As the first hint of warm weather finally descends on Europe, the summer design programme is beginning to awaken, with Design Miami/Basel opening on June 11.
I have been asked to moderate what looks to be a fascinating conversation on June 13 on the relationship between design and choreography, with two practitioners who occupy this particular intersection in different ways.
Judith Seng is the Berlin-based designer behind the ACTING THINGS series, in which objects are produced by carefully planned bodily motions or social organisations, documenting the process of creation rather than manifesting a fixed form.
Daniel Arsham is an artist and architect living in New York City (though we share a childhood stint in Miami) who has collaborated with Merce Cunningham and Jonah Bokaer, among others, on performance and set design, often playing with social and architectural conventions to achieve new contexts for dance.
Set for Merce Cunningham EyeSpace by Daniel Arsham
Many thanks to Design Miami/Basel for inviting me—I think this will be a wonderful opportunity to discuss the way objects and users reinforce, alter, or invent new habits, motions, functions, and performances, both in daily life and in singular experiences.
I leave you with this landmark scene from Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times (1936), in which he explores the machine of the factory as an enormous apparatus of human and mechanical motion, with its complex consequences for our behaviour and self-awareness.
After reading Zvika Krieger's "Crowdsourcing an Israeli-Palestinian Border" on SAYA in The Atlantic, I was curious to speak with the architects of SAYA—Yehuda Greenfield-Gilat and Karen Lee Bar-Sinai, working with Chen Farkas—about how their work fits into a lineage of architectural practice.
Photo by Galit Aloni, care of SAYA
You can read about that conversation, as well as their broader approach to design in border regions, in Domus 970.
The inclement weather inspired some ad-hoc fashion design...
...and it was a pleasure to hear from people outside our normal sphere, like Carlo Antonelli, Mike Kruzeniski, and John Bielenberg. Special mention to Kiran Sethi for making the whole room tear up at her beautiful stories of the Riverside School.
Adhocracy from the Istanbul Design Biennial has moved to the New Museum as part of IDEAS CITY!
Many congratulations to the exhibition designers for a beautiful show. You can find copies of the catalogue we produced at the New Museum, and see the show until July 7, 2013.
