Shapeshifters 2010 | Source – In 2010, Shapeshifters explores the knowl­edge of the ori­gins of our visual thinking in order to under­stand the com­plex anatomy of graph­ical com­mu­ni­ca­tion sys­tems. When and where did images merge with meaning(s), and how and when did the use of images and signs develop into autonomous graph­ical sys­tems? Or were they inte­grated into existing sys­tems? How are graphic designers using these ‘uni­versal’ visual stan­dards (sym­bols, icons, writing or struc­tural sys­tems, etc.) nowa­days in an inno­v­a­tive way? And what is the impact of our download/copy-paste/sample cul­ture on these devel­op­ments? Shapeshifters presents 6 lec­turers who will share their views on this topic:
5 January: Gerhard Jäger and Markus Hanzer
2 February: Timothy Donaldson and Johannes Bergerhausen
2 March: Marius Watz
2 April: Hannah Higgins

Gerhard Jäger (AT) — 5 January 2010

Gerhard Jäger worked for fif­teen years for the Serapions the­atre in Vienna. From 1990 til 1995, he real­ized cul­tural pro­duc­tions in the south of Austria, close to the Slovenian border. Eight years ago, he started up the ABC-project (Art Basics for Children) in Brussels. Until today, he is the gen­eral and artistic coor­di­nator.
www.abc-web.be

Markus Hanzer (AT) — 5 January 2010

Markus Hanzer is one of the founders of the mira4 agency. He worked for many TV chan­nels, like SAT1, ARD, ORF, Phoenix, Premiere, ATV or ZDF – while also focusing on a series of com­plex issues involving mobile com­mu­ni­ca­tion, inter­ac­tive tele­vi­sion and the internet – for Deutsche Bank, Allianz, Bertelsmann, Verizon Wireless, and others – in the field of trade­mark com­mu­ni­ca­tion.
He teaches at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna and the col­lege of MultiMediaArt in Salzburg. His book ‘Krieg der Zeichen’ (War of sym­bols) was pub­lished in May 2009.

www.mira4.com

www.stadtgespraeche.com

Timothy Donaldson (UK) — 2 February 2010

Timothy Donaldson is a let­ter­worker. He devel­oped an obses­sive interest in drawing during his first decade which matured into another obses­sion with writing during his second one. During his third decade he was a jour­neyman sign­writer.
By his fourth decade he had become a let­tering artist and type designer and a lec­turer at Stafford College School of Art. Now into his fifth decade, he focuses on the convergence(s) of research, prac­tice and teaching in his work at University College Falmouth, UK.
www.timothydonaldson.com

Johannes Bergerhausen (DE) — 2 February 2010

Prof. Johannes Bergerhausen, born 1965 in Bonn, Germany, studied Communication Design at the University of Applied Sciences in Düsseldorf. From 1993 to 2000, he lived and worked in Paris. First he col­lab­o­rated with the Founders of Grapus, Gérard Paris-Clavel and Pierre Bernard, then he founded his own office. In 1998 he was awarded a grant from the French Centre National des Arts Plastiques for a typo­graphic research project on the ASCII-Code. He returned to Germany in 2000 and, since 2002, is Professor of Typography at the University of Applied Sciences in Mainz. Lectures in Amiens, Beirut, Berlin, Dubai, Frankfurt, London, Paris, Prague, Rotterdam, San Francisco, Weimar. Since 2004, he is working on the decodeunicode.org project, sup­ported by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research, which went online in 2005. Semester of research 2007 in Paris.
www.decodeunicode.org

Marius Watz (NO) — 2 March 2010

Marius Watz is an artist working with visual abstrac­tion through gen­er­a­tive sys­tems. After aban­doning his studies in Computer Science, he pur­sued graphic design and media art in par­allel, becoming known for his hard-edged geo­metric com­po­si­tions and bold use of colors. After win­ning mul­tiple awards for his design work, he was fea­tured in I.D. Magazine’s “40 under 30” list in 2000.
In 2002 Watz quit design to focus on his art­work, exploring soft­ware processes as an aes­thetic medium. He has since exhib­ited at venues like Todaysart (The Hague), Künstlerhaus (Vienna), Melkweg (Amsterdam), ITAU Cultural (São Paulo) and Club Transmediale (Berlin). He con­tinues to explore the bound­aries of code as method, pro­ducing work that ranges from real­time soft­ware works to phys­ical output using dig­ital fab­ri­ca­tion technology.
In 2005 Watz founded Generator.x, a cura­to­rial plat­form that has resulted in a series of events related to gen­er­a­tive art and design, including a con­fer­ence, a trav­el­ling exhi­bi­tion and an audio­vi­sual con­cert tour. The most recent incar­na­tion, Generator.x 2.0, focused on dig­ital fab­ri­ca­tion and com­pu­ta­tional archi­tec­tural processes and was a part of the Club Transmediale 2008 festival.
Watz is a lec­turer at the Oslo School of Architecture and at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts, Department of design. He presents work­shops and lec­tures on com­pu­ta­tional aes­thetics, live cinema and dig­ital fab­ri­ca­tion. He also does audio­vi­sual per­for­mances with musi­cian Alexander Rishaug.
Marius Watz is rep­re­sented by [DAM]Berlin. He is cur­rently based in Oslo and New York.
www.unlekker.net

Hannah Higgins (US) — 2 April 2010

An Associate Professor in the Department of Art History at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Higgins is cur­rently a Senior Fellow at the Phillips-UIUC Center for the Study of Modern Art in Washington and the daughter of Fluxus artists Alison Knowles and Dick Higgins. Higgins is the author of Fluxus Experience (University of California Press, 2002) and The Grid Book (MIT Press, 2009). Her recent work charts the his­tory of Western cul­ture through the lens of its grids from the brick to the World Wide Web.
She is cur­rently fin­ishing an edited anthology with Douglas Kahn called Mainframe Experimentalism, which details the main­frame phase of exper­i­mental com­puter art from 1960–1970 (University of California Press, expected 2010). She is also working on a book on the legacy of Black Mountain College, a small school in North Carolina. This project is pro­vi­sion­ally called The Long Shadow of the Supine Dome.