Category Archives: New York City

Festivus Comes Early This Year

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This week, as an early Festivus present, thousands of people will cross one more thing off of their Dream-things-to-do-in-New-York bucket list, by stopping by their old pal Jerry Seinfeld’s place. His fictional apartment, that is. A re-creation of the famous Upper West Side apartment will pop-up thanks to Hulu on 14th street near Chelsea Market on Wednesday, and will be open through Sunday. This fan-driven activation will celebrate the introduction of ‘Seinfeld’ to the Hulu catalog.

Similar activations have been created to celebrate ‘Arrested Development’ and ‘Friends’. The ‘Central Perk’ pop-up cafe was co-sponsored by Eight O’Clock Coffee and Warner Brothers, and gave both brands a valuable way to connect fans with one of the most popular shows in television history. Both of these activations were incredibly popular and generated long lines just to get close to the action.

Activations like these allow fans to engage with their favorite shows in an exciting way– they can actually place themselves into the show they normally see through a television or laptop screen. The promise of a great selfie on Jerry’s couch might just be enough to make the long line worth it.

If you’d like to see if Jerry has a copy of Kramer’s coffee table book about coffee tables on his coffee table, the apartment will be open June 24th through June 28th from 10 AM to 7 PM at 451 West 14th Street.

What Sparks Our Fire: Seinfeld… enough said.

A Tree Grows Underneath Manhattan

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What can you do with an abandoned underground trolley terminal? In Manhattan, where space is at a premium, there are a billion creative uses for this subterranean expanse. In 2011, James Ramsey, Dan Barasch, and R. Boykin Curry IV proposed a radical idea for the space that sat unused for over 60 years– turn it into an underground park. The idea immediately resonated with New Yorkers, drew massive media attention, and got a wildly successful Kickstarter get off the ground. And this month, Ramsey, Barasch, and Curry have returned with a new Kickstarter to fund a test lab, bringing them once step closer to the reality of their Lowline park.

The test lab for the Lowline mostly aims to test the special technology that engineers have built to bring sunlight underground. Solar panels at street level will act as sunlight receptacles. Sunlight will then be funneled underground where it can be disseminated to the plants living below. Where UV lamps might have been used in the past, the Lowline is revolutionary because it aims for sustainability. Additionally, visitors will be able to go to the test lab this Fall to see the results in action.

Calling their park the Lowline as a nod to Chelsea’s High Line, the creators have acknowledged the huge impact that green public spaces can have on the surrounding community. The High Line was similarly built on abandoned elevated train tracks on the west side of Manhattan, with the first phase opening to visitors in 2009. With almost 5 million annual visitors, the High Line’s presence has revitalized the surrounding community in a way that the Lowline hopes to emulate on the Lower East Side.

Learn more on the Lowline’s website and Kickstarter.

What Sparks Our Fire: Sustainable public spaces spurring cutting edge technological and economic benefits

Upfront with the Newfronts

digital-content-newfronts Every year marketers and brands flock to Televisions’ Upfronts, to hear the new network line ups and get a preview of the coming years television strategy.  A month before the Upfronts kick off, TV networks are already sharing the spotlight–and potential media dollars–with this month’s NewFronts. Thanks to a long list of buzzworthy announcements, celebrity appearances, and corporate interest this year’s NewFronts signify the continued growth in importance of digital media and advertising. Started in 2008 by Digitas as a way to “bring together content creators, distributors, talent and brands to harness creative media opportunities made possible in the age of digital marketing,” the NewFronts conference has managed to become one of the most important conferences in the digital content realm. Brands like Hulu, AOL, Yahoo, and Google’s YouTube give presentations on their upcoming year’s content in order to attract advertising dollars. In 2008, these presentations were intended to convince marketers and agencies to shift more of their budgets into digital advertising, but as more marketers have already been convinced, the conference no longer helps marketers decide if they’ll invest their advertising dollars digitally, but tells them where. With almost 13% growth in the past year alone, digital advertising now comprises almost 30% of U.S. ad spend. 2015 Hulu Upfront Presentation This year’s NewFronts have already brought news that Hulu will pick up all 9 seasons of Seinfeld, a huge announcement that will surely draw in many advertising dollars. As the conference grows in size and importance– alongside the digital advertising sector as a whole– we will come to expect more and more of these big announcements every year.

What Sparks Our Fire: Knowing that we’ll be spending a good chunk of the month of June binge watching Seinfeld

Light Photography’s New Best Friend

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With the rise in DSLR camera ownership, light photography has emerged as an increasingly popular form of photography. While it has traditionally been a difficult style of photography to master, New York-based designers Duncan Frazier and Steve McGuigan have entirely revolutionized it with just one product: the Pixelstick. The Pixelstick is a LED-lit stick that can display the “pixels” of images, as it is pulled in front of a DSLR camera with a long exposure. With the Pixelstick, photographers can create still images, or capture several images to put together into an animated video.This gives photographers the freedom to “paint” images and even video clips and gifs onto whatever real-life (dark) background they can imagine. It also gives brands an opportunity to put their logo in some creative locations. Take a look at this video and see some of the incredible possibilities.

Light painting with pixelstick from Bitbanger on Vimeo.

What Sparks Our Fire: A revolutionary new product that can expand creative possibility

The (he)ART of NYC

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New York City at it’s core, is known as a center of the arts.  You can get your art fill all over the city, making stops along museum mile, gallery hopping in Chelsea, taking in the street art in Dumbo, or making the trek out to PS1 in Queens, and now even in one of the most iconic spots in all of the city… Times Square.

Now, as New Yorkers, we tend to avoid Times Square at all costs, but artist Peggy Ahwesh’s City Thermogram, has made it a destination spot for art lovers as well as tourists.

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City Thermogram unveils both NYC’s electrical grid and the heat signatures of the human bodies that crowd its streets onto many of the largest billboards in the area. It’s a portrait of the urban everyday through the lens of a heat-sensitive camera. Using innovative technology, the piece recasts our ‘photographic’ world into one of unexpected revelations about our bodies, energy sources and personal devices. While this technology is usually used for scientific purposes, in Ahwesh’s hands the camera reveals the dynamism of the human body and offers a heat-based visualization of the electrical power grid that we all operate within.

This is part of the Midnight Moment series, the largest coordinated effort in history by the sign operators in Times Square to display synchronized, cutting-edge creative content on electronic billboards and newspaper kiosks throughout Times Square every night.

What Sparks Our Fire: Innovative Art in Unexpected Places