A one day symposium focused Creative Practice in the Digital Age held at De Montfort University, Leicester on the 16th of November 2009.

The event included presentations from leading practitioners from art, craft and design of work that focuses on the creative use of emergent digital technologies in the making of artefacts.

Speakers on the day included: Assa Ashuach, Keith Brown, Annie Cattrell, Lionel T Dean, FutureFactories, Philip Delamore, Geoffrey Mann, John Marshall and Tavs from Autonomatic.

www.dmu.ac.uk/digital-design-art

 The event concluded a very busy series of autumn guest lectures, talks and presentation by Tavs, which also included venues such as the Mixed Reality Lab (University of Nottingham) and the Computer Lab at Open University in Milton Keynes.

De Montfort University, Leicester

Open University, Milton Keynes

School of Computing Science, University of Nottingham

We were invited to exhibit as guest group at the 5^th Estonian Triennial for the Applied Arts, so if you happen to be in Tallinn pop in to the Estonian Museum of Applied Arts, were we will be showing until February the 21^st.

The Triennial, with the title “Know How”, is curated by Kärt Maran focussing on the notion of ‘the knowledge of making’. All the contributors to the show were required to submit a manual of how the artefact had been created, this manual is shown along side the exhibits to Illustrate how the knowledge of process and material, is such a key aspect for applied arts sector.

As a part of the Triennial a one day symposium with contributors mainly from Estonia but also a couple of international speakers including Tavs from Autonomatic. The other international speaker was the Israeli designer Ronen Kadushin, who outlined his work with open source design.

The symposium was moderated by Kai Lobjakas who also curated a really interesting satellite show at the Hobusepea Gallery which featured the Estonian DIY magazine: “Practical Kunst ja Kodu” (which was published until the 1970s).

The whole event was really cohesive focused on the notion of making and “know how” of the maker.

Link to the event:

http://www.trtr.ee/events.php

October / November is turning out to be such a hectic period that it is proving difficult keeping the blog up to date with news worthy events. 
One of the major news stories is that Tavs travelled to Beijing to deliver an invited presentation to Icograda – World Design Congress during the first ever Beijing Design Week. Icograda is  ’The International Council of Graphic Design Associations’. Apart from delivering the presentation titled “Digital Drawing”, Tavs was also invited to sit on a Discussion Panels debating the topic of ‘cross disciplinary collaboration in design’ along with ARUP’s senior consultant Dan Hill, Fiona Raby from the RCA and Thomas Castro, Jeroen Barendse from the Dutch design group LUST.

A final contribution from Tavs was a question and answer panel session with the rest of the “Define” parallel sessions speakers: David Small from MIT, design critic Peter Hall (UK, US), Daniel Makoski Microsoft  and up-and-coming Chinese Book designer Les Suen.

The event opened with a day of keynote presentations at the impressive National Centre for the Performing Arts in Beijing, including the presentation of the Adobe Achievement Awards. The conference then moved venue to Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) for parallel sessions and later in the week also an educational conference. Icograda formed the key focus of Beijing’s first ever design week which featured a number of events across the city.

More on the event here: www.beijing2009.org/index-eng.htm

More on Icograda here: www.icograda.org

Icograda opening at the National Centre for the Performing Arts in Beijing

- more specifically  in the ‘How to Spend it’ weekend suppliment to The FInancial Times, Sarturday the 17/10/2009 

Emma Crichton-Millers’ article on digital craft titled: “Look – no hands” feature images of both Drummond and Tavs’ work and a description of the work of Autonomatic in general

Tavs kicked of a rather busy autumn schedule of visiting lectures about the work at Autonomatic with a talk to the 3D Design Department in Plymouth.

More on the 3D course at University of Plymouth here:

http://www.plymouth.ac.uk/pages/view.asp?page=8039

And here:

http://www.3ddesign.org.uk/

Other venues on Tavs’ list of invited lectures includes:

The world design Congress, Beijing
The 5th Tallinn Applied Art Triennial, Estonia
Digital Design Art, De Montfort University, Leicester
University Wales Institute Cardiff
Open University, Milton Keynes
Mixed Reality Lab, Nottingham University
Nottingham Trent University

- That’s probably enough for 2009!

In September Justin presented a paper on post industrial manufacturing at the Westerwald museum in Germany as part of the ‘Cool Britain’ symposium series which are being run in conjunction with the International Ceramic Westerwald Prize.

http://www.keramikmuseum.de/index_eng.html

Katie and Justin presented a paper at the recent ‘Making Futures’ conference organised by Plymouth College of Art and Design.

http://makingfutures.plymouthart.ac.uk/index.php?page=Conference-Home&pag_id=2

‘The purpose of ‘Making Futures’ is to improve understanding of the ways in which the contemporary crafts are practiced in relation to significant and new emerging agendas relating to global environmental and sustainability issues’.

Their full paper; ‘Developments in Post Industrial Manufacturing Systems and its Implications for Craft and Sustainability’ should be available for download in November from the conference website.

The bespoke project now has a website http://www.bespokeproject.org/ where the events and activities surrounding this project can be followed.

In July Justin worked with Nick Lees, a senior lecturer in ceramics at Bath Spa University in order to investigate the potential for 3D CAD and RP technologies to be integrated into Nick’s creative practice http://www.artbathspa.com/research/ceramics/nick_lees.htm

 Four days were spent modelling and then physically prototyping a range of spiral forms which are to be used in the process of creating plaster ‘cores’ for Nick’s sculptural pieces.

 The results at the end of this short experimental period are currently being tested by Nick and we look forward to seeing the resulting final works.

An example of Nick's sculptural work

Drummond’s work has gained recognition in an article featured on the Rapid News website, see link for more details.

http://www.rapidtoday.com/