For an exhibition at the Caricatura Gallery in Kassel (January-March 2008), we created a series of playful and colourful miniature interactives:
loophole | funfaircapsule | the rush | jack in the box
Instead of developing capacious installations for months, we thought it must be nice to make up interactive artworks that fit in a casket. They are based on a simple punchline or a very accessible notion, imagery or format.
Caricatura is a Gallery for Comical Art, most often showcasing the work of illustrators, satirical drawings, animation and comic strips. On their invitation, the class of New Media Design at the Kassel School of Arts and Design presented a range of interactive and electronic artworks. Contributions comment on our everyday use of technology, reverse habitual expectations towards electronic devices and make computer dreams come true.
Find out more about the other participants at jahrmarktskunst.de (sorry, german only).
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.
