A bit of self promotion: A new souvenir concept that I have developed for the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denmark just launched. Here follows a description:
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Social Souvenir is an installation and souvenir concept that creates links and social experiences between museum visitors.

The concept is based on 300 T-shirts that are exhibited and put on sale at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Roskilde, Denmark. Each T-shirt is imprinted with a text fragment inspired by 15 renowned artists represented in the museum's collection, such as Yoko Ono, Erik Satie, Marcel Duchamp and Per Højholt.

Visitors can buy a T-shirt of their own choice, the only condition being that they share a bit of personal information about themselves, or more precisely: their name and address. When paying for the T-shirt at the museum-shop, the information is automatically mapped in Google Maps, thereby making it possible to see where each T-shirt ends up after leaving the museum.

During the course of the exhibition, the 300 T-shirts will gradually disappear from the physical museum space only to re-appear on the web. Consequently, by buying a T-shirt visitors do not simply get a personal piece of the installation - they also help contribute to its collective development and distribution.

• www.socialsouvenir.net

I have been invited to participate in an exhibition on Nordic net art, which is currently taking place in Finland.

My contribution to the exhibition is a work from 2003 called Greatest Hits! which is an animated projection of my favourite 365 spam subject lines collected from tens of thousands of junk mails through a period of 5 years.

The idea behind the work is to highlight the characteristic laconic, intimidating and sometimes playful language that has been authored and developed by anonymous spammers in order to 1) penetrate spam filters and 2) lure naive recipients into spending money.

Greatest Hits! offers one way of collecting, archiving and studying spam's presence while suggesting that we may find some poetic qualities in our daily amounts of unwanted e-junk.

Greatest Hits! is updated continuously, offering a mix of classic as well as up-to-date spam subject-lines.

Visitors to the exhibition in Finland, can also get their very own spam T-Shirt with text-imprints from GREATEST HITS! All they have to do is bring 3 pieces of spam subject lines from their own mailbox and put them up on post-it notes.

• www.liveherring.org • www.campion.nu/exhibits.html

An interview that I made with Nicola Roope is now up at MocoLoco.

Nicolas Roope is the creative mind behind Hulger (formerly Pokia) - the retro-handsets that can turn a dull cell- or VoIP conversation into something special.

Amongst other things, Nicolas talks about Hulger's transformation from concept to a normal(ish) design product.

• Mocoloco

My interview with Marko Ahtisaari is now online at the Danish Design Center's web portal.

Ahtisaari is the Director of Design Strategy at Nokia and I talked to him just before his presentation at the Ars Electronica conference in September.

Besides talking about hot industry concepts such as 'simplicity', Ahtisaari offers some insight on the relation between user-centered design and Nokia's innovation strategies.

• www.ddc.dk (switch to english in the top menu)

Edit: It is not longer online at DDC but it is cached here

Finally! I have worked on this concept for 2-3 stressful weeks and now, we are able to launch the MMS xmas calendar (MMS julekalenderen) - probably the first service of its kind:

A new day = a new artist = a new artwork for you and your mobile phone.

Each day, between December 1-24, subscribers of the xmas calender will receive an MMS-artwork made of text, image or sound. The artworks are created by 24 different international artists, specifically for MMS enabled phones.

The MMS xmas calender is realized in collaboration between the design agency 1508 and the art foundation Artnode - the price of the wireless calendar is 100 kr (14 Euro) and the profit goes directly to the Danish Red Cross.

• www.1508.dk • www.artnode.org

Here's a link to my interview with Theo Jansen, published at artificial.dk.

Theo Jansen is a Dutch artists who is occupied with the making of 'new nature'. For the last 15 years, he has been evolving a series of wind-powered animals that look like skeletons. When these creations are fed by wind, they set into motion and transmute into organic-looking creatures; or 'beach animals' as Jansen calls them.

• www.artificial.dk • Theo Jansen

"You're kidding me?!" is a wireless voice-based service that helps users simulate a mobile phone conversation. The automatic service is designed to assist people at conferences, gallery openings and other places where being socially disconnected is no fun.

After dialing the service number, users can choose between two types of conversations: a 'casual' or an 'important' conversation. The user is subsequently guided through a series of words and sentences that - when being repeated - makes it look and sound like a real conversation is taking place!

"You're kidding me!?" is designed for the INDEX:2005 conference in Copenhagen. The service is provided by 1508 A/S - the design consultancy that I am currently working for. It is based on a conceptual artwork called dialogue that I created some time ago.

• www.1508.dk