality and brings the difference between work and play in the disappearance. Since ancient times man have not accepted their human condition, they have always looked for an escape from the real world. Religions gave them the possibility to live hoping for a better life after the death; novels, theatres and arts in general have the magic to make living possible in visionary situations, drugs alter our senses and shifting to delusions. All mentioned mediums, as substitution for nowadays technology, which are trying to make life easier, allow man to enter the virtual world. The empirical world has always been considered as a limit, apparently man has the necessity of unlimitedness. From the electronic glasses that increase our senses and our ability, to the common screen of tablets and smartphones, which offer a window to another, more sure and cybernetic landscape, than the urban reality. Next generation may single the existence in virtuality out by dilution reality like in a sort of matrix, to buy an endless virtual life while giant companies take care of the body, an all-inclusive service to get the “life of our dreams”. 1 Jean Baudrillard “Simulation theory” http://www.egs.edu/faculty/jean-baudrillard/articles/simulacra-and-simulations/ 2 Infinite Jest 5 June - 7 September 2014 Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, Germany. The exhibition proposed an image of today's world with the individual at its center. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKSlEK-QTM8 3 Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (1975) “Flow theory” http://www.bioenterprise.ca/docs/creativity-by-mihaly-csikszentmihalyi.pdf 4 Jonathan Lethem “Chronic City” showing an autarkic universe covered with beauty spots, David Foster Wallace “Infinite Jest” code word for bleak vision of the future, as the end-point of human evolution. Shinji Mikami “The Evil Within” The game is played from a third-person perspective in which scavenging for supplies and learning when to fight or run are key factors in surviving. “Ghost in the shell” Ghost in the Shell 's plot revolves around a recruit of Public Security Section 9 as he investigates and combats the Human Liberation Front. 5 Jean Piaget “accommodation and assimilation”: for us to escape the socialization pressure from outside 6 Instinctual needs comprise protection to actually survive. 7 “Second Life” SL one developed in 2003 by the Californian IT company Linden Lab 3D simulation of a lifelike, interactive community ("metaverse") on the World Wide Web, the design of the participating individuals themselves, and may be further developed. http://www.lindenlab.com/products/second-life 8 Sigmund Freud, saw the games as a product of imagination, which enables pleasurable experience as well as ability to handle conflicts. 9 “As gamers we are now living by the same laws of physics in the same cities and doing many of the same things we once did in real life, only virtually. For my virtual worlds are perfect. More beautiful and rich than the real world around us.” Quoted by David Perry’s student in Ted talk’s “Are games better than life?”
- ILA Portrait Series: A Contemporary Visual Commentary on Tibal Marks The portfolio from which the present work derives – features images taken by Baingor Joiner in May 2017 in Laogs, Nigeria. The series was created as part of a wider conversation on tribal marks, which were recently outlawed by the Osun State government in April 2017. In this series, Joiner provides a quaint portrayal of the ‘‘‘b’’anned’’ and ‘uncivilized’ tribal marks. The juxtaposing of man and nature is a constant in these images: to represent the control, or perhaps lack there of over the
- I want to be the moonIn the summer of 2012 I was chatting with one of my oldest and dearest friends who had recently moved back to Hong Kong. He’d become involved with a not-for-profit charity dedicated to helping schools and orphanages in some very remote mountains in rural China. We talked about ways I could help and as a result of our conversation, I boarded a flight a few months later to join an exceptional group of volunteers called the “Warm Hearters”. The images in this soon to be available book describe a generation of children caught in limbo between the vastly different cultures of the near by towns and cities while they grow up in remote rural communities. My traveling companions were volunteers and I learned that they all work exceptionally hard to deliver focussed help, so that these forgotten mountain children don’t get left behind by the relentless march towards industrialised progress that drives the rest of the country. They do this by providing essentials like bedding, text books and by raising money for additional out-houses and kitchen blocks so that the children and their dedicated teachers can prepare meals better protected from the elements. Getting to the mountains was not easy, but after several days of traveling we arrived in Yunnan and found a wonderful local driver who owned a rather battered and bruised old “Beijing Olympics” bus, which was to be a big part of our transport for the next week. We were heading into the mountains on roads that seemed to be composed of a powdery bright red dust. Roads that during the rainy season emulsify into rivers of mud that render whole towns and villages inaccessible for months at a time. The pace of change in China is nothing short of incredible. Construction equipment is everywhere and the inevitable road side mounds of earth and the thick industrial clouds we drove through were dense reminders of a landscape undergoing a remarkable transformation. An endless procession of tall metal cranes rose up from the horizon no matter how far we seemed to drive. However it was only by traveling to the heights of Yunnan that the region gave up its secrets and it became apparent that many pockets of cultural isolation still existed. Small village schools are often located near the tops of mountains so as to stay safe during the floods and it was the children at these schools and orphanages that we aimed to photograph on this trip. This meant that each day we wound our way up steep and stoney tracks to breath-shortening altitudes. These hill-top communities often experience brutally extreme temperature changes ranging from 35ºC plus at midday and dropping to a numbingly cold -10ºC at night. Many of the children in this book live in their schools sparse dormitories during the week. At the weekends, after long days of study, they must walk up to four hours on muddy hillside paths to reach a relatives farm or their parents isolated homes. The journey is often dark, wet and cold. We asked each child we photographed that age-old question “What would you like to be when you grow up?” and although many answered in a seemingly well rehearsed way, some children gave less guarded, beautiful and surprising answers. One little boy quietly but confidently declared “I want to be the Moon”. His friends laughed but when asked why he replied, “When I walk home I like it when the Moon is full and bright because I can see where I’m going. I’d like to be the Moon so my friends can see too.” These photos and the accompanying captions of each child’s dreams are a document of an ancient culture undergoing powerful and rapid change. I was lucky to capture this generation that is experiencing a sense of freedom and hope that their parents and grandparents didn’t. The smiling and unsure looks on their faces as they encountered their first foreigners will be some of the last such expressions that anyone will see in that vast country. These children are a snap-shot of a culture at a tipping point between then and now. Change is happening around these isolated communities for better or for worse and this book and its images have been crafted to raise the money needed to make sure that these children don’t get left behind.
+ Show more
Skills
- Thought Leadership
- Innovation Strategy
- Business Transformation
- Critical Analysis
- Collaboration
- Systems Thinking
- Motivation
- Idea Generation
- Delivery
- Data Analysis