MDY - Interactive multidimensional media
Basic information
Project Title
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Project Description
MDY is a transversal media questioning innovation and sustainability through fashion, philosophy, design, culture, art and technology.
A laboratory, a portal between paper & digital, offering an augmented and infinitely expandable experience through its bespoke AR mobile application.
MDY is the start of a new collaborative era: setting a space for experimental and creative project incubation gathering creatives and testing innovative artistic and intellectual formats
Geographical Scope
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Urban or rural issues
Physical or other transformations
EU Programme or fund
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Description of the project
Summary
We are a multi-dimensional media, a consulting and creation bureau combining strategic planning & experiences production at the service of the fashion & luxury industries.
In order to share our creative and strategic reflections, we developed an augmented reality hardcover print and digitally augmented annual magazine.
First launched in February 2021, MDY is questioning innovation and sustainability through fashion, philosophy, design, culture, art and technology.
It is a catalog of explorations, a laboratory gathering creatives around a common fertile ground, a portal between paper and digital, offering a digital experience, augmented and infinitely expandable through its bespoke Augmented Reality mobile application.
MDY I: ‘The Phantasm issue’ is a 272 pages object, featuring 45 contributors - through which we reached over 700K followers. MDY is distributed in EU/UK specialised bookshops. 750 over the 1000 copies have already been sold and we have gathered over 1K MDY application downloads as of Jan. 1st 2022.
Key objectives for sustainability
MDY is positioned as a door opened to questioning how sustainability as a transversal concept can bring a real and desirable change. Questioning the very notion of paper expiration, MDY seeks to bring interactivity and upgrading to paper through Augmented Reality technology.
MDY I investigated contemporary challenges around sustainability and better living, producing and being, for example exploring the notion of collapsology (a field of study exploring the possibilities of systemic collapses of civilisations with Innovation Catalyst & Business Designer Noémie Balmat) and how to think beyond it.
The media gathered thinkers to explore the notion of sustainability, especially through questioning the very notion of innovation and the responsibility of the innovators (with Philosopher Xavier Pavie and Creative Technologist Fabrice Starzinskas), but also the role dystopias play in culture (with Journalist Pascaline Potdevin) or how we could change the way we hyper-consume garments (with Journalist, Activist and Author Vincent Edin). It also explored local traditional craftsmanship of responsible cashmere production in Mongolia.
Key objectives for aesthetics and quality
As a project, MDY aimed at gathering creatives from various disciplines around a common fertile ground. Under the creative direction and curation of Pierre P. Marchal, artists and creators were invited to express themselves through the common theme of "Phantasm" - questioning how fantasies play a crucial role in our times.
- Fashion series: captured by Fiona Torre, Lisa Boostani, Kapturing and Axel Morin with Lauren Kennedy Malpas and Juan Camillo Rodriguez
- Art: Considering art as a transversal value, MDY diffuses it through a couple of art commissions: The cover and cover pages by the British artist Gill Button, reinterprets the tale of Icarus. Thanks to a principle of parallel exhibitions, eight contemporary artists express complementary visions to the written articles: Christina Zimpel (painting), Axel Morin (video), James Tolich, Laurent Tacco and Robin Plus (photography), Jack Rusher (3D creation), Clovis Le Feu (illustration).
- Technology: MDY I gathers reflections about our relationship to technology, its benefits, its limits and applications both in form (through our AR application) and through its content: Fabrice Starzinskas wonders about bulimic quest for technological solutions, Xavier Pavie explains his approach to responsible innovation, Fab Fungus, Entangled Others and XK Studio (three media art studios) celebrate nature through their practice of digital artistry.
Key objectives for inclusion
MDY has been positioned as an affordable and accessible media, through its selling price of EUR35,00. It is distributed worldwide (online) and in EU/UK (retail). The whole 272 pages are available in both French and English.
Its core team, composed of creatives and thinkers from varied origins and backgrounds, aggregates in(ter)dependant networks and skills. Through its content, MDY spreads messages from thinkers and creators from the creative industries, giving voices to a new kind of professionals working for more inclusivity in the industries.
- Young designers: interviews of emerging designers Kevin Germanier and Botter, stylist Jenke Ahmed Tailly and inclusive model agency The Claw, by Caroline Hamelle
- Inclusive philosophy: philosopher Emanuele Coccia was invited to write a manifesto for a radically inclusive fashion industry - Sustainable creativity: in her Edito-Collapso, Noémie Balmat wonders if changing the way creative industries work at the design level could help bring a real and hopeful change to the industries.
Results in relation to category
The project gathered 45 contributors around a common goal: the investigation and definition of a better living and understanding of our world.
It materialised interactions between people who would have not connected otherwise, in order to generate an alternative proposal of thinking and actions with a transdisciplinary approach, all working together towards creating an interactive, never-seen-before experience crafted around a physical object/artefact.
MDY team also gave a few conferences to schools (such as ESSEC, IFM,etc..) and through our social media channels (via live talks mixing different contributors and opening discussion around cross-border subjects: the digital economy and how NFTs could/should (or could not) help artists gain more revenues, or how fashion could be a trigger for positive changes within society. MDY benefitted of a national and international press coverage (Madame Figaro, Les Inrocks, Le Temps - Swiss) presenting this new intellectual and cross platform initiative as “necessary to preserve intellectual reflections in creative business” and “ a reunion of catalysed energy to accompany and propose essential changes in our society.”, deciphering key concepts of the book.
On instagram some influential personalities such as Peggy Frey, Sophie Fontanel and Tiffany Godoy spontaneously adviced their community to focus, read and interact with this first issue of Month Day Year.
How Citizens benefit
The present and future readers of the media are and will be included in the process through intellectual and aesthetic awakening, and challenged with high quality educational contents.
As part of of the second issue (to be produced and launched 2nd semester of 2022), we seek to bring our project to another level by creating a physically and virtually augmented program of physical event during the 8 months following its release: the FASHION & SUSTAINABILITY MDY FESTIVAL.
This programmation will echoe parisian cultural and social schedules (Art fairs, Fashion Week, Design Week, Olympic Games and sports events, EU political and diplomatic sommets, etc…).
MDY will be upgraded into a genuinely multidimensional project, becoming a printed and virtually augmented catalog of a Festival’s curation for 8 months, composed of 20+ events, exhibitions and conferences; categorised (as editorial content) under United Nations’ Global Goals for Sustainable Development.
Physical or other transformations
Innovative character
Within the field of mainstream media, unfortunately we have observed that available technologies are often not used up to their potential: interactions are poor and design lacks vision in terms of sustainability (most of the time when AR technology is being used, it has not been designed to be sustainable and thus uses more resources than necessary).
We also acknowledged that publishers and their advertisers often lack transparency about how media usually get funding and how bigger advertisers get more coverage.
Thus, we have integrally self-funded our project, through the earnings of our consulting activity. Which gave us full freedom to say what we have to say without being censored by advertisers.
As a creative laboratory, we take to enquire and carefully commission subjects to propose intellectual & artistic explorations with a positive impact.
These past and present times have inevitably pushed us, designers, web/app developers, authors, stylists, creative technologists, photographers, painters, strategic planners and all intellectuals working in Fashion, Technology, Art and Luxury to acknowledge the impact of those industries in our lives, our environment and our future.
It is now crucial to mobilize, to generate a movement carrying propositions without forgetting creation’s most important role in society: it unites people.
Learning transferred to other parties
One of the potentials of transferring the project is to allow a bridge between pluridisciplinary and multidimensional in(ter)dependent thinkers and creatives. Through our project, we seeked to open a safe space for creative and reflective explorations, giving voice to humans who inspire and help us promote the right of speech and our common duty of tolerance.
Through this pluridisciplinary approach, the educational purpose of the project ambitions to extend and link to more people, all generations combined.
This is not a mainstream fashion magazine, this is an active laboratory, a combination of thoughts, a desire for change.
The mindset of MDY is a tangible proposition. Dystopian future is a part of the present and we don't need to be afraid of what may happen because it is already happening.
While applying our Memoire duty, studying past and present potentiality, MDY considers that we need to take action now and for that purpose we need to dig, learn, teach/give access to knowledge and most importantly to bond. Only then will we reach the dream of Solidarity.
‘Phantasm’ is the first issue of a long MDY series of publications, yet to become a Creation & Sustainability Festival.
South African Activist Lee-Ann Neidoo says that activists are “time travelers: full of pain at having been forcibly thrust into the present, after a premonition that the future would be different.” She introduces the concept of “Historical Dissonance. To force an awareness of time, when things are not this way.”
