Anti Design Festival 2010

Now I'm probably a bit behind the times but I didn't know that there was a rival to the London Design Festival and I certainly wasn't aware that there was so much dissatisfaction with it!

The following information has been taken from the Anti Design Festival site:

Created initially as a direct response to the pretty commerciality of the London Design Festival, the festival will shift the focus from bums-on-seats to brain food, and from taste and style to experiment and risk. The festival will provide a rare space for unhindered exploration and creative opportunity, where ideas may fail as equally as succeed. At multiple venues around Redchurch Street in London’s Shoreditch area, the festival will incorporate exhibitions, installations, workshops, performances and talks in Art, Design, Product, Film, Sound, Fashion, Performance, Print and Interactive.

Events and exhibitions will be curated by the likes of Daniel Charny, Terry Jones, James Payne, Harry Malt, Stuart Semple and Neville Brody. To date, contributors include Stefan Sagmeister, Jonathan Barnbrook, Yugo Nakamura, Yomi Ayeni, and Mark Moore.

The main venue is the Londonewcastle Project Space at 28 Redchurch Street. The Royal College of Art will host a one-day intervention, as will the London College of Communication. British illustration collective Le Gun will be part of a collective show curated by Bare Bones’ Harry Malt, and at the Aubin Gallery, Stuart Semple will host the first UK show by the radical French illustration group Bazooka. The Anti Design Festival has some pretty fancy sponsors and is being supported by Taschen, Londonewcastle and Arts Council England, with additional support and contributions from USE Architects and Epson.

...anyway, the reason that I got to hear about it is that the publication produced for Goldsmith Art Writing that I was involved with (with Ken Kirton and Clare Acheson) which was printed on the SHIRO Alga Carta 90gsm, has been selected to be a part of the Anti Design Festival exhibition:

See my previous post all about it:

http://justinsamazingworldatfennerpaper.blogspot.com/2010/07/goldsmiths-mfa.html

To read more about how "as a response to 25 years of cultural deep freeze, the Anti Design Festival will attempt to unlock creative fires and ideas, exploring spaces hitherto deemed out-of-bounds by a purely commercial criteria" have a look at the site...

http://www.antidesignfestival.com/disinformation/?page_id=2

Posted by Justin Hobson 31.08.2010

Goldsmiths MFA

Maria Fusco is the Director of Art Writing at Goldsmiths where she runs the postgraduate programme - MFA Art Writing. This is the first year of
graduation, and they were organising a live publishing project at the launch of the show. Louise Ramsay from APFEL suggested she got in touch with me to suggest a suitable paper to use, which was nice - thank you Louise.

It was a student-led project in collaboration with the designers, Ken Kirton and Clare Acheson. The sheets were pre-printed on a RISO machine at a print collective based in Camden called Hato Press. The sheets were then overprinted on an A3 duplex laser printer at the show.

One of the designers involved, Ken Kirton:

Designer Clare Acheson:

The live publishing event in action:

The finished result printed on our new SHIRO Alga Carta in 90gsm:

It was a really good event and the Goldsmiths MFA students showed some truly amazing exhibits!

The only thing that was maybe a bit disappointing at Goldsmiths was the rather half-hearted effort they've put into trying to stop education cuts! ...neither high impact or attracting a crowd!

http://www.hatopress.net/

http://www.gold.ac.uk/art/exhibitions/

http://www.thehappyhypocrite.org/

Posted by Justin Hobson 16.07.2010