See What's Been Stirring At WOK

New versions of WOKmedia's ‘Made in China’ series of furniture.

The work, featuring traditional Chinese furniture embedded with hand-carved wooden toys and finished in white lacquer, is a result of their extended stay in China as part of a collaboration with Contrasts Gallery of Shanghai.

This series of work debuted at Design Miami last December.


They describe it as "Seemingly innocent children toys act as a kind of space invaders emerging from a world hidden inside our childhood memories. Specifically invading antique Chinese furniture, starting to threaten their traditional past."


and as "Revealing a surreal and terrifying landscape of derailed trains, drowning babies, crashing planes and wild dinosaurs."
 


The most recent additions to the above installation are the following :


Limited edition series of WOKmedia's ‘Made in China’ collection.
Each piece is unique, featuring traditional Chinese furniture embedded with hand-carved wooden toys and finished in white lacquer.

 above: ‘GRR’


above: ‘BOW-WOW’


above: ‘BOO-HOO’


above: ‘CLANK’

Who is WOKmedia?

Julie Mathias and Wolfgang Kaeppner established WOKmedia in 2004.
They are based in London with a production studio in Shanghai.

Wokmedia’s work is primarily concerned with the emotional dimension, an archetypal memory or a physical sensation. Often they survey a state of in between where chaos is showing structure and confusion is beginning to make sense. Where out of devastation and destruction emerges a new world. A world embedded in their childhood memories when emotions were not expected to be filtered, when make-believe was not equated with lunacy.

Julie Mathias
julie@wokmedia.com

Wolfgang Kaeppner
wok@wokmedia.com

London Studio
WOKmedia
2 Leswin Place, Unit HQ
London N16 7NJ

Shanghai Production
WOKmedia
Rujin Road 500 (South)
Shanghai

Eurochocolate Festival Souvenirs: (yes, of course they are chocolate)

If you missed this year's Eurochocolate festival which just ran in Italy from Oct 13th- Oct. 21st, you can still get your chocolate fix thanks to some of the fun products from the festival, now available online here.

Check em out:


Above: Chocprin (chocolate aspirin)



Above: Chocopower (chocolate batteries)


Above: Cazzuola (comes in many flavors)


Above: Tavoletta's Chocolate Cellphones (many different flavors)


A little bit about the festival:

The Eurochocolate festival of Perugia 2007 has its core center in the historic center of the city, from Rocca Paolina up to the squares and the internal areas: Carducci Gardens, Piazza Italia, Piazza della Repubblica, Corso Vannucci, Via Mazzini, Via Fani, The Terrace of the Covered Market, and Piazza November IVth.

The kermis Eurochocolate Perugia 2007 has earned in a couple of years the sympathy of the people asserting itself as the most popular festival of the chocolate and the most followed by Italians, making of Perugia the European capital of the chocolate. For nine days the Umbrian chief town transforms itself for the occasion in a huge open-air pastry-shop for the delight of all the greedy persons and the slaves of cacao.

At Eurochocolate Perugia festival will be organized dozens of big events concentrated on the "food of the gods" with exhibitions, laboratories, internships, cooking classes, tasting, expositions, banquets, celebrations and the final prices: Eurochocolate Awards.
Each year new themes and entertainment are developed like for example "the prisoners of the chocolate" of the 2001 edition, and the activities of the section "Ciok si Gira!" dedicated to the cinema of the 2002 edition.
For all the tourists the occasion is without any doubt a good one to discover the most remote corners of this antique medieval center and to enjoy the famous Umbrian hospitality.

Buy the above chocolate goodies (and more) from eurochocolate here.

6 Ways To Wood Floors (Without the Wood)

Wood floors or carpet?
Why choose one when you can have a carpet that looks like a wood floor?

Here are 6 different examples by six different designers.

From the new plynyl floor mats by Chilewich to the tromp de l'oeil look of Yvette Laduck's Woody Wood rug, you can have the look of wood made of anything but wood.

In vinyl. Or silk. Or leather. Or hand-tufted wool.

Click on the above rug for more information and a link to purchase.

prices vary wildly.

See more of my Fancy Friggen Flooring & Radical Rugs list at ThisNext.

Leopard's Blue Screen Of Death Installation Fix

Yes, I had pre-ordered Mac's new operating system, Leopard (10.5) so it would arrive oct. 26th and I could be an early adopter. Sure enough, it came yesterday via fed ex around approx 10:30 am.

Like an excited über goober, I immediately opened it and began the install process.

Okay, not true, I cleaned off my desktop first, tossed some useless files, and verified permissions, and then I began to load it.

In retrospect, I might have wanted to check the discussion boards on Apple first (always a smart move when a new piece of software hits the market) because I'd have seen the numerous posts from panicked mac users pleading for help with what turned out to be a big problem for thousands of new Leopard owners.

Because there's one mighty big bug when it comes to installing this puppy.... and that's the dreaded "Blue Screen" that appears and seemingly 'breaks' one's computer, rendering it unable to do anything else ...even eject the install disc). I can guarantee you that many a mac folk was desperately calling tech support and borrowing friend's computers to log onto the apple tech support.

And I was one of them.



Above: a screen grab of the tech support forum for the new Leopard Operating system shows that over 12,000 people have read the post regarding the dreaded "Blue Screen of death" as of 8:00 am california time this morning

It's pretty funny actually... sooo many people have experienced this during their initial install that it's already been given an acronym.... the BSOD (Blue Screen Of Death) and appears on posts and discussions boards in numerous online forums.

The good news is the fix was relatively easy (if you call taking approx 6 hours to install a new OS easy).
Seems there are two ways to get past this.

One way, and the way that worked for me... was to simply re-install it as "Archive And Install" as opposed to the usual install which yeilded me the BSOD. (By the way, I did have to force eject the disc using the ol' paperclip method, insert it and start up holding down the alt key so i could choose the disc over the hard drive for my next install).

The other way is to go into UNIX through your terminal utility and remove a few files.


Now, I do not have an intel basd mac but instead have a dual 1.8 mHz G5, perhaps that's why the archive and install fix worked for me. I think the intel-based MAC users have to actually enter as single-user mode and delete some code.

If you are stuck on the blue screen and nothing seems to work (not even reboot or disc eject) do not fear, the fix is here.

That being said, there are a few other little bugs (like the inability to delete mail from an IMAP account), but other than that, it's pretty darn impressive.