It’s so easy for us to live in a paperless world nowadays; there’s a device for every kind of papery function you might need—your calendar, books, magazines, mail and bills have been floating about cyberspace, rather than your desk, for a while now. Heck, even some restaurants have started to bring their menus out on iPads. Talented graphic designer/paper engineer Benja Harney, a Sydney local, thrives on a medium that increasingly is being left behind: that rich smelling, smooth, scrunch-worthy thing called paper.

Made as part of the inspiring Slashies series where creatives expose their two sides and explore their passions outside of their 9-5 grind, Harney’s story is extremely impressionable as he talks us through his passion for paper. For six years Harney spent his weekdays designing layouts for The Sunday Telegraph and spent every spare moment on his fragile endeavours with his freelance work at self-started company Paperform. Since then he’s done some incredible work, all with folding, cutting and gluing coloured sheets together: Kylie Minogue’s exclusive pop-up book is staggering; he’s created magazine covers, fantastic shop window displays and all manner of sculptures made entirely from paper, something Harney believes we’ve come to see as “forgotten”. Now Harney has thrown in the towel at his desk job and is working at Paperform full time, ready to create fine and flimsy “worlds that fold away.”

In one of the strangest pairings we’ve seen in a long time, skateboard icon Tony Hawk interviews polarizing figure and Odd Future frontman Tyler, The Creator. The match is a little less nonsensical, however, when you remember that the Los Angeles-based alt hip hop crew are heavily influenced by skate culture. To celebrate the Big Day Out Festival‘s arrival in Sydney, an OFWGKTA pop-up store was open and drew mile-long crowds, though Tyler still wasn’t cocky about its success.

Look, if we don’t make good money by Sunday, we are gonna close this shit. If it’s good we’re gonna let it go until we start seeing we don’t get broke.

The Creator, who was recently arrested for skating past a police officer, has launched an Odd Future clothing line and he shares with Tony what inspires him most to make his T-Shirts; mainly meth and his love for cats. Obviously, skateboarding is a big part of their conversation and Tyler has a lot to say about it.

I did music and then I got into skateboarding because my friends did it. This was around ‘Tony Hawk Pro Skater 4′ around 2002. As corny as that sounds, that’s my shit. All my friends skated.

Aside from amphetamines and felines, the OFWGKTA crew gets a lot of inspiration from skateboarding for their music videos, no wonder Tyler mentions he receives fan videos everyday showing their skateboarding skills.

They don’t even ask! They just do it, and I be stoked as fuck! …That’s all I grew up around.

There is no shortage of dirge-like films on the ‘dying arts’. They are always visually stunning films but their tone is solemn and leaves you with a feeling that we are losing touch with a bit of our souls. Upside Down, Left To Right is a ‘dying art film’ with a difference.

Directed by Southern Devon indie filmmaker extraordinaire Danny Cooke, this film looks at the 500 year old typography technology of letterpress. The beauty of this film is that rather than playing the funeral march of another traditional way of doing things, it is a celebration of the resurgence of letterpress in universities across Europe. Leading the way is Paul Collier of Plymouth University; this film intersperses shots of Collier in the letterpress workshop with archival footage of the stunning machines at work in a ‘how-to’ video.

The intricacy and attention required by the letterpress technique is captured beautifully in a series of close ups and a stunning montage of the paints and the lettered type. Collier explains the benefits of the mechanical letterpress method over modern computerized and digital printing techniques, and it is fantastic to see how a printing method can take on new possibilities by moving it into the realms of art.

The end titles are produced entirely through letterpress and you can’t help but turn upside to try and read them before they’re printed right way up.

Jack Sim is the more socially acceptable name of the man who also goes by Mr. Toilet. You might not have heard of him before, but after this, you will not forget who he is and what he wants to achieve. His goal is to use shit as fertilizer instead of letting it kill millions of people a year. Or as Jack likes to say:

Shit is like fire, if you managed it properly, the fire can cook your meals. If you don’t manage it, it burns down your house. If you manage shit, it becomes a fertilizer, if you don’t manage it, it kills you.

The situation is as follows: the world suffers from a toilet shortage, 40% of the population don’t have access to toilets and in may countries, people defecate outside. And surprisingly to a lot of us, this is not because of having no other choice, but because for most of them it’s more convenient. India is one of the most extreme examples of this, where 90% of surface water is contaminated by feces, toilets are used as storage and only 47% are actually being used as toilets. Mr. Toilet wants to do something about this, so he has created the World Toilet Organization as a platform to raise awareness of how serious health problems are and how worst it can get, working from the motto:

When we are children, our parents tell us not to talk about shit.This is a really serious problem, what you don’t talk about, you cannot improve

Sim wants to open a dialogue on this serious taboo on sanitation and this video is a first good step to make things a little bit better.

Yoshi Masuda is a coffee-addicted older man on a mission to re-invigorate his fellow Japanese countryfolk. That’s right, you heard us, he’s put the record player on and pressed motivate, sorted through his grinder collection, packed up his trusty orange VW wagon, turned on the ignition, sticky taped a handy little shop sign on his windscreen, and driven into a broken road worthy trip around earthquake and tsunami-ravaged Japan.

Before we begin, Yoshi has a question; he wants to know what’s important to you when your heart has been broken into pieces. According to this hand-grinder maestro, the thing that you could do to help yourself, others, and your country can be discovered within your passions. In Yoshi’s case, this is making coffee. Like rebuilding your soul after a heartbreak, or a tsunami-like disaster, making coffee is a process in which you learn how to be humble.

Directed, shot, and edited by Japan-based filmmaker Mackenzie Sheppard, the documentary follows Yoshi’s travelling Hope Cafe around disaster-ravaged Japan, looking to give out coffee starter kits to people who would like to start their own hand made coffee shops. With each stop, Yoshi brings out his old records, sets up his wares, and proceeds to try to re-inspire a country with his particular blend of enthusiasm. If there is one things that Yoshi wants you to know, it’s that a human voice is stronger than a tsunami and with this, thanks to his love of a good drink, he plans to change the way people think and how they live. And as for you, by the end of this documentary you’ll no doubt be wanting to taste  a cup of Yoshi’s hand processed enthusiasm kick-starting coffee yourself.

Groans are a common reaction to the phrase ‘work conference’. Such groans are generally cultivated after multiple exposures to dull lectures, bad food and worse coffee all in the name of personal and professional growth. Luckily for you, there is Tina Roth Eisenberg, creative type extraordinaire who decided that enough was enough.

Directed by Ron Dawson, this video introduces you to Creative Mornings, a monthly breakfast lecture series featuring relevant and dynamic speakers—and free coffee. Roth Eisenberg started holding lectures in New York after bad experiences with boring, elitist conferences. She wanted a series of lectures that was interesting and that had the ability to get creative people out of their caves and into the real world where they could interact.

So what happens post-fantastic lecture and post-ridiculously good free coffee? The idea spreads. Creative Mornings now has 18 chapters across 8 countries, and are launching three more chapters soon in Paris, Cape Town and Utrecht.

This clip was primarily shot during an Atlanta lecture, with additional footage contributed by other chapters. It is clean and inspiring in a way that work conferences have never been before. Roth Eisenberg has managed to morph online networks into real world relationships, and should be lauded for bringing creative types together.

After he fled the Castro regime in his native Cuba and settled in the United States, Neche Eugenio Hadad began filling his life with everyday objects—from typewriters and tape recorders to documents and toys—that, unbeknownst to him, would live on forever in the work of his granddaughter.

Veronica Corzo-Duchardt is an artist, designer and teacher who owns and operates the creative studio Winterbureau in Chicago. Veronica’s new series, aptly titled The Neche Collection, is comprised of prints documenting the objects her grandfather (“the family archivist”) left behind when he passed away, objects Veronica says “really spoke to [her]” for both the memories attached to them and their unique design sensibilities.

Middle Mind Project, an independent film channel from Chicago have, in turn, documented Veronica’s process of immortalizing her grandfather’s possessions in a stunning new film featuring music from Phoenix and New York band A Cloud Mireya.

Prints from The Neche Collection are available for purchase here.

This week’s feature video from our friends at StyleLikeU introduces us to Sarah Kuhn, whose gypsy-esque life has seen her live in myriad places, including Nashville, Jerusalem and London before settling in New York. Her childhood homes are as diverse as her talents; she’s gone from playing in a band to working at W magazine and Teen Vogue, to launching an incredibly successful line of boutique camera straps (which you can purchase here). StyleLikeU’s Lily Mandelbaum tells us more about her impressions of Sarah:

Everyone who works at StyleLikeU is always on the lookout for new people to “scout” for a closet feature. Sometimes we’ll meet people at events and sometimes they will turn our head as they exit the L train and we will chase them up the stairs. Even in a city as big as New York, there is occasionally overlap, where one person is scouted more than once. We must have scouted Sarah ten times. We took this as a sign of fate that we HAD to shoot her. When we were finally able to interview Sarah, our hunch was proven right. She not only has flawless taste but is also extremely dynamic and multi-faceted in her background (having grown up in Nashville, Jerusalem and Cincinnati) and passions (she is in a band and recently left her beloved job at Teen Vogue to launch her own line of camera straps).

A serene home, beautiful children, and a source for awesome beats seems to be all one needs to happily live in the Vermont suburbs. Matthew Day has created and directed a web series through Naked Musicians titled A Day With and this episode features Nick Zammuto of The Books. We get a glimpse into his rural life, which seems pretty perfect and laid-back.

Apart from showing his home life, Day makes sure we also see some of the music-making skills Zammuto has used in both his solo and band career. He shows us how he manipulates an old record to make a beat-continuous track, to which he then adds a pipe (different sizes, widths give different sounds) and complexifies the sound. His DIY approach seems so simple and plausible, it’s kind of inspiring.

Naked Musicians’ A Day With series also has episodes featuring Marco Benevento and  Clark Derbes. With Day’s simple and intimate approach to highlighting a moment in these subjects’ lives, we feel like we’ve been personally invited to their homes and witness their musical processes firsthand.

Damien Hirst: On the Spotfrom Matt Black on Nowness.com.

Most commonly known as “that rich guy who put a shark in formaldehyde and called it art”, British artist Damien Hirst can easily get passed off as a wealthy smart ass; a novelty. He’s a prolific walking controversy, he has a factory to make his artworks for him, he wears rings on every finger—there’s a lot of ammo against Hirst as an artist. But if you can see past his slurs and his status as a sell out, this interview with Nowness surprisingly sheds some positive, intimate light on the man we love to hate.  Getting up close and personal (literally—from this angle we know for sure that those heavy, jeweled rings are probably worth more than my house) with Hirst about his spot series, he becomes more human and passionate about art than you might imagine.

He’s logical and passionate as he dissects his Spot series, in which huge canvases sprawl dots of the exact same size, with not a single colour repeated. They’re rational and expressive works that can mesmerize you unexpectedly—your eyes blur and suddenly negative space becomes just as playful as its surrounding colour; the spots encroach and, dizzingly, seem to follow you.

With a self confessed “Willy Wonka” gimmick—the first person to see all 11 spot series exhibitions around the world will receive a personalised Spot painting by Damien Hirst to keep—you’ll have to be more of a Veruca Salt than a poor Charlie Bucket to snag first place.