DECLARATIONS
of [inter]dependence
and the im[media]cy of design
October 25 - 28, 2001.
Concordia University, Montreal
PARTICIPANTS
Patrik
Andersson (CAN)
Patrik Andersson Recieved his ph.D. from the University of British
Columbia with a dissertation entitled Euro-Pop: the Mechanical
Bride Stripped Bare in Stockholm, Even (2001). He has published
numerous texts and curated exhibitions on contemporary and historical
art. He is also the director and curator of Trapp Gallery in Vancouver,
Canada. In 2000 he co-curated the exhibition Supersonic Transport:
a Survey of Independent Pop Culture Magazines. He is also the
co-editor and author of the book 'Inside Magazines' being published
by BIS in October.
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Michael Barker
(CAN)
Through his work in Toronto with Fierce Little Engine, Michael
Barker makes connections with political organizations and with
the public in the hopes of generating a design/art practice in
the service of 'the public good.'* Barker’s practice addresses
his political and cultural environment and makes a rigorous attempt
at honesty in confronting and discussing the social challenges
we face as a society. This is a lofty (and idealistic) ambition,
fraught with pitfalls, and so he tries to approach his subjects
with equal parts humour and humility. He strongly believes in
making the tools of our digital age, and the hand of a trained
designer available to the voice of the left, be it web sites,
books, interactive Flash internet games or flyposters. By day
he works at Bruce Mau Design as a designer. [ * He uses 'the public
good' somewhat ironically - Bruce Mau's first design firm was
called 'public good', their clients included unions, art and political
organizations.] His current projects include posters and a website
for the Reclaim the Streets event in Toronto, posters for artist
Simone Moir to appear as part of 'The Lefty Show' at Aspace, and
Shag Magazine (as part of the Shag collective), a sexy and campy
tabloid art/porn magazine featuring local Toronto artists, activists,
SM queens, rock stars and other scenesters, to launch in Fall,
2001.
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David Berman
(CAN)
Since 1984, David has worked to establish a code of ethics which
embraces social responsibility for graphic designers throughout
Canada. The Society of Graphic Designers of Canada ratified his
version nationally in May 2000 and he was elected Vice President
Ethics.
He served as the first elected president of the Association of
Registered Graphic Designers of Ontario, the world's first accredited
graphic design organization, from 1997 to 1999. He drafted the
association's constitution and Rules of Professional Conduct and
authored Ontario's accreditation examination on ethics and professional
responsibility.
David is dedicated to realizing graphic design's potential to
help improve the human condition and the global environment. He
speaks at international and local conferences and writes about
the important role graphic designers can play in enhancing social
conditions around the world, as opposed to applying their skills
to help organizations mislead their audiences.
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Russell Bestley
(UK)
Russell Bestley is a Senior Lecturer at the London College of
Printing, School of Graphic Design. His written and design work
has been published in Eye, Emigre, and Zed magazines, and he has
contributed to a wide range of publications and conferences relating
to social responsibility, politics and graphic design. A long
standing interest in both Punk Rock and the Situationist International
has resulted in a number of articles and exhibitions exploring
the link between 'alternative' politics and Graphic Design. In
collaboration with Ian Noble at the LCP, he has developed a praxis-based
pedagogic design project entitled We Interrupt the Programme,
which attempts to provide a critical alternative to the implicit
hierarchies in graphic design's use of accepted visual codes.
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James Boyd-Brent
(USA)
James Boyd-Brent has undergraduate and graduate degrees in printmaking,
and is a fulltime art and design teacher and practicing artist.
He was co-curator of "Here by Design" (with Lindsay Shen). He
explores the qualities of time and place through his work as an
artist and printmaker.
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Jean-Pierre Boyer
(CAN)
Jean-Pierre Boyer, born in 1950, is the cofounder of the Centre de recherche
en imagerie populaire, a professor in the Department
of Communication at the University of Quebec at Montreal, a photographer, video maker, art historian, and archivist.
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Tony Credland
(UK)
Tony Credland completed his MA at the Jan van Eyck Academie in
1998. Currently, he is a Part Time Lecturer at the University
of Portsmouth in the Art, Design, and Media programme. Tony Credland
has organized and participated in a range of publishing projects
that explore the potential of visual communication to challenge,
interrupt, and disseminate alternative points of view. These projects
include, the Debate poster series, the Cactus Communication Network,
Carrion Culture, and most recently, Feeding Squirrels to the Nuts.
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Siân Cook
(UK)
Siân Cook is a codirector of Women's Design + Research Unit
(WD+RU). She works in London as a graphic designer and educator
with a background in design for the music industry and an interest
in AIDS and HIV health promotion. She runs her own studio practice
and her clients include the Lux Centre for Film, Video and Digital
Arts, Terence Higgins Trust, The Showroom Gallery and Paul Hamlyn
Foundation.
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Cristina de
Almeida (USA)
Born in Rio de Janeiro, Cristina de Almeida has practiced graphic
design both in Brasil and the United States. She is currently
an Assistant Professor of Graphic Design at Western Washington
University, in Bellingham, Washington State. As an educator, she
is interested in design pedagogies that promote personal agency
and an understanding of design as a cultural force. Her creative
work investigates the role typographic design plays in the construction,
amplification, or subversion of written discourse genres. She
has lectured and exhibited her work in various venues throughout
the United States.
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Jean Desjardins
Jean Desjardins,born in 1951, is cofounder of the Centre de recherche en imagerie
populaire of the University of Quebec at Montreal. He is also the founding memberof the Atelier du 19 septembre
(production of banners), a theatre designer, art historian and archivist.
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Chris Dixon (USA)
Chris Dixon holds degrees in psychology and graphic design. He
was art director of Adbusters Magazine in Vancouver for 4 years,
taught design at the Emily Carr Institute , and is currently working
at the New York Times Magazine and designing projects for the
United Nations . His work has been recognized by the Society of
Publication Designers in New York, The Canadian National Magazine
Awards, the American Center for Design, and has been featured
in the design publications Emigre, Eye, and Graphis. He was included
in the Art Directors Club's "Young Guns New York" exhibit this
past April for his design work relating to social and political
issues.
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Dorothy Dunn (USA)
Dorothy Dunn is Head of Education at Cooper-Hewitt, National Design
Museum, Smithsonian Institution where she supervises the broad
scope of educational programs offered to the public as well as
the educational and interpretive components of the Museum's exhibitions.
The Educaton Department develops conferences, institutes, lectures,
study tours, performances, workshops, and programs for family,
school, and educator audiences to complement exhibitoins and the
Museum's extensive collections as well as to explore design history
and contemporary design issues.
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'floss'
(NL)
'floss' is a group comprised of current researchers at the Jan
Van Eyck Akademie in the Netherlands from the departments of design,
theory, fine art and somewhere between. The Akademie is a post-academic
research institute where the connections and disconnections between
theory and practise are under constant examination. The work is
often less specifically linked to the traditional discursive practises
of any field of activity as a result and brings elements of all
into play/interplay. The members of 'floss' are culturally and
experientially diverse. Its participants come from Slovakia, Great
Britain, Germany, Belgium, USA, and the Netherlands. 'floss' hope
to bring breadth, imagination and humour to the serious contemplation
of the 'public sphere as a space of democratic voice and citizenship'
An exploration of publishing as a radical act (what is it? what
might it be?) is the current focus of their actvities and will
take place as a series of workshops, productions and interventions
throughout the course of the symposium.
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Amy Franceschini
(USA)
Futurefarmer's founding member, Amy Franceschini was born to a
farming family and grew up amid the fields and orchards of California's
San Joaquin Valley. She graduated from San Francisco State University
in 1992 with a BFA in photography and interned at Photo Metro,
a monthly photography publication, where she was introduced to
computer graphics and design. In 1994, she enrolled in the California
College of Arts and Crafts design program. In the summer of 1995,
she formed a partnership with Olivier Laude and Michael Macrone,
founders of Atlas (www.atlasmagazine.com), an online magazine.
Since that time, Atlas has garnered numerous awards for its dramatic
and unorthodox approach to online publishing and design. In 1997,
the Atlas website was selected as the first to be included in
the permanent collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern
Art. The site has won two Webby awards (the equivalent of an online
Oscar) for Art and Design, and has won many other online and publication
design awards. In
1995, she also started Futurefarmers. It's first
years harvest proved to be quite prolific. First with Switch Manufacturing's
highly aclaimed collateral and print catalog (see communication
arts 01/97). Next, "Flesh Farmer", a multimedia CO-lab in "Dig
It: Digital Art and the Next Generation", a digital show co-curated
by Thomas Bonavich of Postmasters Gallery, NYC and Limn Gallery,
SF and most recently being nominated for Bay Area Now II.
This balance between art and commerce pushes her
to continually rethink her craft while striving to transcend both.
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Mieke
Gerritzen (NL)
Mieke Gerritzen (1962) was born in Amsterdam. Studied there at the Rietveld Academy audio visual media. She is the founder of NL.Design.
NL.Design is a design company permanently under construction based in Amsterdam. NL.Design makes designs for all media and works with many different designers, writers and artists. NL.Design publish books and organizes events like "The International Browserday" in New York, Berlin and Amsterdam. Gerritzen also is the head of the design department at the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam.
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Brian
Holmes (FR)
Brian Holmes is an art and culture critic, translator and editor,
and member of the activist art group Ne pas plier, which is based
in Ivry-sur-Seine, France (Paris region). His specific interests
turn around the relations between artistic practice and political
economy. This means raising two basic questions: To what extent
and why has cultural production become a significant part of the
postindustrial or informational economy? How can artistic practice
exert political effects on that economy, in which it inevitably
participates to some degree? Ne pas plier, which is a cross between
a subsidized but autonomous association and a professional graphics
agency, offers a concrete sociopolitical base from which he has
developed answers to these questions.
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Fiona
Jack (NZ)
Fiona Jack is 27 and lives and works in New Zealand where she is a
Lecturer at the Auckland University of Technology School of Art and
Design. Previous and current projects include the NothingTM billboard
series, The Haiku Project Billboard Series, GE billboard series and The
Lint Project. As well as working extensively in the field of public art
and design activism, Fiona is an accomplished painter, freelance graphic
designer, performance/installation artist and techno DJ. Fiona's work
has been published extensively internationally from Archive to
Adbusters, and was recently exhibited as part of 'Brand New' at the
Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
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Sandy Kaltenborn
(GER)
Sandy K. is a graphic designer who has been working in Berlin
for the last eleven years on the edge between political movements
and visual communication production. From his studio, Bildwechel
(image shift), Sandy works to sensitise political activists on
the importance of visual communications and production in political
struggle. His atelier is at the Metro Gap workspace, a group of
designers, architects and urban planners undertaking political
actions primarily against the privatisation of public spaces.
His own production includes over fifty posters in the last five
years, all of them in collaboration with political groups, with
anti-racist groups.
For the NGBK (New Society of Fine Arts) in Berlin in May 2000,
Sandy undertook an exhibition, poster action and catalogue project,
Politisch/soziales engagement & grafik design (Political/social
Engagement and graphic design), on French graphic ateliers which
grew out of the Grapus tradition. Recently he contributed to the
print publication, hoch die kampf dem (design aside from nice
posters), covering twenty years of the Autonomous Movement, and
wrote the catalogues texts for the Festival internationale d¹affiches
in Chamont, France, answering in part the question, What is a
good political poster? Sandy is also a member of the activist
video group AK KRAAK who provides a cultural and content bracket
for political scenes and movements, in a biannual political video
magazine.
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Jouke Kleerebezem
(NL)
From a formal education in typography and graphic design, Jouke
Kleerebezem developed to be an artist/designer who both exhibited
individually in European contemporary art institutions and galleries,
as well as organized international exhibitions and published widely
on art and media. Major venues include artists' space De Zaak
which he co-directed between 1980-1990 and the organization of
the Allocations contemporary sculpture exhibition (1992). Since
1994 his focus is on the Internet and World Wide Web. His work
has been shown eg. at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (`Under Capricorn',
1997) and Stroom hcbk the Hague (`Silicon Rally', 1996). As 'editor
at large' he is involved in the Doors of Perception conference
series (www.doorsofperception.com) since 1994. Currently he co-chairs
(with Melle Hammer) the design research department of the Jan
van Eyck Akademie, Maastricht NL. His ongoing activities are linked
through his personal publishing portal site: www.nqpaofu.com
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Naomi Klein (CAN)
Born in Montreal in 1970, Naomi Klein is an award-winning journalist
and author of the international best-selling book, No Logo: Taking
Aim at the Brand Bullies. www.nologo.org
Translated into fourteen languages, The New York
Times called No Logo "a movement bible." The Guardian Newspaper
short-listed it for their First Book Award and in April 2001,
No Logo won the Canadian National Business Book Award.
Naomi Klein¹s articles have appeared in numerous
publications including The Nation, The Guardian, The New Statesman,
Newsweek International, The New York Times, The Village Voice
and Ms. She writes an internationally syndicated column for The
Globe and Mail in Canada and The Guardian in Britain.
For the past six years, Ms. Klein has travelled
throughout North America, Asia, Latin America and Europe, tracking
the rise of anti-corporate activism. She is a frequent media commentator
and has guest lectured at Harvard, Yale and New York University.
Naomi Klein lives in Toronto.
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pk langshaw (CAN)
pk langshaw's research on social design’ practices investigates
the role of the individual creator within the context of the collective
and societal structures beyond or in combination with client based
demands. Her artistic work is initiated as hybrid, a cross disciplined
practice, extracted from concrete poetry, and expanded by the
quantic relations between text and image. Each work is bound to
the site where construction takes place and to the audience who
receives the work. pk has participated in solo and group gallery
exhibits and is actively involved in collaborative, public art
projects, exchanges and conferences.
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Steven McCarthy
(USA)
Steven McCarthy is an Associate Professor of Graphic Design at
the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities campus. His current creative
investigations are concerned with telling stories and providing
interactive experiences in the digital environment. However his
primary concern is with the human condition—the technology
matters less. McCarthy's self-authored graphic design work has
been published in Graphis Poster, the AIGA annual and in Provocative
Graphics: The Power of the Unexpected in Graphic Design. His artists’
books are in numerous collections including the Museum of Modern
Art, the Banff Centre in Canada, the Sackner Archive of Visual
and Concrete Poetry, and the Houghton Library at Harvard University.
His interactive works have been performed/exhibited most recently
at the School of Visual Arts in NYC, at VideoFormes, Clermont-Ferrand,
France, and at the Paris/Berlin International Meetings.
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Ian Noble (UK)
Currently Director of Undergraduate Programmes within the School
of Graphic Design at the London College of Printing, Ian Noble
has worked professionally as both an editorial designer and as
a design educator. He is a regular contributor to Eye magazine
(UK) and has had his worked published in Emigre and Zed (US).
Working collaboratively with Russell Bestley, he has developed
the We Interrupt the Programme research project, lecturing and
exhibiting around the world. Their design practice Visual Research
produces design work for a range of galleries and public institutions.
They are currently completing a book on graphic design research
methodology entitled Experimental Layout to be published by RotoVision
in Spring 2001.
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Josh On (USA)
Josh On is a recent arrival at Futurefarmers. He hails from New
Zealand where he completed a BA in Sociology. He has spent the
last 6 years in London working with computers doing various design
jobs in television, computer gaming and internet companies. He
has just completed an MA in Computer Related Design at the Royal
College of Art in London.
Josh has helped create a few of the recent projects
at Futurefarmers, including communiculture and they rule You can
also see him on the english comedy site hahabonk where he acts
the fool in the nojedi series and is behind the awkward humour
of MrLoveYaMate. He is currently working on an experimental community
website project and working fulltime at the Futurefarmers' headquarters.
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Lindsay Shen (USA)
Lindsay Shen has a Ph.D from the University of St Andrews, Scotland.
She is the Director of the Goldstein Museum of Design, University
of Minnesota. She has long research interests in the relationship
between design and place, and this year she was co-curator (with
James Boyd-Brent) of "Here by Design," an exhibition about this
relationship, at the Goldstein.
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Matt Soar (USA)
Matt Soar is visiting assistant professor of video at Hampshire
College, and is completing a PhD dissertation on the culture and
ethics of graphic design practice. His writing has recently appeared
in the AIGA Journal of Graphic Design and Jump Cut: A Review of
Contemporary Media. An article on First Things First and the politics
of culture jamming is forthcoming in the journal Cultural Studies.
In February 2001 he spoke at the AIGA conference Looking Closer,
addressing the relationship between cultural theory and graphic
design practice, criticism, and history. From 1997-2001 he was
resident designer at the Media Education Foundation (www.mediaed.org).
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Judith Steedman
(CAN)
Judith Steedman is the principal of Steedman Design Studio, a
graphic design studio in Vancouver, Canada. Specializing in art
and design books, Steedman has designed and produced books for
artists and writers such as Francis Alÿs, Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Douglas
Coupland, Stan Douglas, and Walter Marchetti. She has produced
a broad range of catalogue and identity design for instutitions
such as the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, the DuPont Foundation,
the Museum of Contemporary Art (L.A.), and the Charles H. Scott
Gallery. Steedman co-curated the exhibition Supersonic Transport:
A Survey of Independent Pop Culture Magazines. She is the designer
and co-editor of Inside Magazines, published by BIS Publishers
in October 2001.
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Teal Triggs
(UK)
Teal Triggs is a codirector and founding member of the Women's
Design + Research Unit (WD+RU) and director of postgraduate studies
for the Faculty of Design, Kingston University. Her writings on
graphic design history and theory have appeared in numerous design
publications and she has contributed to a number of academic books
on graphic design, feminism and fashion. Triggs is coeditor with
Roger Sabin of the book Below Critical Radar: Fanzines and Alternative
Comics from 1976 to Now (2000) and on the editorial board of Visual
Communication, an academic journal published by Sage (forthcoming
in 2002).
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Jan van Toorn
(NL)
Jan van Toorn has been a graphic and exhibition designer since
1957. The emotional charge of van Toorn's designs stems from his
interest in investigating visual meaning and the social role of
the profession as opposed to purely practical requirements. His
radical teaching and practice were highly influential on the younger
generation of Dutch designers. He taught graphic design and visual
communication for many years at various academies and universities
in The Netherlands and abroad, including Gerrit Rietveld Academie,
Amsterdam [1968-1985], Technical University Eindhoven[1982-1983]
and Rijksacademie Amsterdam [1986-1989]. From 1991 until 1998
he was director of the Jan van Eyck Akademie in Maastricht, transforming
it into an international postgraduate center for fine art, design
and theory. Since 1989 he has taught in the MA program of Rhode
Island School of Design, Providence USA. In 1997 he organized
design Beyond Design, critical reflection and the practice of
visual communication, a conference devoted to the discrepancy
between the socio-cultural and symbolic reality of the information
economy.
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Patricia Zimmermann
(USA)
Patricia R. Zimmermann is Professor in the Department of Cinema
and Photography at Ithaca College. She is the author of Reel Families:
A Social History of Amateur Film (Indiana, 1995) and States of
Emergency: Documentaries, Wars, Democracies (Minnesota). She was
co-editor with Erik Barnouw of The Flaherty: Four Decades in the
Cause of Independent Cinema (Wide Angle, 1996). Her forthcoming
book, co-edited with Karen Ishikuza, is Mining the Home Movie:
Excavations into Histories and Memories (University of California
Press.) Currently, she serves on the editorial boards of the journals
Wide Angle and The Moving Image: The Journal of Association of
Moving Image Archivists. She also serves on the board of Women
Make Movies. With Erik Barnouw, Ruth Bradley, and Scott MacDonald,
she edits the Wide Angle Books series for Temple University Press,
a series dedicated to tracing the history of the international
non-profit media arts sector. She has curated the Flaherty Film
Seminar several times, including most recently "Explorations
in Memory and Modernity" in 1997, as well as other film,
video, and new media exhibitions at Ithaca college as well as
nationally and internationally at museums, conferences and film
festivals.
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