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do [interesting] things | 8/8 - 8/14

Thu, 06 Aug 2015 20:07:00 +0000

Each week, Maxus NY gather and compile a list of the most interesting things happening in and around NYC for the week ahead. This is our Do Interesting Things weekly series and is released every Friday to inspire people to get outside their comfort zone. The initiative started to give people a reason to get out and experience new and interesting things with the view to broaden the mind and foster creativity. We encourage our staff to experience the best that NY has to offer, and share their experience at our bi-weekly staff meeting, exemplifying our mantra “Lean into Change”.

WEEKEND

Hong Kong Dragon Boat Festival

Summer Streets

Renaissance Fair

Family Dinners with Mario Batali’s Chefs at NY Botanical Garden

Basquiat: The Unknown Notebooks

Holocenter House

How Cats Took Over The Internet

Shakespeare In The Parking Lot

LoMan Street Art Festival

Please Touch The Art

Tune-Yards + Shabazz Palaces: Celebrate Brooklyn!

SummerStage Central Park: Glass Animals / Taylor McFerrin / BattleFest League Dancers

ALL WEEK

Restaurant Week

Ballet Festival

MON 8/10

Books Beneath the Bridge

SBB at 1 Penn Plaza

HBO Bryant Park Film Festival: Desk Set

Live Jazz with Dida Pelled

Redefining HERstory: The Real Impact of Media Stereotypes of Women of Color

TUES 8/11

Book Launch: Barry Yourgrau in conversation with Darin Strauss – Mess

Amazing Scavenger Hunt Adventure: Midtown

Mapping Brooklyn: An Artists Panel

Branding Bootcamp: Discover Your Personal Leadership Brand

WED 8/12

Bryant Park Reading Room: Al Rocker & The Great Gulf Hurricane

Screening: We Come As Friends

Meditation for the Modern Mind: Introductory Talk

Bogart and Bacall Movie Night: Dark Passage

SummerStage Central Park: The Wiz – A Celebration in Dance and Music

THURS 8/13

Summer Movie Series at Intrepid Sea: Wall-E

Drink & Draw

Made In Her Image Opening Reception

MoMA Nights with Lower Dens

Q+A with Ann Beattie – The State We’re In

The Wall of Reflections in Brooklyn

New York Data Scientists Networking Event

FRI 8/14

Brooklyn Beer & Wine Fest

This Is Spinal Tap

MetFridays

The Great Food Truck Derby 2015

Fridays at the MoMA

Fringe Theater Festival

Hudson River Park’s Sunset on the Hudson: Baby Soda Jazz Band

Enjoy!

Camilla Quirk + Megan Koval

do [interesting] things | 8/1 - 8/7

Wed, 29 Jul 2015 16:49:00 +0000

WEEKEND

The Chardonnay Run

Water Balloon Combat

Lincoln Center Festival

Animation Block Party

Warm Up MoMA PS1: Tiga, Bob Moses, Gavin Russom, Frank & Tony

Panel Discussion: The Life and Work of Geoffrey Holder

Sennelier Oil Color Demonstration with Jim Minet

Brasil Summerfest: Coladera + Harlem Samba

SummerStage Central Park: Brasil Summerfest (Nacao Zumbi)

Peru Show at Chelsea Market

Videology Trivia Night: Parks and Recreation

Screening + Q&A: On Beauty

A Night at the Museum Sleepover for Grown-Ups

Seminar: Inside The Art of Visual Storytelling

Full Moon Fest

The Wassaic Project Summer Exhibition & Festival

ALL WEEK

Celebrate Brooklyn!

Mostly Mozart Festival

Restaurant Week

Brasil Summerfest

Storm King Art Center on exhibit at The Ace Hotel

MON 8/3

Movies Under the Stars: Dead Poets Society

Books Beneath the Bridge: WORD

SummerStage Central Park: Beautiful – The Carole King Musical

HBO Bryant Park Summer Film Festival: Marathon Man

Lecture: Noxious New York – Race, Class and Garbage

TUES 8/4

Lecture: Kathleen Alcott Infinite Home

Citi Bike: Street Skills Class at REI Soho

SummerStage East River Park: Tito Nieves

Comedy Inside The Art: Roasting The Art World From Within

Whiskey School: Bourbon, Scotch & Rye – Shake Down

WED 8/5

Summer on the Hudson Picture Show: Moonrise Kingdom

Lecture: Luther Campbell The Book of Luke

Discussion: Give Us The Ballot – The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America

The Hifi Reading Series: Jim Shepard

Panel Discussion: The Secrets of Book Publishing with Sue Shapiro

j’eatjet? Gastrobar Crab Boil

THURS 8/6

SyFy Movies with a View (Brooklyn Bridge Park): Friday

Hudson River Rocks: U.S. Girls + Yuck

Alive After Five featuring The Imbibe

Art Opening: In Search for Roots

SummerStage East River Park: Caribou with guest Sinkane

FRI 8/7

SummerStage East River Park: The Nuyorican Poets Café featuring Sarah Jones

The New York Pops with Pink Martini

Long Beach International Film Festival: Shorts On The Beach

Wes Anderson Art Show – NYC Pop-Up!

Enjoy!

Camilla Quirk + Megan Koval

do [interesting] things - TEMPLATE

Wed, 29 Jul 2015 16:44:00 +0000

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Enjoy!

Camilla Quirk + Megan Koval

do [interesting] things

Fri, 24 Jul 2015 13:47:00 +0000

WEEKEND

Celebrate Brooklyn: Sylvan Esso

Flavorwire Magic Hour Roller Disco

Found Sound Nation

Anxious Closing

Strawberry Fields: A tribute to the Beatles

Carroll Gardens Greenmarket

Butcher Paper Dinner: Lobster Boil

5^th Annual NYC Poetry Festival

GMA 2015 Free Concert Summer Series: Nicki Minaj

Central Park Waterfight

Bushwick Flea Market

Fashioning the Body: An Intimate History of the Silhouette

NYC Zine Weekend

Gigawatts Festival

Giant Bagel Sculptures

Second Annual Antique Car Rally

The Epic Ride

ALL WEEK

Restaurant Week

Harlem Week

Mozart Music Festival

Jazz in July

MON 7/27

Vintage Movie & Pizza Night

TUES 7/28

Bierkraft Beer Tasting

Floral Flavors: MSG at Brooklyn Botanic Gardens

Death Cafe

WED 7/29

Riverflicks Big Hit Wednesdays

Mediation on the Highline

Stand Up for Charleston

THURS 7/30

DJ Questlove Presents: Bowl Train

FRI 7/31

Hozier

Hip Hop Karaoke

Enjoy!

Camilla Quirk + Megan Koval

SXSW 2015 - Technology and Great BBQ

Mon, 23 Mar 2015 14:45:00 +0000

Last week a few of us had the pleasure of attending SXSW. Before the breakfast tacos and Shiner Bock cravings completely subside, we wanted to share with you the major themes we saw coming out of this years conference.

1. The Human Touch: It was refreshing to see so many speakers and exhibitors reinforce the thought that to connect, to have meaning and have impact you have to strike at real human emotions. As this is such an interesting topic we explored it further, writing a blog post on this subject.

2. Shift from entrepreneur to corporate: The volume of parties, side meetings and presence of mainstream brands was at an all time high. You couldn’t walk anywhere without brands shouting, inviting and bribing you to engage with them. For me personally the enormous McDonalds' food truck and Jalapeño burger was a not so great example of a mainstream brand trying to fit in.

3. Food has officially become pop culture: The addition of a food themed stream 'SXSW bites' this year reinforced the notion that food is a growing movement with a rabid fan base. The volume of content, platforms, tools, and participation in community centric food programs demonstrates that this is an area with extreme passion and ripe for leveraging.

4. Wearables became artistic: In previous years there's been lots of attention on the functionality and tech behind wearables. This year we began to see wearables in action that have a fashion/art bent – huge relief for me as frankly who likes wearing those clunky Jawbone UP bands. There was the collaboration between Opening Ceremony and Intel. The beautifully crafted garments and accessories from Unseen, a group out of London that blends biological and chemical matter into materials; combining science with art, design and performance. And my personal favourite the Mi:Mu music making gloves of Imogen Heap.

We believe this renewed interest in creating experiences that harness human emotions is something we can easily take advantage of and lean into more. We're in the business of evoking emotions. So next time we devise a host of tactics to drive engagement or tune-in, let's remember to ask ourselves what emotion does that piece of content evoke.

For further insight into what Maxus took out of SXSW check out our video on our insights, themes and trends.

Maxus SXSW Round Up

Fri, 20 Mar 2015 17:23:00 +0000

Maxus sent a team of our top digital minds to SXSW to report back on key themes and trends across the festival. Here's a round-up of their observations.

SXSW: In Search of a Higher Purpose

Thu, 19 Mar 2015 17:24:00 +0000

Nick Vale, global head of planning at Maxus, reflects on the joys of getting uncomfortable at the annual SXSW Interactive festival in Austin, Texas.

To attempt to pull a singular topic or even a range of topics from the maelstrom of ideas that is SXSW is futile; capturing the current of ideas, their spirit and essence and packaging them up to bring home is invaluable.

My personal hope was that the festival would this year go beyond tech (and the repetitive repurposing of tech) in all its GoPro-enabled, drone-delivered 3D-printed glory, and deliver a call to arms to an industry that is all too often self-serving to stop showing off: to start thinking.

And I’ve been pleasantly fulfilled. While fully expecting a continued focused on the Internet of Things, everything this year has spoken to tunes of humanisation, higher purposes and ways to make humanity better as a whole.

A growing presence of artists and designers signifies an embracing of alternate and entwined perspectives. It’s a refreshing invitation for us to look at problems from a different angle – to pivot our thinking to find ‘the spaces in between’.

Fusion of ideas

In her keynote session, MoMA’s Paulo Antonelli spoke of designers and architects working in tandem with bioengineers; a fusion of ideas and expertise that creates new human landscapes, such as the embedding of nanoparticles right into the fabric of building to purify our air.

This coming together of disparate fields – inviting radical new ways of thinking – is tremendously exciting and pushes innovation into new spaces.

Conversation around wearables and in-store tech, for example, has evolved into the realm of emotion and purpose. In the retail space, we’ve heard talk of conducting heat maps of consumers. Mapping the emotional reactions of consumers at the moment they experience an aisle or product range is a really powerful idea.

As Morgan Spurlock sagely put it, no amount of tech is going to make a bad story good. The assumption can now be that the technology exists. It needs to take a back seat and let the idea come centre stage so we can focus on adding value to people’s lives.

Yes, we’ve seen some really interesting, extremely good and inspiring work over the past 20 years, but has any of it been truly ground-breaking, or driven culture to the same extent that ‘Lemon’ did in the 60s, ‘Pregnant Man’ in the 70s and ‘1984’ or ‘Laundrette’ in the 80s?

Blown away

Overall, the zeitgeist here in Austin strikes a tuneful chord with our approach at Maxus of leaning into change, which I interpret as always having something interesting to say. I was blown away at one morning session at the idea that humanity could eradicate all disability within 100 years (as a conservative estimate), with bionic implants enabling humans to perform significantly better than the average person today.

While I’m not purporting that media can save humanity, what we can do is inject the spirit of innovation we’re seeing into how we think about people, into our planning and the products we create for clients to deliver to their audiences. We could start by introducing a more ‘Spartan’ approach to ourselves and our work. Our job is to create the great ideas that genuinely fuel innovation and open the door to great tech.

Progress means taking a fresh look at ourselves and defining, or redefining, what our communications industry exists for. We need to take a long, hard inwards look at our industry (and ourselves) and start to get a little more uncomfortable with what we see.

(Originally posted on M&M Global)