goldsmithsdesign

Goldsmiths Design lecturer Stuart Bannocks to take part in Artist Self-Publishers’ Fair

Image from Stuart’s City Strips exhibition, December 2015

On 10 September 2016, Goldsmiths Design lecturer Stuart Bannocks will be one of 70+ UK and international independent artists exhibiting their self-published work at the Artist Self Publishers Fair. The event will take place at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) in London.

ASP features artist self-publishers only, as an attempt to “avoid the restrictions and market dominance of much of contemporary arts culture.”. The fair was started in 2015 by artists Dan Mitchell and Sara MacKillop.

Stuart has been previously featured on the Design blog with his comic zine “City Strips”, which focuses on architecture from comic fiction.

Correspondence from Goldsmiths Design’s Charlie Evans, Designer in Residence in Taiwan (IV)

This summer, Charlie Evans (2014 BA Design graduate, and currently a Technical Tutor in the Department) is spending two months in Taipei, on a Designers in Residence program for the British Council in Taiwan. Charlie will send us regular correspondence with impressions from his experience; we’re publishing his fourth letter today.

I’m watching David Cronenberg’s adaptation of Crash. There are two sweet spots in the most famous exchange:

James:

What about the reshaping of the human body by modern technology? I thought that was your project.

Vaughan:

A crude Sci-Fi concept that floats on the surface and doesn’t threaten anybody. I use it to test the resilience of my potential partners in psychopathology.

This is a really useful, succinct manifesto for design: a superficial, material territory that allows us to look much deeper into things*. For me, exploring the (re)shaping of the human body is a way of accessing and challenging the more discrete political forces governing us.

I’ve been wondering how best to explain this in a reasonably clear way. A nicer example so far came from a conversation with Ivan Chenh-hou LIU of the Chinese Taipei Olympic Committee:

Taiwan is a country with an ambiguous international standing which manifests in the obscure title, Chinese Taipei. This is a point of contention for the people of Taiwan, who increasingly identify as Taiwanese. In this context, the Olympic Games becomes a political forum for cross-Strait relations and fundamentally demonstrates how the elite practices of sport render the body as a political object.

*It’s why Ballard is so important for designers. He’s all about the external/physical and internal/mental landscapes.

Read part one

Read part two

Read part three

Charlie is also keeping a visual blog on Tumblr.

Design Alumni evening at Goldsmiths Design Festival

You can now put in your calendars the first special event happening at this year’s Goldsmiths Design Festival: on Friday, 16 September, the festival will host a reception for Design alumni, in collaboration with the Development & Alumni Office at Goldsmiths.

The event opens at 6 30 pm, in the St James Hatcham church building where all festival events will happen. There will be a few short talks from Design alumni, free drinks and plenty of time for mingling and networking. Find out what Design graduates are doing now, reconnect with former classmates, or find future collaborators!

The 2016 Goldsmiths Design Festival takes place 15-18 September as part of the London Design Festival.

Correspondence from Goldsmiths Design’s Charlie Evans, Designer in Residence in Taiwan (III)

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During the interval at an outdoor dance performance by Cloud Gate, I watched thousands of people stretch at the behest of three motivational performers. It reminded me of this video I’d stumbled across earlier in the residency, a news report on Taiwan’s Bureau of Health Promotion promoting a daily exercise routine for office workers: Continue reading “Correspondence from Goldsmiths Design’s Charlie Evans, Designer in Residence in Taiwan (III)”