AV Club
A 17-day festival at MOCA's Geffen Contemporary, curated by Mike D of the Beastie Boys for Mercedes-Benz.
Summary
Overview
AV Club was a 17-day art and music festival at MOCA's Geffen Contemporary in Los Angeles. Mike D of the Beastie Boys curated it. Mercedes-Benz sponsored it. The event mixed gallery shows, concerts, and installs from more than a dozen artists. The brand had to work across many different formats, from concert posters to gallery wall text.
Challenge
Exhibitions, concerts, DJ nights, food, and installations all lived under one brand for 17 days. The identity had to hold up across digital, print, a vehicle wrap, signage, and stage backdrops. All of it was produced on a festival timeline.
Process
A core logo and a full brand style guide built to flex across formats.
Posters, banners, and web ads that all read as the same event.
Entrance signage, murals, stage backdrops, lighting, and a wrapped Mercedes van.
Art direction carried into the concerts, food stalls, and gallery shows.
The Festival Mark
Mike D invited a group of artists and musicians to build the festival with him. Benjamin Jones, Mike Mills, Tom Sachs, Lauren Mackler, Sage Vaughn, Peter Coffin, Roy Choi and Will Fowler were among them.
The identity had to sit inside that company, not above it. The mark is two triangles meeting at a point, nearer a signal diagram than a logo. Mercedes-Benz Transmission LA sits over it and The Audio-Visual Club under it, so the sponsor and the festival share one lockup rather than compete for the top of every piece.
One Mark, Every Surface
Digital and print went out together for the launch, and the system stretched further than a launch usually asks. The furthest it went was a Mercedes van.
The Backdrop and the Opening Wall
The backdrop takes the perforation of a speaker grille and blows it up to a burst, with the lockup sitting in the clear middle of it. The opening wall tiles the mark itself until the geometry becomes a pattern and the pattern becomes a room.
Both are the same two triangles at a size the first drawing never planned for. That is the test a mark built from geometry passes and a drawn one does not.
The Invitation
The invitation puts the mark across the eyes of a molded red head. It is the one piece where the lockup stops being a lockup and becomes a mask, which is the register the whole festival was pitched in.
The Equipment Wall
The largest piece was a wall of audio visual equipment drawn in outline. Every unit is wired to the next with cable runs and set beside its serial number, packed edge to edge for the length of the Geffen Contemporary.
It is a festival about sound and image drawn as the machines that make both, at the scale of a building instead of a poster.
The Wall, Quarter by Quarter
Up close it stops being a texture and becomes a drawing. Cameras, speakers, microphones, a cassette, an arcade panel, a Super 8 body carrying the Transmission LA lockup where a maker's badge would be. Mike D signed the wall off on the full black and white view.
The Pieces In Place
The pieces were made for a building full of people, and that is where they ended up. A Mercedes star hung in steel over the entrance. The backdrop behind a live stage at night. The artists who built it, lined up outside on the painted deck.
