Connections

Connections: Experimental Design presents for the first time in Australia cutting-edge experimental design from Barcelona, London, Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Amsterdam. Design and art, once considered the preserve of a creative elite in centuries past, here emerges from the global economy in new forms. The exhibition includes the most recent connections forged between the previously disparate specialisations of design, engineering and art.

The technological imperative for the rapid development of laboratory ideas into commercial reality, of rapid prototyping and just-in-time delivery, has revived a critical and experimental attitude to design. As consumers we are no longer merely subject to more design and more production and consumption for its own sake. In this newly informed design context, the leading designers, engineers, and artists represented in Connections: Experimental Design imagine the future and connect design practice to pressing social and environmental issues. They create and realise in material form a range of experimental approaches to the question ‘What kind of future does current design practice create?’

The School of Design Studies at the College of Fine Arts, the centre of integrated design in Australia, presents the critical application of integrated, experimental and connected thinking to both imaginary and real world situations.

PARTICIPANTS
Cecil Balmond & ARUP Advanced Geometry Unit, London
H_edge produced by ARUPs Advanced Geometry Unit in London was first displayed at Artists Space in New York in 2006. The documentary dvd of the work shown at Ivan Dougherty Gallery explores the myth that inspired the work, the Indian Rope Trick, and its transformation through complex mathematics into a freestanding chain wire structure that is almost impossible to believe.

Jop van Bennekom, Amsterdam
Re-magazine by Jop van Bennekom began as a student project in 1997 focusing on life that the glossy magazines didn’t cover. Issues explored idle thoughts, the nature of boredom and a guide to connecting with ones past. In 2002 the magazine was reconfigured and each issue has presented a perspective of life from a single contributor. Undesigned and devoid of many decorative devices Re-magazine challenges the notion of better design through greater control.

Anthony Dunne & Fiona Raby, London
Dunne’s and Raby’s Technological Dream Series #1 presents a dvd demonstration of anxious robots. Taking seriously the prospect that in the future it is likely that robots will perform mundane tasks around the house, Dunne and Raby contemplate whether they will become neurotic, in one way or another, while acting as receptacles for their users fears and anxieties. Technological Dream Series #1provokes debate about how we would like to relate to technology other than in fantasies dominated by triumphant science fiction.

Saul Griffith, Boston & Selena Griffith, Sydney
I-cycle by Saul and Selena Griffith, is a clear polycarbonate flat pack bicycle. Giving attention to the ubiquitous bicycle by reworking its material, the way it is shipped and the integration of an iconic form (that of the Sydney Harbour Bridge) highlights the issues around sustainability, the nature of transport in cities, and the role design plays in engineering solutions.

Marti Guixe, Barcelona
Marti Guixe’s Autoband tape is simple. It is packing tape printed with a highway lane marking pattern. But its effect is delirious. It can represent with childlike mania the impact of the motor car on modern culture as one stretches it across a table a room or a gallery, for that matter as if it were the real world.

Ana Mir & Emili Padros (Emiliana), Barcelona
Hot box by Emiliana is a design that provides warmth and light for sex workers on the streets in the European winter. It is critically ironic and its message to change society’s norms is almost explicit in that it is a luminescent pedestal that literally raises the status of the sex worker above the street where they do business.

Jenny E. Sabin, Philadelphia
Jenny Sabin’s Fourrier carpet is the result of a combination of the mathematical modelling of data sets, interior architecture and textile design. Computational programmes used to manufacture carpets are inverted to illustrate their own mathematical construction in much the same way as we ‘ saw’ the film The Matrix.

Anne Wilson, Chicago
In Errant Behaviours Wilson illustrates what happens when materials go wrong. As an animated satire with pins, needles and lace, Wilson challenges ideas of design’s perfection and the contradiction implicit in the (mis)representation of culture as a perfectly woven fabric.

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