The festival starts tomorrow and the trailer for our audio/visual concert lounge just got finished, hurrah!
I’ll post some more complete documentation when i recovered from this. There are still a few ambient animated particle wallpaper videos waiting to be rendered …
Recently i have been sketching a typographic design with a new particle system. I have been commissioned by the 24th Kassel Documentary Film and Video Festival to create the identity for their Audiovisual Performance lounge to be held in November.
The idea is to use a generative design across different media; posters, flyers, motion graphics and an interactive wallpaper for the specific location. Black and white typographic layouts are converted into flow fields which influence the particles.
We hope this generative identity will reflect the procedural nature of many of the invited artists work. Vera will keep you posted.
These awesome tshirt designs are by Samia Malik, London. Thick neon prints on plain white, grey or light colour shirts and sweaters. Found them at lik+neon, 106 Sclater Street (E16HR), a side street of Brick Lane in the East.
The artwork and packaging for Disco Four, a collection of remixes by the Pet Shop Boys (featuring songs by The Killers, David Bowie and Yoko Ono) has been designed and art directed by Farrow, employing the photographic talents of John Ross. The album cover features a number “4″ made with four fluorescent lighting units.
Students from the Kassel School of Arts and Design have created seven unique micro-architectural concepts for this year’s Tendence Lifestyle in Frankfurt: unique spaces and environments to tear you away from the traffic of the fair. They invite without courting, they intoxicate without overexciting. They span a room in which you can spread out, stretch out your body and mind. Talking, playing, reading, making music, or just staring into the space are explicitly encouraged – whether it be by swinging inside “Hängeparty” (Michael Bohl, Marijan Severdija), by contemplatively ripping cardboard in “Raum 6” (Johann Schorr, Uwe Kramer, Timo Bäcker), being freed from your cell phone in the “Magnetfeld” (Aiko Telgen), a cozily padded rubble container installation, by listening to the sound of rain in atrium of “RegenBogen,” (Leonard Wilkop, Paul Ertel), by gazing at your personalized starry sky in “Orbiter” (Vera-Maria Glahn, Marcus Wendt), shielded under the cupola of “Umbrella Dome” (Denise Pacheco, Andreas Brethauer), or sheltered as if in snail shell in “Meerdinger” (Christof Binder, Veit Wolfer) which simultaneously offers a projection screen for images and dreams. The lounge invites its visitors to linger, relax, sleep, dream, and contemplate.
Two current chair prototypes, “Tuesday” (Jens Otten) and “Reversible Seat” (Annika Frye) will also be on display.
By entering the micro-architectures, you leave the main hall of the trade show behind. You lose yourself and dive into a world of other dimensions. Big and small blur together, the everyday disappears and meanings are relaxed but also sharpened by purposeful interventions.
This interdisciplinary group of designers, supervised by Oliver Vogt, Professor of Industrial Design, and Dipl. Des. Heike Lehrmann, consists of students of Product Design, Architecture and Visual Communication at the Kassel School of Art and Design / University of Kassel.
In June 2005, Kai Bernau, a student at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts (KABK) in The Hague, asked us (among some other designers) to participate in Neutral, a graduation project that was both a neutral typeface, and a statement about neutrality. Apart from contributing to an e-mail discussion on the subject of neutrality, he also asked the invited designers to create a poster displaying the Neutral typeface. These posters were shown during Kai’s graduating exhibition. More about this project can be seen at Letterlabor
Thinking about the idea of introducing a new sans serif typeface, we suddenly remembered a quote about Stanley Kubrick, a quote that has been posted on a lot of (typo)graphic forums. It’s a quote pulled from an article in The Guardian, describing Kubrick’s obsession with the typeface Futura: “It was Stanley’s favourite typeface. It’s sans serif. He liked Helvetica and Univers too. Clean and elegant”.
We used this quote as a starting point for our poster. Since Kubrick was supposedly so interested in sans serif type, we figured that the best context to show a new typeface would be a poster for one of Kubrick’s movies; the ultimate testing environment for a sans serif. Also, a movie poster is a very recognisable format, so we thought it would fit quite naturally in Kai’s series of posters.
While we were thinking about this plan (to design a completely typographic poster, as a sort of hybrid between a film poster and a type specimen), we suddenly had another idea. We realised that the most ‘neutral’ letter of a sans serif alphabet would be the ‘I’, as it is just a black vertical bar: it could be either a capital ‘i’ or an undercast ‘L’. In fact, it is the context (the word in which the letter is placed) that decides whether the ‘I’ is an ‘i’ or an ‘L’. At that point, we made the connection between this neutral ‘I’, and the black monolith that plays a central role in Kubrick’s ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’.
From the screenplay of ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ (1965), by Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clark:
Dr. Heywood R. Floyd:
Any clue as to what it is?
Dr. Bill Michaels:
Not really. It’s completely inert. No sound or energy sources have been detected. The surface is made of something incredibly hard and we’ve been barely able to scratch it.
Floyd: But you don’t have any idea as to what it is?
Michaels: Tomb, shrine, survey-marker, spare part… take your choice.
So that is, in short, the idea behind the poster. The neutral sans serif ‘I’, shown as black monolith, in the form of a film poster.
graphic design for the sonic acts festival in amsterdam, 2006 by coup graphic design collective
- the most beautiful printed design piece i have seen this year. unfortunately it got lost when moving back from rotterdam to kassel… =/
only about 2 months late, some documentation of our recent vj gig:
everything turned out much better than we expected thanks to Nils, his crew and their awesome location;
a big cinema with a monster of a screen that gave our visuals enough space to compete with the music. awesome party!
merci vera for putting this together! :-)
I forgot all about good ole Dextro. This was the site back in the day, no explanation, crazy work and truly inventive for its time. One of my all time favorites and I very happy to see its still going. Dig around, you will find some nice stuff!
I’m terribly busy at the moment. One of the reasons is the ‘Weltverbesserer’ book, we’re working on at the uni. (the title means roughly ‘do-gooder(s)’). Although i should be mainly concentrating on our upcoming exhibition piece, i did some graphic design during the last nights.
cover
back cover
We still need to add some final touches here and there, but basically it’s done and should be printed just in time for the exhibit.
Wie schätzt Du Deine Arbeit ein? Verhälst Du dich kritisch zum Designdiskurs oder arbeitest Du innerhalb des Designsystems?
Ich bin sehr kritisch gegenüber dem Design eingestellt, weil es sich selbst konzeptionell einschränkt. Das Design beruht zu sehr auf Formen ohne Inhalt. Wenn wir mal das Hardcore Design nehmen, da legen die Firmen zu viel Wert darauf, Produkte zu formen und zu verkaufen.
Meiner Ansicht nach ist die Welt zu komplex geworden um sich auf die Form allein verlassen zu können. Man muss mit Erinnerungen arbeiten, mit Kontexten. Die Vorstellung vom Designer als einem Formgeber oder Problemlöser ist sehr einengend und nicht mehr zeitgemäß.
Lässt sich im Design eine Veränderung beobachten in der Hinsicht, dass das Design konzeptueller wird oder sich mehr in die Richtung Kunst entwickelt?
Vielleicht, das Ganze geht aber eher in die Richtung einer für mich uninteressanten Kunstwelt. Einige Designer gestalten ästhetische Objekte, gehen damit ins Museum und signieren die Stücke als Werke und Skulpturen, andere behandeln Möbel wie Luxusartikel. Im Kunstbereich fällt mir hingegen auf, dass immer mehr Menschen an der Gesellschaft als ökonomischer Struktur arbeiten, jedoch nicht im Kontext von Konsum.
Ich als Designer oder Ex-Designer habe nach wie vor ein gutes Verhältnis zum Konsum. Allerdings möchte ich gute und intelligente Dinge konsumieren. Den Wunsch, sich außerhalb der Konsumgesellschaft zu befinden, kann ich nicht nachvollziehen. Jeder Einzelne sollte doch gegenüber dem Konsum einen Standpunkt beziehen.
Du akzeptierst also die Konsumgesellschaft, aber Du würdest sie gerne mit intelligenten und komplexen Produkten bereichern?
Heutzutage konsumieren die Menschen in hohem Maße romantische und idealistische Vorstellungen und das ist nicht mehr zeitgemäß.
Mich interessiert eine Welt in der man frei von diesem Klischees ist. Die Vorstellung von Besitz ist meiner Meinung nach überholt. Es beschwert einen, man ist nicht beweglich oder kann nicht Dinge verändern. Was den Konsum von Objekten und Produkten anbelangt, nimmt die Nahrung den wichtigsten Stellenwert ein, da man sie kontinuierlich kaufen muss.
These awesome tshirt designs are by 
