Concept-driven experience design agency HUSH has hired Zoë Salditch as sr. producer.
During her years as a creative producer and digital art curator, Salditch directed efforts for Rhizome at New Museum, edited for GIPHY, collaborated with Moogfest, Tribeca Film Festival and artist Ai Weiwei and co-founded her own digital art product and platform, Electric Objects. With the latter, Salditch commissioned 200 artists, thousands of artworks, and grew a community and company.
Now at HUSH, Salditch hopes to apply the insights she’s gained from her previous work in digital curation, product development, artistic collaboration and storytelling into a position that requires constant communication and a level of humanization. “The Electric Objects experience taught me how to communicate, listen and keeping asking questions to all kinds of people with so many personalities, from so many different disciplines and people with different vocabulary. As a curator, I largely focused on humanizing digital art – very much in the same way HUSH humanizes information through design. Through the experiences we create, we ultimately tell stories about the people and businesses behind the raw information.”
According to David Schwarz, creative partner at HUSH, added, “We often articulate our work as living along a spectrum between the ‘artful’ and the ‘useful’. I think Zoë wonderfully represents our ability to deliver value in this way. She understands the power of artistry just as clearly as the importance of a robust digital platform. She’s already applying these insights in our work for Instagram and WeWork, and will be pivotal in helping to develop our own intellectual property and design products.”
Jennifer Kent On Why Her Feature Directing Debut, “The Babadook,” Continues To Haunt Us
"The Babadook," when it was released 10 years ago, didn't seem to portend a cultural sensation.
It was the first film by a little-known Australian filmmaker, Jennifer Kent. It had that strange name. On opening weekend, it played in two theaters.
But with time, the long shadows of "The Babadook" continued to envelop moviegoers. Its rerelease this weekend in theaters, a decade later, is less of a reminder of a sleeper 2014 indie hit than it is a chance to revisit a horror milestone that continues to cast a dark spell.
Not many small-budget, first-feature films can be fairly said to have shifted cinema but Kent's directorial debut may be one of them. It was at the nexus of that much-debated term "elevated horror." But regardless of that label, it helped kicked off a wave of challenging, filmmaker-driven genre movies like "It Follows," "Get Out" and "Hereditary."
Kent, 55, has watched all of this — and those many "Babadook" memes — unfold over the years with a mix of elation and confusion. Her film was inspired in part by the death of her father, and its horror elements likewise arise out of the suppression of emotions. A single mother (Essie Davis) is struggling with raising her young son (Noah Wiseman) years after the tragic death of her husband. A figure from a pop-up children's book begins to appear. As things grow more intense, his name is drawn out in three chilling syllables — "Bah-Bah-Doooook" — an incantation of unprocessed grief.
Kent recently spoke from her native Australia to reflect on the origins and continuing life of "The Babadook."
Q: Given that you didn't set out to in any way "change" horror, how have you regarded the unique afterlife of "The... Read More