Image Fulgurator

The image of Japanese tourists posing with their friends, flashing peace signs in front of national monuments, Schloss Neuschwanstein, Arc de Triomphe, the Great Pyramid, Ground Zero, etc, is a long standing cultural phenomenon, which has yet to be understood beyond the shores of the Land of the Rising Sun. More recently, since the rise of the cell phone camera, raised lighters romantically oscillating at concerts have been replaced by the blitz of hundreds of mobile devices, trying to capture the perfect memento of a live performance. 

What fans end up doing with the mostly abstract blobs of light they go home with also eludes me. – by Michael Ladner

There is a new device, however, that can transform these entirely banal snapshots into politically charged documents, brand signage or slapstick realist humor: the Image Fulgurator. Berlin-based artist Julius von Bismarck has constructed a photographic device, which instead of reproducing the reality in front of the lens, hacks into surrounding peoples’ flash cameras, and inserts prescribed content (image, symbol or text) directly onto their photos. All you need to do is point the Fulgurator – fulguration is the act or process of flashing like lightning – at an object that others nearby are photographing and the data is then superimposed onto their images. This process all goes unnoticed by the innocent bystander with a point-and-shoot; it is invisible to the human eye. The element of realist humor comes into play when they look at their image display: WTF is this phantom logo? Where did this text come from? Such reactions can be viewed on Julius’ website in a YouTube instructional video. 
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Von Bismarck’s experiments with his invention include smuggling Magritte’s dove onto Mao’s portrait in Tiananmen Square, beaming the cell-phone service provider O2’s logo onto Berlin’s mayor, Klaus Wowereit, and projecting a cross onto Obama’s podium during his celebrity appearance in Berlin in summer 2008. He also edited the text on the famous sign at Checkpoint Charlie: “YOU ARE ENTERING THE AMERICAN SECTOR”. Von Bismarck’s manipulation reads: “hundreds of people die at the boarder between Mexico and the USA”. 
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Whether heavy-handed sabotage or a just funny prank, the Fulgurator’s manipulations are always stimulating. And the idea of enhancing strangers’ pictures unbeknownst to them is just fucking cool. Hats off to Julius von Bismarck! And tourists beware, be open; you think photography insures objective reproduction, but you never know what can just show up.    ◊
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www.juliusvonbismarck.com/fulgurator

Motorcycle Helmets

For daredevil motorcyclists the helmet is more than just a placebo sense of safety – it’s also a role-play prop with kinky connotations. Think of the oxygen mask drill in an airplane. When the masks drop, it’s green light for mouth-to-mouth with death, but the flight attendants perform their ritual anyway. It’s just like the pool of holy water in a catholic church: you wouldn’t go without it, but at the end of your life you’ll die anyways. – by Eva Munz

Safety measures are rarely sexy; helmets have always begged for design. Chanel did some, as did Louis Vuitton a couple of years back. Stunt drivers have no time for this kind of kitsch. The Bandit Helmets we used for the DERZEIT Accident Issue’s fashion shoot cater to the very needs of speed freaks on two wheels. Their heavily adorned hats are carefully cast characters that show the ›face‹ they want to put on for the ride. They’re irreplaceably personal, like the parachute that every parachutist packs himself, so when the fabric fails to unfold they have no one to blame but themselves. Every rider knows that if a helmet drops on a concrete floor from the hip, its protection may be gone forever, gripped invisibly by an evil spell. 
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The Berlin-based company customizes helmets with airbrush designs and also offers prêt-a-porter models with see-through grid textures, ornaments, dipped in flashy chrome or shaped like bizarro ghostlike masks. Helmets offer a great opportunity to identify with your tribe. Harley Davidson riders know this, as do Vespa Mods and Bangkok’s motorcycle-taxi drivers. Personally, I think men on motorcycles are always kind of lame: nothing beats a hot chick on wheels.
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Helmets GmbH, Roentgenstr. 14a, 10587 Berlin, www.motorbike.de

Spandex

 Spandex is immortal. I know it. I speak from a place of wisdom, from the Planet of the Unitarded. (For earthlings unfamiliar with this futuristic state of mind, think of the tortuous medieval costume once known as a pee-prohibitor.) With that image in mind, let us argue the contrary to prove the point. – by April Lamm

If spandex were mortal, it would be in mounds at those musty depositories of the unwanted: Humana, Salvation Army, Goodwill. But contrary to what you might imagine, spandex is conspicuously missing from most of these shops. Of late, in order to cope with the discrepancy between my personal addiction to more and the world’s crisis of less, I began to do what I did so often in the 80s: thrift. After much field research, I’ve come to the conclusion that every lycra-legged lady out there is hogging their old spandex. Give ‘em up, I say, I want some hand-me-down spandex! Vintage!
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Sure, it’s chemical, artificial, made mostly of polyurethane, which is something you put on floors to make them shiny. It wraps the hard-bodied bottoms of superheroes galore, but its also highly flammable. Let’s face it. Shopping for pants is a form of mental torture. The bottom is an elastic that expands with the increasingly eroded resistance to every cookie that crosses your path. Our nether regions are non-heroic.
Historically, the original era of spandex culminated with the original era of disco, that is, the era when we used to dance … a lot. In the 70s, Patricia Fields claims to have invented the modern day legging as we know and love it today. And while it might have been Jane Fonda who transformed the verb »workout« into a noun in 1982, contrary to my memory, Fonda was not wearing the shiny spandex, but rather a dull striped cottony variation. The disco roller rink muse Olivia Newton John wore it as part of her bad girl gear in the culminating scene of Grease back in 1978. In her black shiny spandex, she morphed from a conservative Pink Lady into a slinky one dipped in ink. That’s how she got her guy.
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There’s just something irresistible about a material that is simultaneously historic and of the hereafter. And it is one of the few items where you can reliably order a generic subjective S-M-L-XL. Spandex is, or so I learned, a material that stretches 500 times its »relaxed state.« 
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My personal spandex collection was once reserved for my annual dance recital. In my jazz flats, leggings and matching spandex silver sequined bandeau, I performed on a stage for a crowd of 50 mothers, and came as close as I’ll ever come to Madonna. Earth, Wind, and Fire and … spandex, immortal. Since the discovery of sugar, no better material has ever been found.   ◊

Donna Daytona

A few months ago, I had the honor of standing in a crowded room next to Donatella Versace. As I meticulously studied her appearance, I noticed the watch on her feeble little wrist: a Rolex, Daytona model, a men’s watch from the most ubiquitous luxury label in the world. It looks like a child‘s definition of the word „expensive“. There are buttons and an extra dial, with which Donnatella can mark the time waiting for her driver to navigate the Milan’s shopping district. And it’s all in bright, yellow gold. – by Marco Rechenberg

A Rolex Daytona is actually supposed to be worn in stainless steel, because in any case it’ll be rare and totally overpriced. In white gold it breaks the bank, and looks exactly like the stainless steel one, so unless you have the microscopic vision of the members of new York’s Diamond’s Dealer’s club, only the beholder will know its real value. Clearly Donatella Versace is not interested in such nuances. She opts for the shock value of the garish yellow gold variation. It dangles thick and heavy around her wrist, making even the lifting of a cigarette look like a workout. 
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In contrast, the other signoras in the room mostly do without watches. And if one was to be seen, it was no doubt some soulless, diamond-encrusted ice, a present from their personal Berlusconi-wannabe. Understandably, people in fashion aren’t always interested in watches. The watch-making industry still holds on to unbearably slow, tedious and conservative collections. Nevertheless it was a watch – Donatella‘s gold monster – that managed to enhance the afternoon. It gave it an air of Plein Soleil, Alain Delon, sort of. Even if the reasons for this were never too clear to me, I instantly felt sympathy for Ms. Versace wash over me. Perhaps it was about her brother’s sad demise or the stoicism with which she‘s led the fashion house for more than ten years now. Plus her unique looks, her body, the hair. Then there are the concerns about her daughter, the spindly poor little rich girl. That very afternoon I saw what made me so enthusiastic for Donatella Versace: the bar of gold on her wrist, worn with the same insouciance with which she sends her garish turquoise down the catwalk. 
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It didn‘t take long before I felt the desire to own that watch. On a man’s wrist, I imagine, it could develop its full potential. It‘s a watch that‘s charged so heavily with sexual motives, I’m surprised that I’ve never heard of a gay man with a watch fetish. And yet, there are some conceptual problems in this aesthetic equation: someone has to pay for it. A Daytona costs about as much a liver transplant. Also, as was warned, many people perceive such a heavy golden watch as aggressive. I believe this is a simple misunderstanding: such openly displayed splendor is just a gracefully extended invitation, to a different kind of time.   ◊

Patrick Mohr Sunglasses

 – by Emily Segal These Patrick Mohr sunglasses look like a slide rule or a piece of motherboard. They’re just a rectangle of black plastic with two legs that hook over the eyes. Layered on top is a grid of eight red discs, like traffic lights muted mid-warning; be alarmed, they seem to say, but don‘t look. Or go ahead, stare: the kind of ambiguous challenge that typifies Patrick Mohr’s design strategy. Take Mohr’s famous clothes-hanger dresses that suspended outfits from the necks of the models walking down the catwalk – geometric armatures that acted out the idea of fashion while preventing it from actually touching the body. In contrast, these sunglasses are like snug armor for your forehead. And how does one see through the techno-mask? Through two sets of rough pin-prick holes that look like they were made by a garlic press. The whole experience feels like looking through the peephole of a camera obscura. But like Mohr’s clothes-hanger dresses, the sunglasses play a game with you: they look so enticingly ominous, you can‘t wait to put them on, but then you need to take them off again, to relieve the blindness and behold your toy anew. ◊

Overall Valley - Lala Berlin

 – Eva Munz Leyla Piedayesh has single-handedly answered all my unspoken prayers with the creation of this jumpsuit. The overalls fit right into the script of my science-fiction art/porn movie: Chandigarh-69. The main character is an alpha-worker in the fictional corporate federation DubaiDusseldorf.
Exactly – She's designing a replica of the Twin Towers, albeit bigger and better. The genetically enhanced underling-laborers she supervises worship her like a Goddess. Why? Because she looks amazing in the dark, silky-snug one-piece by Lala Berlin aptly entitled "Overall Valley" (a subtle play on the underrated women’s lib novel, "Valley of the Dolls," and the Freudian notion of the polymorphic perverse: valley everywhere). She also outsmarts all the Federati Nomenclatura with her light-speed cognition, and also stars in deft sexual stimulation programs, which are broadcast directly into their laborers' hives.
But that’s besides the point. It is the aesthetics of “Overall Valley,” the subtle folds around the shoulders, the neckline that plunges to the navel, the black that’s never black because of its reflective luminescence. This one piece is a Russian doll of subconscious projections: There’s only one layer you need to take off to be naked (assuming that you chose to forego undies), you can fly a plane in it (and thus be close to God), you can fix a car in it (and impress the dykes on bikes if you don’t care about ruining the silk), or you can just be a lethargic fashion idiosyncratic (where you radically buy three pairs of the one item you require each season). APC did one for summer, it was made of cotton and it was blue. It just didn’t cut it. Lala does.