In February of 2001 a cross-disciplinary design exhibition was held at the Wagner Rosenbaum Gallery in Toronto, curated by Filiz Klassen. Fourteen architects and artists presented their current work. Anyone who has been involved in such a venture realizes how much energy is generated in the process of mounting an exhibition — doing the work, writing about it, looking at it, thinking about
P ro-fusion [ www.ryerson.ca/~forum ] is a virtual design forum that sews, fastens, attaches, fuses and transgresses the borders between singular and isolated design disciplines. Conversations and images can be linked across space and time — a web forum gives us an expanded and open field for developing and exhibiting design activity.
Designers who re-interpret design concepts, visual material and visualization techniques from the fine and applied arts; from newspaper, television and internet media; and from popular and design culture are working across the often fixed boundaries of professional disciplines. They go beyond the framework of usual design collaborations to promote new subjects for design reflection. The forum can develop a more pluralistic and interactive understanding of design as a creative base for new ideas and specific projects. And it will serve as a provocation for established architects, engineers, scuptors, fibre artists, writers, historians, photographers, and for emerging designers, to find in this fusion an inspiring field of practice. Pro-fusion: a virtual cross-disciplinary design forum Filiz Klassen the connections it makes with all sorts of other kinds of work. And then the exhibition is over, and it is all filed away. How can the energy and the connections be maintained, expanding outward to draw in more than the original fourteen? This being the electronic age, a website has been constructed.
Raymond Chow Reverberation in the Skin of a Fluid
This investigation began with a string attached to a spinning motor. The action of spinning a string gives a wave: a balanced relationship between the reistance in the mass of string and the forces generated by the spinning motor and gravity. Recording the phenomena with a strobe light, photography and video revealed emerging patterns of behaviours inherently present, but hidden from the naked eye. A strip of fabric soaked in plaster was substi- tuted for the string, containing and arresting gravitational and centrifugal forces through the setting and strength properties of the plaster. This fabricated form was multiplied to make a series of rib bone-like structures. The com- munity of rib components balances upon a member made of bamboo under tension.
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O n S ite review
S ewing
I ssue 8 2002
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