Design art and new craft: Who’s zooming who?

Fresh approaches to design emerging in design art and new craft present intersections between the conventionally distinct categories of visual art, craft, and design. In spite of their stated aim to cross-over disciplines, debates within design art and new craft characterise the term integration in different ways according to the value they attribute to conceptualisation, decoration, function, and context. While advocates of specialisation criticise hybrid design because they believe it produces only an homogenising blurring of distinctive practices, what is compelling in the new discourses is that although they intersect they are dissonant and serve to highlight the gaps between visual art, craft and design. While design art acknowledges the influences of design on art of the second half of the twentieth century, and new craft links craft with design’s technology and distribution systems, both reveal the culturally sanctioned parameters of visual art and craft. Rather than blur the boundaries of the fields of visual art, craft and design practice, the concept of integration reveals a number of prevailing conventions that each field produces. By contrasting the specificities of each field integration creates new possibilities for design

The Data Imaginary: Fears and Fantasies

The Data Imaginary: Fears and Fantasies brings together eminent and emerging artists and designers to show how creative applications of data technology are crucial for a vital, inclusive and sustainable future. The exhibition includes artworks and designs that engage audiences in critical, playful and agentic reflections on data and creative technologies. Through the exhibition, workshops, podcast and publication, the audience will be empowered to respond to climate change patterns and future city design, interact with empathy from remote locations, learn about Indigenous cultural knowledges and reflect on everyday habits that secure data privacy. Dedicated url: http://thedataimaginary.com

Curating the Data Imaginary: Fears and Fantasies in the Middle of a Dataverse Takeover (Like Science Fiction but Weirder)

As we catapulted by COVID-19 to an increasingly abstract datascape, the curatorium of Katherine Moline, Angela Goddard, Blaklash (Amanda Hayman and Troy Casey) and Beck Davis developed the exhibition The Data Imaginary: Fears and Fantasies at Griffith University Art Museum, Brisbane for 2021. Our original aim—to explore data experiments in relation to climate change, data security and urban landscapes, many informed and shaped by Indigenous knowledges—had become our reality with the global pandemic. The challenge to the norms and standards of the social imaginary—how data operates and for whom it is operationalised—made by artists, designers and scientists have become a platform for survival – outside of the gallery and in our everyday worlds. The public fears and fantasises regarding data analysis throughout the pandemic now guide our curatorial framework. This chapters explore how the curators and exhibition participants have reformulated The Data Imaginary exhibition for pandemic life in a dark Eden and how we are reviewing the selection of works so that for example, Lola Greeno’s embodied knowledge of how climate change is impacting the materiality of Palawa shell stringing on the shores of the cool waters surrounding Lutruwita (Tasmania), contrasts with Silvio Carta’s dystopian vision of human value in The Machine’s Eye - How machines see our world

Authorship, Entrepreneurialism and Experimental design

This paper responds to recent calls in design literature for a return to design authorship, and the appropriation from fine art of theories of relational aesthetics (Poyner 2005, Mermoz 2006). I suggest that before looking to art as a model, it is useful to retrace various divergent moments in the authorship and entrepreneurialism debates in graphic design. This paper describes how these debates polarise the designer-as-author as antithetical to the designer-as-service-provider, and as such omit a third term, experimental design. I discuss an example of experimental design, Re-magazine by Jop van Bennekom, in terms of how such design challenges the promises of total control or autonomy that is identified by many as a key motivation in practices of graphic authorship and entrepreneurialism (Heller 1998, 2006, Lupton 2003, Margolin 2003, Tremlow 2006). I interpret issue nine of Re-magazine as an allegory that questions designs pursuit of autonomy. Rather than confuse the distinct specificities of fine art and design practices in an unexamined adoption of relational aesthetics, as Poyner and Mermoz suggest, I propose that design must first reflect on its own products and practices

Here

Solo exhibition 'Here' at Yuill Crowley Gallery, curated by Kerry Crowley

Reframe

Installation photograph of three artworks '5000 Times Again', 'Small World' and 'Round the World' in group exhibition 'Reframe', curated by Karina Clarke at Ivan Dougherty Gallery, University of New South Wales

Outside In

Exhibition at Ivan Dougherty Gallery, curated by Rilka Oakle

Deterritorialization

Solo Exhibition at Yuill Crowley Gallery, 200

Relationships

Exhibition at Cofa Space, curated by Emma Robertson