Edinburgh's giant balloon sculpture

A sculpture made completely of balloons has been unveiled as part of the Edinburgh International Science Festival at the National Museum of Scotland.

The piece was designed and built by American artist Jason Hackenwerth, who is known for his organic and biological forms made from latex balloons.

The sculpture, titled Pisces, is the artist’s interpretation of the legend of Aphrodite and Eros: in Greek mythology, Aphrodite, the Goddess of love and her son, Eros, escaped the fearsome monster Typhon by transforming into a tightly woven spiral of two fish, a figure which later became a constellation called Pisces.

The piece is made up of 10,000 balloons, which took 3 staff members 6 days to inflate before Jason and his assistant Leah Blair wove them carefully into this three dimensional structure.

Pisces will be on display in the Grand Gallery of the National Museum of Scotland through April 14th, 2013. More images are available on Flickr.

Photography in abundance

Dutch artist Erik Kessels has printed out and placed one million photographs from Flickr in a room for his unusual installation Photography in Abundance.

He created the mountain of pictures to illustrate how many we share over the internet in only 24 hours.The million uploads are a mere drop in the ocean compared to the estimated total of 6billion images on Flickr, which is the same suspected number added to Facebook every two months.

‘We’re exposed to an overload of images nowadays," The Dutchman explained. "This glut is in large part the result of image-sharing sites like Flickr, networking sites like Facebook and picture-based search engines. Their content mingles public and private, with the very personal being openly and not self-consciously displayed. By printing all the images uploaded in a 24-hour period, I visualise the feeling of drowning in representations of other people’s experiences."

The Photography In Abundance installation is part of the What’s Next display at Foam Amsterdam throughout November 2011.

To read more about Kessels Installation or to see more of the Foam photography visit Metro Online or Foam.

Social media campaign improves visibility for OKI C300/C500

The Think Tank was asked to extend a pan-European OKI product launch campaign in the UK marketplace using social media channels to widen reach and promote the product in a non-traditional manner.

The creative campaign that was developed for the launch of the OKI C300 and C500 series of printers featured the products as real 'stars' on the covers of leading publications. A fanzine style micro site was developed to act as a focal point for the campaign and this included a blog which was used to deliver content for the social media element of promotion in the UK. The regular addition of content to this blog was communicated via Twitter over a six month period, with additional content being added to Flickr and YouTube to provide additional links back to the micro site. 

The campaign resulted in almost 12,000 views of content over the period and engaged a wide range of sector specific individuals, with Twitter followers reaching more than 1,300.