Submit Saturdays: 3Dmou.se on translating its internet-inspired aesthetic into commercial projects

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If you really dig strange 90s net art and witch house (spoiler alert! We do) then you’ll doubtless love the website of 3Dmou.se. This peculiarly named trio is in fact a London-based creative consultancy, formed of Charles Olive (Chief Spirit Officer), Tom Pounder (Head of Visual) and Romney Taylor (Captain of Industry). Along with these wacky job titles, they also make the bold claim that their ethos is based around “Science-Fiction-Fantasy-Komödie – from the genre description used in the German Wikipedia entry for the 1984 film Ghostbusters – Die Geisterjäger.”

We had a chat with Tom to try and get our heads around this zany three-headed beast.

Why the name 3Dmou.se? And the Ghostbusters thing? And the job titles?
It’s a portmanteau created using the Twitter handles of our founding fathers 3Dperson (Tom) and Grumblemouse (Charles). Tom is a real film buff who visited Berlin before the rest of the gang and found the description. It perfectly sums up the dyspraxic nature of our organisation. Our first big project, even before the website, was working on job titles. 

How did the three of you start working together? What does each do, or specialise in?
Spirit Officer is about communing with the zeit. Head of Visual interprets the signs into visual outputs. Captain Of Industry is really about championing our work and ethos in the corporate sphere. 

We met at an advertising agency – one of our first projects was hosting a two-week-long documentary film festival in Meeting Room 1. Essentially the three of us were the only people who turned up so it was fate. 

How would you sum up what 3Dmou.se is and does?
We’re at the intersection of Hadron Collider and primordial soup – one foot in the future and one in the past. We can’t tell what will happen or evolve but things do – we’re guardians of the output not necessarily the creators. 

What influences and defines the aesthetic of your work, and your site design?
In terms of influences it’s a real mix, we’re big fans of corporate aesthetics – something we discovered while working in advertising was the concept of being ‘wilfully obtuse’ – advertising often prefers to make things more complicated than they need to be – something we think about is how could this be more complicated but also simple?

I really love the Trends Occult piece, perhaps because I’m the last person who still actually listens to Salem. What do you see the role of the zeitgeist to be? Was witch house really so bad?
The zeitgeist is central to everything – she’s our mother goddess – our Gaia, our Ishtar, our Venus. I think the Trends Occult piece was an attempt to document our relationship with her. 

How do you translate your hilarious and at times quite mad aesthetic into commercial projects?
This is really where Romney comes in. As Captain Of Industry it’s really his role to monetise the output or find partners for creation – he’s currently in Mexico so we’re having a fallow week. 

What do you have planned for the year ahead?
We’ve recently hired a young hot shot web developer – he doesn’t have a name or a title yet but we’re workshopping options – he’s really going to help shape future output. We’re also delving further into our relationship with creation and the zeitgeist – we’ve been looking at how different cultures perceive the chicken and egg conundrum. We’re also experimenting with different mediums for blog posts including mugs and tote bags. 

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