PHOTOGRAPHY
with Milo Keller
Following the success of the exhibition resulting from the Automated Photography research project at Paris Photo in 2021 and then at the Galerie l'elac in 2022, the ECAL is exporting this project to Plateform-L in Seoul from 17 September to 8 October 2022, through an immersive audiovisual exhibition.
FINE ARTS
Symposium : HOW SOON IS NOW? HISTORIES AND FIGURES OF YOUTH This symposium is the first stage of the research project How Soon Is Now? Histories and Figures of Youth. It questions “youth” as a conceptual, aesthetic, andpolitical figure born with modernity in the visual arts, popular culture, and the humanities. At the same time, this project proposes to examine the implications ofthe problematic category of "youth" in contemporary art and thought. By exploring the processes in which youth is constituted through its forms of representation, thisproject intends to render intelligible the aesthetic and political dimensions of youth, and to grasp it as a historical allegory allowing for a reconsideration of thecontemporary in the light of its most lively site. What image(s) does the notion of youth carry with it? What idea does it have of itself? How can we talk about it beyond ingrained ideas and the fantasies that society projects on it (at least in Western culture), making it simultaneously a force, a market, an age, a culture, a piece of a history which which we only began writing inthe twentieth-century, and which today has reached its critical stage? In recent history, the notion of youth has so often been conflated with “bringing down the house” that we now expect everything from it: to reinvent us, to shake us up, to carry us, to succeed in what others have failed at (establishing the most open communities possible), to build bridges for the future, to be radical, to be uncompromising where anyone outside of youth has already given up, to be desirable where others are overwhelmed. But with what means? If not those that young people make themselves, for themselves, with elements that they alone will have chosen? With their culture, their places, their clandestinity. Because that which is not yet over happens in the shadows of the world. Youth is a secret. “How Soon Is Now?”, The Smiths once asked. When is it, now?
with Patrick Keller
(Re-)Viewing Paik is a joint research initiative between Switzerland and South-Korea that involves Prof. Patrick Keller from ECAL/University of Art and Design Lausanne (HES-SO), Dr. Sang Ae Park from the Nam June Paik Art Center and archives (NJPAC) in South Korea, and Dr. Christian Babski from fabric | ch, an architecture and information technology collective based in Lausanne. The main long-term objective of this joint and interdisciplinary research, based on the archives of Korean artist Nam June Paik (1932–2006), is to establish novel types of online exhibition curating and design, which must take shape digitally at any viewer's (visitor's) place or housing, and to virtually populate it, in an autonomous way. The results of this initial joint work, which will take the form of a functional "demo" (proof of concept), will be used in parallel to formulate a more detailed research project which will then be submitted to a national funding agency.
with Davide Fornari, Jonas Berthod
The research project Swiss Graphic Design and Typography Revisited is divided into three sub-projects: ‘Principles of Education’, ‘Networks of Practice’ and ‘Strategies of Dissemination’. This three-year project is the biggest research collaboration established in the design field since the SNSF began its activities.
Artificial Intelligence-Aided Type Design AIZI research projects is a collaboration between ECAL and EPFL Computer Vision Laboratory. Its aim is to develop an artificial intelligence tool to help the creation of hanzi. The idea is to train an AI to generate glyphs from a small number of ‘seed’ characters, using Generative Adversarial Network (GAN): two algorithms fighting each other, endlessly attempting to outperform one another. Chinese script is rich of thousands of hanzi, but their construction is, on many point, very logical and systematic. It processes by assembling a limited number of radicals in order to produce new signs. For the designer, a major difficulty is that depending of the surrounding components, the design of the radicals changes, always self-adapting to the context, in order to achieve harmonious forms.
with Davide Fornari, Matthieu Cortat, Jonas Berthod, Chiara Barbieri
Jan Tschichold’s essay Die neue Typographie (The New Typography, 1928) is a game-changing book, acclaimed as the curtain raiser of modern graphic design. While it takes the form of a critical essay and an operative manual, its sources have been understudied because of their difficult identification. This project aims to reconstruct the body of sources that Tschichold drew on to understand the broader cultural context of the book, through an international conference on its impact and a travelling exhibition.
This research focusses on ways explored in typography to use letters as means of expression in order to emphasize the semantic, phonetic or visual qualities of language.
with Stéphane Kropf, Thibault Walter
Phantom Power questions the social configurations of the non-audible narratives of aural practices in performances and public sound installations.
with François Bovier
To date, there is no European-wide history of video art. It is this gap that the present research programme proposes to fill. Firstly by gathering data on the artists, the works and the events that enabled the emergence of this new artistic practice in the 1960s, or that were important in its development in the following years in Europe, and by bringing to light specific national conditions of production and distribution.
with Younès Klouche Camille Blin, Christophe Guberan, Anniina Koivu, Julie Richoz, Anthony Guex, Chris Kabel
The potential of shape memory materials in furniture design.
with Florian Amoser, Claus Gunti, Milo Keller
The Automated Photography research project (2019–2021) is conducted by Milo Keller in the framework of the MA in Photography at ECAL/University of Art and Design Lausanne. It is a continuation of the research project Augmented Photography, equally conducted at ECAL (2016–2017), which aimed to question the mutability of the digital image, transformed both in its physical materiality and in its virtual expression.
Enabled by Design is a joint research project between EPFL and ECAL, funded by Gebert Rüf Stiftung, which aims to foster collaboration between young entrepreneurs involved in technological projects and designers.
The research project Design management for start-ups focused on the integration of design in innovation processes. Its objective was to promote the use of design within mainly technological start-ups and to create tools and methodologies to foster collaboration between designers and entrepreneurs.
This research project looks into the shift from video art to new media, taking a major but little-studied event, the Locarno VideoArt Festival (1980-2001), as a case study: a pioneering space for broadcasting video art in Europe and a place for exploring electronic art which took place every year from 1980 to 2001 on Monte Verità.
MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN
with Mario de Vega
This project is both a book and a portable server programmed to open a WiFi network. Your smartphone becomes a sound device by producing an assigned frequency and creating small ephemeral communities. Programming ECAL/Callum Ross
The research project Smartphone Peripheral Companions explores new forms of interaction with the data flows passing through our smartphone, questioning the status of total object that this device has acquired.
The project is an investigation into the creative process of visual art through the concept of aurality, which explores sound, listening and auditory perception from a cultural perspective. It is about stepping beyond object culture to look at listening as part of the broader and richer cultural approach developed by studying the case of ECAL, its (human) actors and (non-human) agents.
with Camille Blin, Augustin Scott de Martinville, Maxime Guyon, Nicolas Polli Margherita Banchi, Thilo Alex Brunner, Christophe Guberan, Carolien Niebling
Aesthetics of Sustainability aims to explore and define the aesthetics of a new generation of sustainable materials.
Letterforms carry messages – in public space, they are powerful propaganda tools. Witness to this fact are the inscriptions placed on display by Emperors to showcase their power across the Roman Empire. During a Summer School at the Swiss Institute in Rome, ECAL MA in Type Design and ISIA Urbino students explored a more recent avatar of this communication tool.
Bobst Graphic, 1972–1981, with a preface by François Rappo, an interview with six important actors and further selected texts, documents, at a distance of 48 years, the hitherto relatively unknown history of a Bobst company division: Bobst Graphic, pioneers in photocomposition.
with Calum Douglas, Philippe Fragnière, Maxime Guyon, Benoît Jeannet, Marvin Leuvrey, Calypso Mahieu, Nicolas Polli, Jean-Vincent Simonet, Justinas Vilutis Anniina Koivu, Davide Fornari, Carolien Niebling
The Fuori catalogo research project calls into question the way we think about the life cycles of contemporary design objects by shifting focus from a product’s birth and lifespan to its “end moment”.
A Materialist History of Exhibitions
with Milo Keller Maxime Guyon, Joël Vacheron
Can we count on the sausage to provide a solution, in order to reduce the consumption of meat? And can the use of new ingredients increase the diversity of our diets? Can the sausage make a considerable contribution to a sustainable food culture? To answer these questions, a chef of molecular gastronomy, a master butcher and a designer have teamed up to look into sausage production techniques and potential new ingredients – such as insects, nuts, and legumes – to reinvent the sausage of the future.
Artists’ films, video art and exhibition of moving images in French-speaking Switzerland
The design research I&IC (Inhabiting and Interfacing the Cloud(s), explores the creation of counter-proposals to the current expression of “Cloud Computing”, particularly in its forms intended for private individuals and end users (“Personal Cloud”).
The Senior Living Lab is a laboratory dedicated to the quality of life and welfare of seniors and their caregivers.
Digital Strategies in Genre-Defining Magazines
Performance and situated action, from social sciences to artistic practices
This project questions the potential for glass in contemporary art and design to adopt a pragmatic approach with a view to producing extraordinary results. This research project also offers a cutting- edge model in the field of creative research, which places students at the heart of the process.
FINE ARTS
John Graham Ballard’s literary technique influenced by Surrealism, his explicit or indirect references to artworks or artpractices and the relationships the author had with the british Pop artists attest that The Atrocity Exhibition has an affinity with the discipline of contemporary art. The aim of this research project was to design the parameters of an exhibition dedicated to The Atrocity Exhibition. The student-researchers inquired into the status of exhibitions - such as documentary, historical or thematical – and into more recent experimental displays. They decided to conceive an exhibition that articulated documentary restitution and creation. The few selected documents were used to blur the notions of context and reference in order to echo with the ambiguous media criticism in Ballard's work. The display structure created for the exhibition points towards devices as eclectic as contemporary commercial fairs, world’s fairs or the Independent Group’s Pavilions, in an elliptic and entropic gesture involving oblivion, decay, mutation and sedimentation. A book gathers all the lectures by invited experts, the interventions by the professors and the results of the sudents’ research in the conception of this exhibition. Main applicant Ecole cantonale d’art de Lausanne (ECAL) Julien Fronsacq (project leader) Andreas Hochuli (assistant) Students of Master en Arts Visuels de l’ECAL Partners Circuit, centre d'art contemporain, Lausanne Maison d’Ailleurs, Yverdon-les-Bains Period From February 2012 to February 2013 Publication Atrocity Exhibition Archive Paradoxe Déambulations dans La Foire aux atrocités Published by ECAL with the support of HES-SO Edited by Julien Fronsacq Funded by the HES-SO (University of Applied Sciences Western Switzerland)
by Thibault Brevet, Mark Mussler, Happy Pets, Cem Sever
PRODUCT DESIGN
PRODUCT DESIGN
PRODUCT DESIGN
FILM STUDIES