Five Ideas: Labour

Five Ideas is a collection of work from GOOD's favorite artists, illustrators, and designers. Some of the work you've probably seen, some of it has never been published. Each week, we'll showcase five pieces of work that tell a short story about our most creative friends.

Labour is a Brooklyn-based creative office that makes moving images, still images, physical images, and mental images.

At Labour, we like things to be quantifiable and quickly digested as concepts. Here are five:

1. Boxes on Heads

For the music video for "Rules Don't Stop" by We Are Scientists, we constructed two pieces of headgear–one cube, one double-cube–onto which additional footage and imagery could be placed later. These boxes give the video the depth and emotional range that the band just couldn't quite achieve on its own.

2. Unreadable Words

We wanted to create a typeface that can only be read in context, which otherwise breaks down into unreadable forms as single letters. After achieving this, we wanted to create a t-shirt that would make passerby strain their eyes to decipher, only to audibly groan in realization that there is no payoff or punchline. This is life as a graphic tee–dark, hard to figure out, and a bad pun at best.

3. Rock Bands

This short video done for MTV speaks to the gritty, abrasive reality of life in a rock band.

4. Visualizing Success / Spatiotemporal Manipulation

The body can realize what the mind can only dream of. Shutter the eyes and make the mind's eye the soul's window. Lifestyle branding.

5. Time Traveling Monkey Astronauts

The Infinite Monkey Theorem suggests that a roomful of monkeys with typewriters (immortals, or indefinite supply of monkeys), given an infinite amount of time, will recreate the entire works of Shakespeare. This spread from Faesthetic no. 8 (The Infinity Issue) is a future-historical portrait of the actual monkey responsible for successfully completing the entirety of the works, who then climbed into his time-traveling spaceship to voyage to the 16th century in order to gift the works to their nominal creator with detailed instructions for their unveiling. We salute you, commander Pooper.

Inspiration

Here are four English Electric Lightnings flying in tight formation. Shapes only an engineer could create, unfinished metal surfaces, steel-nerved RAF pilots and an overcast sky that mirrors the pallid emotional landscape of cold war-era Britain. Soundtracked by John Foxx's "A New Kind of Man".