London Design Festival is coming back to the V&A soon and with it our annual Digital Design Weekend! The museum will be filled with activities for the curious, designers, students, hackers, makers and families and it is also a chance to see LDF’s installations before the end of the festival.
Now in it’s fourth year, the Digital Design Weekend explores and promotes contemporary digital art and design and presents cutting edge work and research projects, giving audiences the opportunity to meet the artists, designers and researchers and find out more about processes while engaging in dialogue, debate and the creation of culture.
Last year’s Digital Design Weekend Wrapup
The Digital Design Weekend transforms the V&A into one big workshop; studios and galleries become makerspaces, tinkerspaces or labs, where visitors come together with artists and designers to discuss and think about objects, making and working collaboratively.
This year we will be inviting participants and audiences to explore digital value, cultural value and ‘making’ value, so we are inviting everyone to join in a weekend of collaborating, networking, sharing knowledge, tools, practice and of course playing! We want to encourage experimentation and get people involved with design and making through provocative and surprising displays and workshops.
The programme includes many exciting projects such as Heidi Hinder’s Money No Object, which explores a new significance for material and physical currencies in an increasingly immaterial digital world, one where smart payment transactions are imperceptible, but human emotions, creativity and culture retain a value that money can’t buy. Or, Knyttan, sharing tools for pioneering the democratisation of manufacturing, the Restart Project helping people understand the impact of electronic waste and how to negate it and Flora Bowden and Dan Lockton’s Drawing Energy & Powerchord that explores energy use and everyday life, investigating and communicating data in meaningful ways.
Here are some of the events that you definitley should not miss!
Open Collaborative Making
Join some brilliant designers and artists in the Learning Centre in our open maker laboratory and get hands on with projects exploring data in meaningful ways.
Projects and participants include Memory of the Weather from the Met Office, [arra]stre, a digital, data-driven dance performance that derives its movements and concepts from computer science theory, Aurora Wearables, an internet-connected spacesuit with Jon Spooner/Unlimited Theatre & Exeter College, Penguin Random House YourFry: a meeting of text and technology, Remixing weather forecasts by Natasha Trotman, BBC R&D Playlister Fob & Perceptive Radio, Uniform physical weather apps, Microsoft Research prototypes, REACT Objects Sandbox prototypes, a showcase of projects funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council Digital Transformations, James Parr’s Ultrascope, an ultra-low cost automated robotic observatory able to radically democratise digital astronomy, and many more.
Supported by The Met Office, Microsoft Research, BBC R&D, RS Components and AHRC.
Open Collaborative Making welcomes families and will be accompanied by an AHRC-funded publication distributed free during the event.
AIR, THE UNSEEN
Exploration house, THEUNSEEN, blend biological and chemical matter into material. Discover the AIR collection in the Fashion Gallery, involving wind reactive ink that changes colour upon contact with the air around us. It is intended to reveal the unseen turbulence surrounding us as we move through our environment.
Money No Object, Heidi Hinder
Money No Object explores a new significance for material and physical currencies in an increasingly immaterial digital world, where smart payment transactions are imperceptible, but human emotions, creativity and culture, retain value that money can’t buy.
Supported by Creativeworks London and UnLtd; further thanks to MasterCard
Knyttan and Common Works
Knyttan is pioneering the democratisation of manufacturing, giving people the opportunity to design the things they buy. Discover a set of tools developed by Common Works and Knyttan, and become involved in the creation of a collaborative knitted artwork that will evolve over the weekend.
The 7 Lamps of Making, Dean Brown (Fabrica)
“The 7 Lamps of Making” re-visits John Ruskin’s essay “The 7 Lamps of Architecture” (1849) as a guide for 21st century making. Translating craft literature into tangible examples of the 7 guides in practice – as open source lighting products that embody the enduring principles of good craftsmanship. The applied research project speculates that the future of making can have philosophical roots in 19th century Arts & Crafts Theory.
The Digital Design Weekend is taking place at the V&A on Saturday 20 & Sunday 21 September, from 10.30 to 17.00.
Events are free and drop-in, but places for some are limited, so please arrive early to avoid disappointment. Most events are suitable for all ages.
For the full Digital Design Weekend programme click here.
Ladies and Gentlemen:
Someone on the V&A staff might interested in my theory that Michelangelo’s source of inspiration for his famous figure of Adam in his “Creation of Adam” was an ancient cameo that is now at Alnwick Castle, Northumberland. This cameo shows the emperor Augustus Caesar riding sidesaddle on a capricorn–his favorite astrological sign. You might be able to see this cameo by typing “cameo, augustus, capricorn” on Google Image. Also at Alnwick is another cameo of Philoctetes fanning his diseased foot. I have been able to see how M was inspired by this cameo as well. These cameos were part of a collection of over 140 cameos owned by cardinal Domenico Grimani who was living in Rome at the time M was painting the Sistine ceiling. Grimani died owning some drawings by M which suggests contact between the two men. M rarely gave away his drawings and would not sell them. These insights were published in the New York journal “Source: Notes in the History of Art” in 2013. Since the V&A deals with the decorative arts and Renaissance art, I thought someone on your staff might be interested in this. Thank you for your attention. Sincerely good wishes, Bruce Sutherland