| interdisciplinary art & design
I recently started writing some bits for the Arts section of the San Diego Union Tribune.
With two “craftsman” related projects passing my way in the past two weeks, I decided these modern craftsmen were not to be ignored. Who is the face of this emerging modern-day craftsman? Two beautifully shot projects aim to define it. Read more about it in the post: The Modern Craftsman: A Hero With A Thousand Faces.
It’s an honor to be part of this show, featuring this much admired cross-discipline group of creatives. Hope to see you there!
A great TED talk about the new trends in sharing and how the internet is shaping this movement. “Sharing is to ownership what the i-pod is to the 8-track, what solar power is to the coal mine.”
Above: knitted lighting pieces by Kwangho Lee (past works)
We at Set & Drift will be showing the work of Kwangho Lee at Current at The Bakery (San Diego) September 1-5th. Just in from Seoul, Lee’s Black Whale is a 7 foot long sculptural lighting piece, knitted with power cords as his unconventional medium. We can’t wait to unveil it, and hope you’ll toast with us at one of our opening events — the evening of September 1 or 4th! See RSVP and event details here.
Kwangho draws inspiration from materials and memories from a childhood spent on his grandparents’ farm in rural Korea. In his work, he seeks to transform the ordinary into something beautiful. His knitted lighting installations are just that — enchanting and eerie at the same time. His studio in Seoul is littered with piles of rubber cords and tables he’s invented to knit on a massive scale. It’s our honor to bring Kwangho’s work to San Diego for this exhibition.
We hope you’ll come visit us at Current to celebrate this talented young artist’s West Coast debut!
In “Winter Stories”, Paolo Ventura creates an imaginative series of photographs depicting nostalgic scenes that arise from the mind of an old circus performer as he looks back on his life. Rather than dramatic events, the invented character recalls images of an everyday life, though they feature the bizarre and fantastical: tightrope walkers, sword swallowers, stilt walkers, and fire eaters. Using his own childhood memories of Italy, miniature figures, and sets of flea market props photographed to appear life-size, Paolo built a haunting, deceptive, and beautiful world with his own hands.
Limited to just 2000 copies, the book is now available at Amazon.
“Architecture is the will of an epoch translated into space.” – Mies van der Rohe
Born out of our increasing reliance on cars, the design of parking garages dominates the last century. Simon Henley’s book “The Architecture of Parking” argues there’s something unexpected to be found within these overlooked structures, cataloging the most striking and iconic examples via 568 images.
It’s an interesting look, especially considering that the story of these structures is just beginning. As transportation evolves, a new life will inevitably need to be re-imagined for these massive buildings, leaving us with quite a bizarre opportunity on our hands.
More images at Cool Hunting
“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”
-R. Buckminster Fuller
The Washington Post review calls British graffiti artist Banksy’s latest film, Exit Through the Gift Shop, “a celebration of pranksterism and perhaps a superb prank in its own right.” Indeed, Banksy initiates an unexpected and entertaining dialogue through the supposed “documentary”. It’s a twisted art project in itself.
Why do we love pranks? They remind us that we all have the power to challenge the norm — to create our own opportunities and to participate in slightly altered realities.
Creative “pranks” arrive unexpectedly; they’re manifestations of those who’ve strayed and created their own path, and they enrapture. Many will follow them and in the end, some will end up leading. The potential is a world that’s left a little more complex and a little more beautiful.
via The Living City, by Jonah Lehrer (full article at SEED Magazine)
A group of scientists and economists got together for an unexpected experiment: to study how cities might work like organisms. Indeed, through all their math and measurements, they found cities act just like creatures.
Cities apparently act decidedly like elephants, because “they get more economical with size.” (They explain that a large animal, like an elephant, consumes much less energy per pound than an animal with smaller mass, like a mouse.) And indeed, a city can double its population without needing to double its consumption of resources (like electricity, for instance). Basically “you need a little bit less of everything per person.”
What this means, according to these physicists, is that what we’ve been traditionally believing is completely backwards. Cities (dirt, pigeons and all) actually hold the key to a more sustainable society. What we need is bigger cities.
And this leads to bursts of creativity and productivity… As cities get bigger, they’ve found that each individual actually gets more productive. Twice the population led to more than twice the creative and economic output. (“A bigger population” they say, “means more economic activity for each person, which encourages more people to move to the city, which results in more economic activity, and so on.”)
Then comes a bit of a hitch…in the words of Bob Dylan: “He not busy being born is busy dying.” At some point, all this continuous growth hits a limit, where the city runs out of resources. The solution to avoid running out of resources? Change something, innovate. And as it turns out, the bigger a city gets, the quicker it has to innovate in order to continue its patterns of growth. In other words, “a city that isn’t innovating is on the verge of collapse.” So, they remind that cities must always support the institutions that end up cultivating innovation.
In a nice twist of fate, big, crowded cities make that innovation possible. They explain that because of their density, “cities concentrate our social interactions.” (In fact, only ants live closer together.) The article brings up Jane Jacobs, who documented in The Death and Life of Great American Cities that “every healthy city was defined by its ability to facilitate social interaction.” She sees the potential in things like short city blocks and mixed-use neighborhoods to encourage “the intricate mingling of diversity.” When strangers were forced to communicate, Jacobs wrote, the city developed the “innate ability… to invent what is required to combat its difficulties.”
The scientists give us a glimpse of what a sustainable future might look like. Today’s opportunity lies in creating and designing for this human interaction — determining ways to cultivate innovation and live our way into this vision.
photo credit: tread
The Farm Proper is a mobile, urban farm under development in the lot behind The Bakery, in the Barrio Logan neighborhood of San Diego. We at Set & Drift developed The Farm Proper as an experiment in the urban landscape — where design meets the food system. It was created by a collaborative of artists, designers, and backyard growers as an installation to inspire pocket farms and creative takeover of unused urban spaces. We gathered abandoned shopping carts, burlap coffee sacks, and a generous donation of composted soil from Suzie’s Farm and started planting.
The Farm Proper featured on designboom (Milan, Italy): here !
Some of our inspirations:
The project considers the idea of designers as the new farmers. Perhaps now’s the time for designers to claim a stake in imagining engaging ways to recreate our food system. We’re putting this experiment out there as a prototype, for “there is no such thing as a failed experiment, only experiments with unexpected outcomes.” -R. Buckminster Fuller
Join us at The Farm Proper for this season’s seminars and cookouts!