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Generative Design meets Elevate 2013

2012's „Elevate the Apocalypse“ was a fitting tagline for Elevate’s take on a long-gone worldview. The artwork revealed the familiar medieval clock tower's mechanical innards, resembling the bleak building blocks that make up our world. The untouchable nature of affairs rang in the end of all things for a fatalistic mind.

Having said that, “Elevate Open Everything?” couldn’t be a more contrary mantra. The overwhelming amount of information and knowledge that we all have instantaneous access to thanks to digital media, as well as the direct and interactive involvement in production and distribution, are just one example of technological advances clashing with past logic of property.
Immaterial commodities like creativity and ideas, knowledge and information can rarely be credited to a sole originator and are not exactly eligible for private property. The essential question is no longer “what belongs to whom” but a question of right of use and access.

All these reflections and thoughts have inspired this year’s design. The miniature clock tower has been removed of its iconic corset; it mutates, rotates, explodes, meanders and oscillates between specific shapes and complete deconstruction. The image is no longer hand-crafted, but a visual concept that has been filtered through algorithms and into a coding language that helps it reach execution. A program like that can not only create one image, but an array of magnificent imagery by modifying parameters.

These graphics were created with the help of open-source processing software that artists, designers and scientists use for a wide variety of different projects. At this point we would like to mention a fantastic online exhibition which features artistic and installation-type approaches to data visualization. www.processing.org

The project is actualized by visual artist and Depart-collective member Leonhard Lass, who has been dealing with generative graphics for years now, Mimu Merz, who generally zig-zags between music, visual and conceptual art, and Florian Sattler and Roland Oreski who will support the team in terms of implementation and execution.

We wish you a great time.

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