We asked the NOWNESS team to select their all time fave bits of content

I like to think of the internet as a constantly surging, changing sea. Things moving around with the tide, bobbing up, sinking down, re-emerging bloated and crying for attention. In the past few years a lot of sites have tried to keep up with the erratic ebb and flow of attention-grabbing online, posting more cats, GIFs and anything to do with Pharrell. But there is one site that has shrugged off the need to please anyone and everyone at once, a site that posts one piece of exquisite, exclusive content a day: NOWNESS.

If NOWNESS was a scarf it would be a Hermes, if it was a food-stuff it would be a long-hidden truffle. They’re game changers without ever having changed their own game, and it’s intoxicating. For our ongoing online publishing feature, we asked the team over at NOWNESS HQ to choose their favourite piece of content that sticks out to them from the past few years. Here they are…

Terence Teh, Editor

We live in a world of ferocious noodle eaters. And I don’t know anyone who wouldn’t find interesting the story of a white Jewish dude from New York emigrating to Japan to become a ramen celebrity chef within the notoriously insular noodle industry. Add his return to New York after 20 plus years in Tokyo for the launch of his first Stateside restaurant, selling delicious Jewish-comfort-food-inspired bowls of Shio Ramen—including chicken soup and rye flecked noodles—and you’ve got the story. The heart and soul of what timeless online “content” and digital publishing should be.

Claudia Donaldson, Editor in Chief

I started getting bored of beauty. Endless beauty campaigns, editorials, commercials, fake glossy hair, underwear, chocolate, deodorant, fragrance – in fact any flavour beautiful the media threw at me depressed me. Everyone in the office felt the same and so the DefineBeauty campaign was born.

I asked Saam Farahmand he wanted to make a film about the Magic Gap, the Bermuda Triangle of anatomy. He replied saying he wanted to talk about armpit hair. I sent him a photograph of Madonna taken by Lee Friedlander in the early 70s, long limbed with underarms all a-fuzz and we started talking about body hair. "Can we talk on the phone for a minute? I like phoners. Old school, like pit hair." Our conversations over the following months were funny, sincere and each a step toward the final piece. His film Les Fleurs helped bring 1 million new viewers to NOWNESS.

Tim Burrows, Copy Chief

When Morten Traavik’s video for Laibach’s Whistleblowers came in, it divided the office. Was it a pisstake? Laibach, the Slovenian industrial group known more for political provocation and the impossibly low growl of singer Milan Fras, had created a glorious pop song more catchy than K-Pez, and featuring an ear-worm of a whistled melody. The track itself is an ode to Edward Snowden et al, cyber guardians in an unseen war. Filmed at a school for young athletes in Latvia, the video is hope distilled. Wikileaks thought so too, posting it as one of their stories of the day.

Rebecca Guinness, Editor at Large

This song was part of a project put together by one of my musical heroes, Randy Poster. And what a song – Buddy Holly’s Not Fade Away done by one of the great voices of our era. Welch and her band were in New Orleans for the Voodoo Festival in late 2010 and called upon Louisiana-native CC Adcock to produce the track. What’s genius about this is that Tabitha Denholm, who directed this video and herself a good friend of Welch’s, seemed to catch the magic–and mild chaos–of the recording session: the feeling is of friends having fun jamming and at points you can spot Welch’s manager Mairead Nash and even Denholm herself getting involved in the recording process. Fun.

Raven Smith, Commissioning Director

I often do these moves when I’m drinking. Sometimes when I’m sober. I like to think of this film as the prefect storm. A tesseract of pop culture, discovery, and entertainment. A meeting of slapstick and poise. This film’s as funny as it is familiar. Explaining why something’s funny kills the joke, so just watch it…

Anne Bourgeois-Vignon, Creative Content Director

Christmas 2013. Two guys precariously balance their dinner on their knees, staring at a computer screen. They haven’t slept much in several days. Luke and Remi are the directing duo behind Tell No One, who create other-worldly films filled with witty effects that feel organic and real. They even foregoed their Christmas holidays to finish the SFX for this short film, which went on to win a couple of awards at the Berlin Fashion Film Festival.

The ambition to create NOWNESS’s first interactive shoppable film inspired a close collaboration with the pair, whose organic aesthetic and clever DIY SFX brains I admired. It was crucial to all of us that the film itself should never be overtaken by its interactive capabilities. In fact, we believed it should be immersive and captivating first, with or without the interactive elements. It’s the charm of the film itself that drives the audience to engage more deeply with its expanded technological dimension, and for that, I’m deeply grateful to Tell No One for giving up their turkey dinners.

Pietro Pravettoni, Visual Assistant

Il Capo is a film by Italian artist Yuri Ancarani that follows a quarry foreman (capocantiere in Italian) in Carrara, Tuscany as he directs the operation of extracting big chunks of raw marble.

The film is not an original commission but the excitement of publishing it on NOWNESS was more about finding and selecting an incredible, multi-award winning piece and bring it to a diverse online audience. We had to go through multiple steps to be able to show the film, starting in London where it was being shown at the Whitechapel gallery. When last-minute clearance came from Los Angeles, there was much excitement as we knew this was an opportunity to show an exceptional work.

The excerpt has since had over a million views on our YouTube channel, bringing the work of an incredibly talented artist and director such as Yuri outside the gallery space and festival circuit, to be seen and shared by many people who might have otherwise have missed it.

Behind the Screens
The “golden era” of independent publishing has seen an awful lot written about magazines; their enduring influence as well as the challenges facing the industry. Sometimes those discussions have overlooked the amazing things happening in online publishing so in November, we plan to rectify that. For the next few weeks we’ll be speaking to the people who have been beavering away at making the internet a very pleasant and addictive place to visit, finding out their secrets and asking them why they do what they do.