Positioning
Sometimes at nights I tend to spend time surfing on different portfolio sites and blogs when I really should already be sleeping. Last night was one of those nights. After coming home from EDO’s inspiring Indie Night I ended up browsing my way to Åbäke’s portfolio message board and I saw an interesting event for today. This event was titled Positioning and took place at the London College of Communication. The evening was curated by Joshua Trees for the soon to be graduating third year students at LCC.
Joshua wanted to raise new questions among students and show alternative ways of positioning yourself in the industry. The evening’s line-up for the speakers were Patrick Lacey from the previously mentioned Åbäke, one of my typographic favourites Paulus Dreibholz, Jaime Gili and Yuri Suzuki. Gili and Suzuki were artists I knew very little about before the today’s event, but their work seemed very interesting. Of course I had to get there, how could I miss this?
So I managed to sneak my name on the list, since Joshua is also tutoring at Central Saint Martins. The LCC students had a briefing before the lectures and the theatre was full of people, but as the speakers were setting up over half of the people just vanished never coming back - I mean what the fuck? Excuse my French, but when are you people offered such a treat of interesting speakers for free?
Well, not everyone can be interested I guess. For the people who stayed it was an hour and a half of really inspiring opinions and works from people representing very different ways working. Since Gili and Suzuki were quite new acquaintances for me - partly because they come outside the traditional graphic design discipline - I found their presentations incredibly engaging. I could recall seeing only few of their works before. Gili’s supergraphics and stories from Venezuela plus Suzuki’s amazing sound and industrial designs were just amazing. I can only recommend checking out their portfolios. I know that I don’t even need to mention the productions of the other two speakers, you already know it’s good.
A few weeks ago I bought a small digital voice recorder to record the sounds for my audio tour brief. Today I decided to use that device to try to record the whole event. I have now listened basically the whole evening back and I realise that this little recorder is going to be extremely handy for these purposes. The sound quality is actually pretty decent I must say.
Going back to the event; after the talks I had a nice little chat with Paulus Dreibholz about the current situation of the art education. Focus being mainly in the commercialisation of the universities. Needles to say that we both shared the same view; good, independent and alternative art education needs to be run thinking about the students best, not pushing the business side in the front. At least for the sake of those students who take the interest to stay and learn…
