News – Page 18 – Goldsmiths Design Blog

Goldsmiths Design Festival news: Fashions and Embodiment workshop, Alumni evening

Only ten days remain until the start of this year’s Goldsmiths Design Festival (15-18 September), when the department opens its doors for a series of free design events, including the 2016 Postgraduate show!

The Masters students’ final exhibition will be open on 16-18 September, after an industry and press private view which takes place on the evening of September 15th. For a peek at the graduation projects, have a look at the Festival website, where students are uploading information and images on their work, tackling a variety of topics from diagnosing eating disorders amongst Chinese youth to crowding on the Underground and cat cafes.

But the festival includes other events as well. All day on 15 September, artists Celia Pym and Emma Hoette will be facilitating a Fashions and Embodiment workshop, initiated in collaboration with the Goldsmiths Fashion Research Unit and the MA Fashion Programme, and supported by Goldsmiths Annual Fund. The workshop will explore the relationship between fashion and movement through the acts of wearing and repairing; all participants must bring with them at least one garment that requires mending.

On the evening of 16 September, the Design department and the Development and Alumni Office at Goldsmiths will host a Design alumni evening reception. The first confirmed Design alumnus to be a speaker at the event is Nicholas O’Donnell-Hoare (MA Design: Critical Practice 2010), currently Head of Design and UX at Pi ltd, and a PhD student at the University of Dundee where he is researching Disruptive technologies and Design for Sustainability. (This is a good time to re-read an old interview with Nicholas on the Design blog).

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.

Goldsmiths Design Festival returns in 2016

Last year, the Design Department at Goldsmiths opened its doors for its first ever Design Festival, a week of free events, including the 2015 MA show, as well as special guests, exhibitions, workshops and exciting performances. We’ve had drone-building, glue guns, nudity, poetry readings and many other exciting ingredients for a great festival.

We’re glad to announce that our Design festival will return in 2016 as part of the London Design Festival. Graduation projects from the MA class of 2016 will be there, as well as additional special events, amongst them a fashion workshop and an Alumni evening and reception. All events will take place in the St James Hatcham gallery in New Cross (15-18 September), with a private view opening on the evening of 15 September.

More information and highlights from the programme will be available soon. Until then, refresh your memory by revisiting last year’s highlights!

“Life in the Invisible City”: Quinn Norton talk at Goldsmiths

quinn norton

On Wednesday, 20 June, journalist Quinn Norton is visiting Goldsmiths Design to give a free and open talk titled “Life in the Invisible City”:

For the first time in our species’ short and illustrious history, our interior lives are more social than our exterior lives. We talk to more people at home, physically alone, than we could ever talk to face to face.

On this global network we swim in information, but even more these days, we swim in emotion — and we don’t have tools to cope with either. As accidents, crime, war, and danger have fallen, fear has risen beyond our ability to quantify. The body politic is showing symptoms of a contagious mental illness, and we often feel as much dragged along as pulling the train.

Soon, everyone with a computer will be able to get the same PTSD drone operators in the US military come down with.

At the same time, we’re all dealing with the issues and powers of celebrity, to greater and lesser degrees, which change day by day. We are quickly becoming super-connected super-beings. Our thoughts have powers. Our words, carefully or carelessly spoken to a network or an interpreter can, and do, change reality.

Stewart Brand said it in 1968: “We are as gods and might as well get good at it.”

Armed with only the language and artistic tools of the 20th century to do this, our generation’s great job is to teach the future how to be better gods in the invisible city we’ve built for them.

The talk begins at 5 30 pm, in room LG01 of the Professor Stuart Hall Building.