In Tokyo for EPIC – Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference. 6th edition. [Link] Kenya Hara, Art Director of Muji, has opened the conference with a beautiful meditation on emptiness – “ku”. For me, Kenya was talking about human being and how it implicates the world of things. This Henckels knife fits the hand of the…
archaeological sensibility
Ghost signs: BBC Viewfinder
The BBC is covering Tom Bland’s photography in the archaeological imagination – Ghost signs. “I was seeing layers of typography, paint, colour – and combined with the texture of the crumbling and flaking materials, many of them were appealing to me as contemporary pieces of design in the vein of work by Ray Gun magazine.”…
Steampunk at Oxford
What if the Victorians (with their steam engine industrial aesthetic) had had access to digital technologies? What if a Victorian design sensibility had not been eclipsed by modernism and its minimalist aesthetic? What if technologies such as dirigibles, analog computers, or digital mechanical computers (such as Charles Babbage’s Analytical engine) were still with us? Steam-powered…
design and collection
This post is in a series of commentaries on a class running at Stanford, Winter Quarter 2010 – “Transformative Design” ENGR 231 – [Link] I mentioned in a recent post about design and the everyday the little photobook “thoughtless acts” by Jane Fulton Suri and IDEO – [Link] It is a collection of observations, documented…
Behind the Locked Door
An archaeology of the store rooms of the Cantor Arts Center, Stanford Don’t you often wonder about what museums keep in their store rooms, but rarely manage to display? The hidden, perhaps forgotten, treasures of “The Archive” Last year, between March 2007 and April 2008, in a small gallery off the main stair well in…
Joseph Beuys and the archaeological
Tate Modern London. I am still reading today’s Arts section of the Guardian – this time Adrian Searle’s preview of the Tate Modern’s new exhibition of Joseph Beuys [Link] Beuys wasn’t being mischievous or disingenuous when he said there was nothing to understand (in his work). He may have been wrong to believe everyone could…
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