Interviews and features – Page 18 – Goldsmiths Design Blog

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

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

I’m working on an installation and performance for the night market in Gongguan. I’ll be using various types of tape and applying it to people’s knees, a technique that athletes use which I’ve been researching in Taipei.

Why I’ve chosen the night market: Continue reading “Correspondence from Goldsmiths Design’s Charlie Evans, Designer in Residence in Taiwan (V)”

Drifting as a community space: alumnus Tee Byford on his Channel 4 series “Driving Sideways”

Whether you take an interest in the motorsport of drifting or not, the Channel 4 series of short films “Driving Sideways” is well worth a watch. Its ostensible focus is drifting itself, a driving style in which the driver keeps the car in a state of oversteer; the real stars, though, are not cars but the humans who thrive in this fringe community.

The director and creator of the series is Goldsmiths Design alumnus and visiting tutor Tearlach (also known as Tee) Byford, who found out about drifting after a friend he’d stumbled upon by chance in a pub invited him to observe an event: “I went with my little camera, just to see if it’s interesting. And I did realise that what they were doing was far beyond just driving a car. Actually, it was a community centre, and the car was the architecture, the device that allowed those people to come together and have this sort of common sense of place and belonging.”

Continue reading “Drifting as a community space: alumnus Tee Byford on his Channel 4 series “Driving Sideways””

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.

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)”