The New Cool
Respect - Ambition - Success
11 June - 3 September 2006
How do you go from printing t-shirts for your mates, to negotiating an international distribution network?
From skateboarding to school, to producing a top-selling skate magazine?
From after dark street-art, to large-scale corporate commissions?
Or from wagging school to play spacies, to designing a prototype for Playstation?!
What does it take to transform your creative passions into business dollars?
Aotearoa's new generation of street-smart entrepreneurs are the undisputed New Cool in business. They're young, hip, totally ambitious and have leapt into the business world from our ski fields, skate parks, clubs, spacie parlours, uni's, art schools and backstreets.
Puke Ariki is proud to present The New Cool, an interactive multi-media exhibition celebrating young creative business in New Zealand.
The New Cool showcases the inspirational stories of 12 young entrepreneurial New Zealand companies including: Dawn Raid Entertainment; Disruptiv; First Floor Publishing; Huffer Clothing; Illicit Clothing; Inject Design; Insidious Fix; LOOP Aot(ear)oa Recordings; Metia Interactive; Misery; Sidhe Interactive and Sticky Pictures.
These business stories are all about big ideas and very small beginnings. They've experienced the hard years, the timely successes and the challenge of combining creativity with commerce. The New Cool believe in 'co-opitition' (supporting the creative youth culture they have grown from and continue to serve), the value of the 'bro-job' (working barter-like with and for your mates!), and are driven by the simple satisfaction of waking up each day and loving what they do.
Visitors to the exhibition will be able to play a demo version of Sidhe Interactive's Playstation games, listen to LOOP's NZ music CDs, watch footage from Sticky Pictures TV series, and have a go at designing their own t-shirt just as Dawn Raid started out!
Throughout the exhibition PC stations have been set up so that visitors can access The New Cool Website and information on how to take their own creative ideas and begin transforming them into business enterprises.
"The New Cool is an example of the important role Puke Ariki plays in bringing to Taranaki the inspirational stories of creative New Zealanders. It's also an indication of the wide-ranging partnerships Puke Ariki has developed with other institutions like The Dowse in Lower Hutt who produced this exhibition," says manager of Puke Ariki, Bill Macnaught.
"We know that we will reach a new audience and it may encourage young people to be bold about their own business ideas."
"The project has been supported by a major grant from New Zealand Trade and Enterprise under their Enterprise Skills and Culture Activities Fund and is partnered with Westpac and a range of other companies to present this exhibition, which is more 21st century fun fair than a traditional museum experience. We hope that visitors will engage with, and be inspired by, the young companies profiled".
An extensive events series will also run alongside the exhibition giving visitors the opportunity to learn more about how to step in a New And Cool direction with a positive entrepreneurial attitude!