Creative Design Concepts

By TOM VANDERBILT

Photograph by Ronald Dick

OPEN SKY Chris Milk (left) and Aaron Koblin at London’s Tate Modern, which is partnering with the duo on an upcoming project.

In the opening scene of Chris Milk and Aaron Koblin’s Internet video “The Johnny Cash Project,” the singer’s ghostly form emerges on a barren railway track. Rendered in grainy black-and-white silhouettes, the figure moves through a moody landscape to the haunting strains of Cash’s “Ain’t No Grave,” the style of the animation changing every few bars.

Milk, an acclaimed music-video director who has worked with U2 and Kanye West, conceived the project, but he did not create it; comprising hand-drawn stills contributed by thousands of people, the piece is a groundbreaking experiment in global crowdsourcing.

Milk first met Koblin, the head of Google’s Data Arts lab (a team whose artistic visualizations have been acquired by MOMA), at a tech conference in Lisbon. Over lunch, the two began a days-long conversation. Milk was frustrated with videos, which had seen a radical shift in distribution but in form remained largely unchanged since their inception in the 1980s. Koblin was feeling equally constrained by digital media.

Together they envisioned a new art form, blending the emotive power of music and images with the large-scale collaboration made possible by the Web. The inspiration was Koblin’s project “Sheep Market.” Composed of images of sheep from thousands of artists (each was paid two cents), the massive, 10,000-image digital fresco is as delightful as it is varied.

They wanted to take things a step further. But would people participate in an enterprise with an unknown result? What could be the catalyst? When Milk learned from producer Rick Rubin that a posthumous Johnny Cash album was on the horizon, he knew they had their muse: the music of a genre- and age-crossing artist. The result, which started as a fringe project, went mainstream when Google marked the anniversary of Cash’s death by airing the video in an ad during “Monday Night Football.”

Their next project, an interactive film for the Arcade Fire song “We Used to Wait,” again engaged the audience in the creative process. Viewers enter their childhood address, and as the song plays, they see—thanks to Google Street View—the street where they grew up.

Despite the technology involved, Milk and Koblin see their collaboration as one between artists—not between the “visual guy” and the “tech guy.” The results are surprisingly humanistic for projects created by virtual strangers across a vast digital divide—strangers now a little less strange to one another.

Milk on Koblin

In Portugal, Aaron gave a speech, and a crowd of people came up to the stage afterward, wanting to talk and give him business cards. I was one of those people. I was interested in his crowdsourcing work and whether we could explore something in a music video that utilized those ideas. If you accept that the Internet is the place you go to see music videos, what can you do to make them more than just a linear sequence of images playing 24 frames per second with music underneath?

With the rise of broadband and YouTube, people started watching music videos more on the Internet than on television. That’s a momentous paradigm shift, but we haven’t really changed the way we make music videos—we make them as if they’re still for MTV. Videos are the perfect bite-size morsel. You understand what it is; you know it’s going to be about four minutes long and that it’s not going to take your whole afternoon. I was excited that Aaron was using the Internet as its own unique and specialized canvas. The experiments he was doing were not about how to transfer television to the Web, but rather, here’s the Web, here are these tools we’ve never had before, what can we do that’s interesting with them? When cinema started, nobody saw it as “The Godfather”; no one saw it as close-ups and music and creating shots in color and dialogue and emotion. It grew to be that, and the Internet will grow. Now we’re fooling around in the dark trying to figure out what this thing is. That’s what I see the music videos that we made together as: experiments on what this medium will eventually be.

“Every media at first imitates the last: The first radio is people reading books; the first photographs are similar to paintings; the first films were of the theater.”

Most of the time Aaron and I are talking about whether something is compelling, rather than the best program to make it with. The question we’re most often asking ourselves is, “Is this good, and if it is, how do we make it better?” The more I learn from a technical standpoint—whether it is film stocks or camera lenses or compositing software—just means more tools, more paints in your palette as a director. I think Aaron comes from the other end of the spectrum. He’s very thoughtful and intelligent and articulate when talking about scenes and ideas and stories; he’s not coming at it just from a computational standpoint, and I think we’re meeting somewhere in the middle.

Koblin on Milk

I had seen a couple of Chris’s videos but wasn’t really familiar with who he was, which helped make our several conversations a pure thought exchange. I was increasingly frustrated with the ability of interactive digital art to really connect with people emotionally. That kind of started the conversation with Chris: What if we weren’t paying people, as we did with “Sheep Market”? What if we were getting people to engage for a purpose, for a cause? We started thinking about ways in which we could get people to creatively interact.

I’ve always been excited by rotoscoping, the technique used in films like “Waking Life,” which fuses animation with real-life emotion. It seemed like it was a process ripe for innovation. What if we could get thousands of people to create their own drawings, completely separate and disparate from one another—but then combine them to be bigger than the sum of their parts?

With the Arcade Fire project, Chris and I were talking about how every media at first imitates the last: The first radio is people reading books; the first photographs are actually similar to paintings, still lifes and portraits; the first films were of the theater. Then they realized you could actually move the camera around, actually take people on these experiences in the first person.

I’ll never forget the pitch to Arcade Fire. We sat in front of the band; Chris opened up Google Earth and started playing the song. He asked for singer Win Butler’s home address, and then “drove” to the address while the song was playing. He said, “Now, imagine this experience as part of the video, where everyone is doing this for themselves automatically.” The band said, “We have to do this.”

With a music video specifically for the Web, one of the things we thought about was how we could make the experience nonlinear, interactive, data driven—even break it out of the standard ratio and make it play all over your screen.

Part of what makes our collaboration fruitful is that Chris had never done anything online before. We have a lot of overlap in our perspective and our taste, but in terms of our skill set, it’s complementary. We know what we like and what we don’t like. Usually it’s the same stuff, even if we don’t always have the same solutions to change something we don’t like into something we do.

—Edited from Tom Vanderbilt’s interviews with Chris Milk and Aaron Koblin

When the 2012 Tony Award nominations are announced Tuesday morning, one name is sure to be on the list: Christopher Gattelli, the choreographer of “Newsies.” While other award categories will have the theater crowd debating like railbirds handicapping the Kentucky Derby, this one is practically a lock.

In “Newsies,” which romanticizes the story of the 1899 newsboy strike, Mr. Gattelli uses Broadway dance to do exactly what it should: enhance a story through movement. Sure, this show has come in for criticism for its inability to scratch every dramatic itch of the mature theatergoer, but it is unassailable for its craft in a season that has seen Broadway dance undermined in every conceivable way.

In “Ghost,” the evil office drones are upstaged by unforgivable projections and lighting. The likable steps in “Nice Work If You Can Get It” turn arthritic as Matthew Broderick heaves himself through them. (Whoever met a rich playboy who can’t dance?) “Leap of Faith” has some crisp moves, but their function is to give the singers a break. At “Evita,” dance is a distraction between costume changes.

Mr. Gattelli’s success lies not in having created a new style or edge-pushing concept; the choreography is drawn from existing classic steps. Rather, he has assembled those steps in an original way and created a dance vocabulary that is specific enough to communicate the story at a visual level.

One jump in particular (shown in the graphic to the right) illustrates the mechanics of how that’s done.

At first glance, the jump might look like your garden-variety backup-dancer move. But “the Kyle,” as it’s known—because the photo of dancer Kyle Coffman hitting it graces the show’s main marketing image—is loaded with deliberate choices.

When we first meet the rough and tumble youths of “Newsies,” they’re enjoying the freedom of living on the streets. “The Kyle” shows up early as they head to out to sell newspapers, and their sense of fun starts from the ground up: with flexed—not pointed—feet.

“I tried to structure a lot of vocabulary on things they would do in the street: kick the curb, cans, hopscotch,” Mr. Gattelli said. “We tried to incorporate anything they would find on the way to work.”

What sends the body moving are the legs, and this jump leads with downstage leg (the one closer to the audience), which crosses the body, suggesting the forward motion of a kid running down the block. By contrast, in ballet it is the upstage leg that often leads in the traditional leap (the grande jete), so the body can appear as taut and elongated as possible. “The choice was to have it crossed, so it didn’t have the length and line that a normal jete would,” Mr. Gattelli said.

As the boys decide to organize, they dance with a goal-directed sense of purpose. The jump returns with more polish: the toes are pointed, the arms are more militant and the newspaper becomes a weapon. “It goes from boyish flying-through-the-streets to more powerful,” said Mr. Gattelli. “It’s like the cavalry is coming.”

Other steps have layers, too. The fact that the boys are airborne throughout much of the show contrasts their vibrancy to the earthbound newspaper owners. “Pulitzer,” said Mr. Gattelli joked, “would never jump.”

One series of several pirouettes—which whips the crowd into stadium-style cheering—also does double duty as the dancer turns with a newspaper underfoot to say, “This is what I think of your publication.”

It helps that the “Newsies” cast is extremely well trained, especially in ballet. It’s the underlying reason why these steps in service of musical theater are executed so well, said Rhonda Miller, the director of Pace University’s commercial dance program: “You practice classical technique. You work and work and work daily. But you have to approach movement from the acting perspective.”

That perspective maintains the characters’ personalities until the lights go out on the story. And you can see the difference in the dance as soon as the extended curtain-call starts: When the young actors return, they’re dancing to their own strengths, be they turns or tricks that don’t fit into the show. “That’s me saying, ‘Here they are,’” Mr. Gattelli said. “We are in such a great place with their talent.”

Come the Tony ceremony, he will be, too.

Write to Pia Catton at pia.catton@wsj.com

A version of this article appeared April 30, 2012, on page A22 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: The Jump That Saved a Season.

By ERIC FELTEN

Christchurch, New Zealand, where an earthquake last year killed 185 people, is still struggling with how to treat another of its casualties, the city’s Anglican cathedral. Built of stone in the 19th century, the church has been damaged repeatedly by earthquakes over the years, and repeatedly repaired. But with its spire and sections of ceiling and walls collapsed, Christchurch’s Anglican bishop has declared the old pile too expensive to rebuild. Instead it will be “deconstructed” (which isn’t a postmodern linguistic gesture; it’s just that the bishop doesn’t like the awful word “demolished”).

Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

Christchurch Cathedral in November 1995

Many locals and preservationists are hoping to stop the wrecking crew, trying to buy time to raise the money and do the structural engineering that might save the Gothic beauty. They rightly ask, what’s the rush?

Especially since, meanwhile, the diocese has decided to toss up a temporary church designed by Japanese “emergency architect” Shigeru Ban. The architect has made a specialty out of temporary structures, using large, coated-cardboard tubes and stackable shipping containers. The roof for the Christchurch sanctuary is to be made of Mr. Ban’s signature tubes, which instantly earned the proposed building a nickname: The Cardboard Cathedral.

Some of the eye-rolling comes from the very idea of putting up a temporary church—shouldn’t sacred buildings strive to express a commitment for the ages, a confidence in the durability of faith? Yes, but even stone crumbles. A temporary church makes a virtue out of expressing the impermanence of this world.

Still, the plans for the temporary cathedral are a shame because they are one of the architect’s least interesting designs. After the 1995 earthquake in Kobe, Japan, Mr. Ban drew up a paper church that, with it’s elliptical footprint, was a lovely modern interpretation of the oval churches built by Bernini in the 17th century. By contrast, his Christchurch design is the sort of plain A-frame used promiscuously in the 1960s and ’70s, a tall shed that could work just as well as a church building or a Polynesian restaurant. Christchurch will soon have a sort of ecclesiastical Trader Vic’s.

But if the temporary chapel isn’t Mr. Ban’s best work, it does have this going for it—it isn’t permanent.

Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

Devastated in March 2011 after the recent earthquake

Most architecture is built to last, which is one reason it occasions such bitter fights. Take the controversy over new additions to the small church of Notre Dame du Haut in rural Ronchamp, France, built in the 1950s by the modernist Le Corbusier. When Renzo Piano was hired to add a visitors center and convent to the grounds, prominent international architects mounted an unsuccessful petition against the additions, denouncing the changes an artistic apostasy that “opens avenues to all forms of barbarity.”

How much less fuss there would have been if the new buildings had been temporary. One reason the planning of new structures is so fraught is that we have to live with the potential mistakes for decades to come.

There’s a great history of temporary architecture, the showcases for which have often been world’s fairs, where grand pavilions are built to convey the passions and fashions of the moment. The “White City” at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago allowed American architects to present their vision for ideal public spaces. Not that everyone was happy with the experiment: Chicago architect Louis Sullivan rejected the Neoclassicism that dominated, and contributed a building rich with color and ornamentation. He is said to have griped that the rest of the White City set back American architecture by decades.

Forty years later architects were at it again in Chicago. This time, at 1933′s Century of Progress International Exposition, the buildings were a futuristic fantasy of the modern and moderne, with the prefab disposability of the buildings part of the architectural statement. They would be as influential, in their way, as the White City had been a generation before.

If Gustave Eiffel’s iron tower had been proposed as a permanent structure, it probably would never have been built. But as a temporary novelty for the 1889 Exposition Universelle, why not? When it came time to take it down, Paris officials somewhat grudgingly allowed that it had become a part of the city: If the Eiffel Tower “did not exist, one would probably not contemplate building it there, or even perhaps anywhere else,” concluded a city commission in 1906. “But it does exist.” And so it continued to stand.

Perhaps we should encourage more temporary architecture, works that can be experimental because they don’t have to endure (or be endured). Wild new styles could be tried with the confidence that unless they succeed, the buildings will be disassembled, proving as ephemeral as the bad ideas behind them. And if any of these life-size architectural models do capture the public imagination, they can always be set, as it were, in stone.

By ALLEN BARRA

On the football field, the University of Alabama had a great season, winning the BCS national championship for the second time in three years. In the courtroom, however, there’s been less cause for celebration.

For seven years now the university has been locked in a bitter legal struggle with Alabama artist Daniel Moore over his right to depict scenes from Alabama games in his paintings. The university argues that it has exclusive rights to its trademark, which includes the Tide’s famous crimson-and-white colors. Mr. Moore maintains that his paintings are covered under his right to free speech. Appealing to a higher court, he says the freedom to paint what he chooses is a “God-given right.”

Simply put, the University of Alabama is telling Mr. Moore that he can’t portray its football players unless he purchases a license from them.

In a recent account of the case, the Birmingham News called the lawsuit “embarrassing.” News reporter Jon Solomon said in a phone interview last week that “Alabama couldn’t have picked a worse PR fiasco than the one they’ve created.”

To put it in football terms: Picture Alabama’s 2012 national champs playing a junior highschool squad—and going into the fourth quarter with the junior high leading. At least that’s what it looks like as the university, using the lawyers and other “material and financial support” provided by Collegiate Licensing Co., Alabama’s licensing agent, lines up against Mr. Moore and his Birmingham-based lawyer, Steve Heninger. (In addition to Alabama, CLC represents the NCAA and 100 other universities.)

So far, according to the Birmingham News, the university has spent nearly $1.4 million in legal expenses battling Mr. Moore. The irony is almost dizzying: Mr. Moore’s works have boosted Alabama football’s prestige, bolstering fan support for the same self-sustaining athletic department that is now seeking to restrict the artist’s right to portray the team in paint.

The late, great Bear Bryant must be spinning in his grave. As his career neared its end, Bryant himself selected Mr. Moore to commemorate his assault on Amos Alonzo Stagg’s record for coaching victories. In fact, several of Mr. Moore’s works are on display in the Paul W. Bryant Museum on the university’s campus in Tuscaloosa.

The legal wrangling began back in 2005 when the university filed suit against Mr. Moore to prevent him from using Alabama’s trademarks, including colors and logos, in his popular paintings. Many legal observers believe that Mr. Moore won a major victory in 2009 when a U.S. District Court in Birmingham ruled that the First Amendment gave him the right to paint, but that this right did not extend to merchandise such as coffee mugs, calendars and other items that the court considered commercial products rather than art.

The ruling satisfied neither party. The university appealed in an attempt to claim its trademark interests on any and all depictions, while Mr. Moore appealed on behalf of his right to use his artwork in all mediums.

Oral arguments were heard by the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta on Feb. 2 of this year, and the court’s decision, which will reverberate through all of college sports, is expected soon. There have been few relevant cases regarding art and trademark infringement, the most important being a 2003 decision by the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati. In 2000 Tiger Woods’s licensing company, ETW Corp., filed suit against artist Rick Rush to prevent him from selling prints made from his painting of Mr. Woods winning the 1997 Masters. The court decided that Mr. Rush’s painting, like Andy Warhol’s depictions of celebrities such as Marilyn Monroe and Mick Jagger, was sufficiently “transformative” to fall under First Amendment protection because the work—with Mr. Woods in three different poses with several past winners of the Masters—contained the artist’s own creative component and was not simply a likeness of Mr. Woods. Messrs. Heninger and Moore are hoping for similar logic from the Atlanta court.

Mark McKenna, a Notre Dame professor specializing in trademark law, is an amicus attorney for the case. In a phone interview last week, he said: “CLC and the university are using Daniel Moore as a test case. The bottom line is that Alabama and other schools want to control all the merchandise carrying an image associated with their schools. If they win, it isn’t clear how far they could take this. If Daniel Moore isn’t free to use an image from an Alabama game, how do we know that, say, Sports Illustrated wouldn’t be able to use a photo from an Alabama football game without the university’s approval? How do we know it would be OK for a newspaper to print a game photo? For that matter, could they even say ‘University of Alabama’ or ‘Crimson Tide’ in print?”

Does Mr. McKenna think that magazines and newspapers are concerned as they await the court’s decision? “They ought to be,” he says.

The University of Alabama responded by email: “While we regret the necessity of having to involve the courts in this matter, the lawsuit was necessary since UA must protect the value and reputation of our trademarks, name, colors, indicia, and logos by determining who uses them, as well as when and how they are used.”

Mr. Moore’s attorney, Mr. Heninger, says that “Alabama and CLC have made it clear from the start that they’ll go straight to the Supreme Court on this issue if necessary.”

It’s fourth-and-goal, and the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals has the ball.

Mr. Barra writes about sports for the Journal. His next book, “Mickey & Willie: The Parallel Lives of Baseball’s Golden Age,” will be published this fall by Crown.

A version of this article appeared March 22, 2012, on page D4 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Who Owns Crimson and White?.

By RHEA WESSEL

Corbis

Thousands watch as the Virgin of La Macarena enters the basilica in Seville.

Along the ancient Route of the Caliphs in the olive-producing city of Baena in southern Spain, white-robed children with palm fronds and solemn faces walk along a cobble-stone path that has been worn by thousands before them. The procession, marking the entry of Jesus Christ into Jerusalem, is accompanied by the slow, pounding rhythm of drums whose beats penetrate the city’s white-washed walls.

It is a scene replicated each spring across Spain, as cities large and small celebrate Semana Santa, or Holy Week, with centuries-old traditions and teeming crowds. Recreating key parts of Easter week—from Palm Sunday to the Passion of Christ—the festivities bring together the artistic, musical and physical strengths of the local communities.

In the week before Good Friday, thousands of people take to the streets, marching for up to 12 hours a day and carrying back-breaking floats depicting Mary or Jesus, in some cases with 70 men carrying a single float weighing 1,200 kilos. Thousands more accompany them, playing in brass bands or dressing up as hooded penitents.

I stumbled upon my first Semana Santa in Cartagena in 1999. Like the many other tourists who attended, I was taken in by the spectacle of sober music and ornate floats and costumes. A decade later, wanting to learn more and share the experience, my husband and I began taking our daughter, now 7 years old, to processions in Andalusia, some in Seville and Granada, others in Córdoba, Baena and another nearby village, Espejo, where my father-in-law lives. While the events are most striking in Seville and Málaga, it was in small-town Andalusia that I came to understand the intense sense of community behind the processions.

In Córdoba in 2009, we landed seats on bleachers and enjoyed a broad overview as a golden, candle-lit float portraying a crucified Jesus crept slowly through the crowds. It swayed as the men beneath shifted under the immense weight, grunting. In Granada two years later, we looked on as women dressed in traditional black-lace mantillas, or shawls, somberly paced toward the cathedral, rosaries in hand. One elderly woman’s legs and ankles were so swollen that even short walks must have been painful.

These Holy Week processions complete a year of preparations that involves people of all ages—from the decked-out children who march as soon as they can walk, to the grandmothers who sew costumes by hand and the local artisans who carve, paint and embellish alters and floats. Each float is unique, designed by groups of religious brotherhoods linked to local churches. Throughout the year, brotherhoods (most of which now accept women as members) not only plan for Semana Santa, they also perform charitable acts and organize social activities. Members selected to carry floats, called costaleros, consider it an honor.

Dating back to the 16th century, the marches originated as a way for the church to tell the Easter story to illiterate townspeople, says Francisco Montilla, the secretary of Baena’s Museum of Semana Santa. While Spain remains largely Catholic, the parades today are as much a celebration of family and local life as they are a spiritual experience. In fact, according to Mr. Montilla, the church is hardly involved in an official capacity. “This is a grassroots community event,” he says. “Organizing the processions is the primary goal for each brotherhood. Priests serve mainly as consultants to the brotherhoods.”

Corbis

Women wearing mantillas

Eva Maria Frías, a 37-year-old Baena native, has taken part in the city’s Holy Week her entire life. “Parents go to great lengths to pass on the traditions to their children and share their faith through the processions,” she says. Members of the Santo Cristo de la Veracruz brotherhood, Ms. Frías and her husband registered both of their daughters with the association at birth. One now carries incense in the processions, while the other plays the drums.

Baena has become known for its handmade drums, which add a unique flare to the processions. During the march, as many as 3,000 drummers beat a particular Baenese rhythm, creating a surreal, surround-sound experience. Citizens have made the drums, which sell for roughly €300, a symbol of the city and an object of affection. “Some drums are shared over five generations,” says Mr. Montilla. Drummers dress in red embroidered jackets and gold-tinted helmets with plumes on top and manes of white or black hair that tumble out the back. Mr. Montilla says the costumes, which can cost more than €600, were most likely inspired by military uniforms worn during the Napoleonic wars. Today, the uniforms are still taken into battle, though of a more friendly variety. Drummers with black manes are pitted against those donning white tresses, as groups challenge each other to informal drumming matches before and after processions.

Even when the marches are called off because of bad weather, a few eager drummers may take their contests inside. Last year in Baena, the night procession and Good Friday parade were rained out, disappointing tourists and causing some local women to cry. “The work of our brotherhood for an entire year was lost,” explains Ms. Frías. But my family came across a group of men who had put on their costumes anyway and took their beats into a bar on Plaza de la Constitución, a central square, turning it into a kind of beer and concert hall all at the same time.

During Holy Week, Baena’s population doubles to 40,000, according to Mr. Montilla, and the city essentially shuts down as residents focus on the festivities. Friends and family come to march, spectate and share in festival foods, such as torrijas, a fried, cinnamon- and sugar-dusted bread. Though the processions draw thousands of tourists, particularly from other regions of Spain, Semana Santa is hardly commercial, says Juan Carlos Roldán Sillero, president of the Association of Brotherhoods of Semana Santa in Baena. “Restaurants and hotels may benefit from the processions, but the brotherhoods don’t,” he says. “We’re not doing this for tourists.”