The first event FIT atten­ded dur­ing Lon­don Digital Week was “A Talk With Tomato” held at JWT on 22nd Septem­ber 2009. Tomato is a highly respec­ted cre­at­ive art and design col­lect­ive co-founded by Rick Smith and Karl Hyde of Underworld.

First we got ourselves some com­fort­able seats and com­ple­ment­ary drinks cour­tesy of JWT (of course). We then had a talk from two Tomato col­lect­ive mem­bers, Simon Taylor and Dylan Kendle, who have been involved in Tomato’s digital pro­jects. Sadly though there was expec­ted to be three mem­bers of Tomato present­ing, but one had a road acci­dent and couldn’t make it.
Kana: I was sur­prised that they star­ted the present­a­tion with a pro­ject based in Japan, I didn’t expect it.

Nick: I remem­ber you men­tion­ing Tomato sev­eral years go, but I can’t remem­ber in what respect …

Kana: When I first heard about them, I had the impres­sion of them being a video mak­ing col­lect­ive for Under­world. I didn’t actu­ally know that Tomato oper­ated on cre­at­ive pro­jects inde­pend­ently from Under­world in Japan.

Nick: The first present­a­tion was about “Art Jam Japan”, which was held in Novem­ber 2007. The basic concept was a live paint­ing ses­sion on the walls of the Mak­uhari Messe. This was quite an old pro­ject, but set the tone for rest of the present­a­tion, which was based around organ­ic­ally inspired digital work.

Kana: Then they presen­ted “Word Col­lider” for Nokia, “Nos­tal­gia” multi-screen film install­a­tion for the Ta Mat­ete Gal­lery in Rome, “Voices: Expo 2004″ in Spain, “Water for Life” for the inter­na­tional Expo in Zar­agoza, Spain, re-branding for “TV Asahi”, “Un Movil En Le Pat­era” in Spain, “Hotel Claska foyer” in Tokyo, “Aspesi Flag­ship store” in Milan, “You Me Who” in Japan, “Nou­velle Vague” third album design and “Gang­ster No.1″ open­ing title sequence.

Nick: I was inter­ested in the TV Asahi re-brand, as it seems unusual for an art col­lect­ive to do brand­ing.  I had never heard of it before. Had you?

Kana: Well I think I’ve seen the logo, but not the mov­ing one.

Nick: Whilst work­ing on the pro­ject, Tomato had to cre­ate around 20 dif­fer­ent ver­sions of the inter­act­ive logo of which only one was selec­ted. They said this was unusual as at the time, because they had lots of cre­at­ive free­dom and less rules, mainly due to less com­pet­i­tion. Dylan men­tioned that the logo was still going strong and had been recently been re-printed on the side of a heli­copter and cof­fee mugs. So I decided to check up myself online.

It’s impress­ive that the logo is still in use today, and is still evolving. The ori­ginal logo was designed from a gen­er­at­ive audio driven anim­a­tion, yet here it appears static. I think often mov­ing logos lose rel­ev­ance when they become static, the static logo works today but appears a little abstract, which is per­haps has been key to it’s longev­ity, yet the reason why it’s now sup­ple­men­ted by a little green monster.

Kana: The main theme of the present­a­tion was “Gen­er­at­ive”, wasn’t it? Each present­a­tion was related to move­ments and had organic ele­ments in it. The TV Asahi re-brand was no excep­tion. It is impress­ive the logo still keeps going as I think they said the re-brand was in 2003. They also said it was “live brand­ing”, never to be seen as a same logo, mean­ing it’s unique each time. I think their work has an asso­ci­ation with “lan­guage” in terms of com­mu­nic­a­tion and inter­ac­tion, it’s very organic.

Nick: This is why I think the present­a­tion was inspir­a­tional for me. It’s nice to see some­thing that’s digital yet organic, which seems to be com­ing very much in vogue today. Most of the pro­jects talked about used ana­logue ele­ments and it gave me a desire to use less digital quick fixes.