Book release and talk, featuring Markus Weisbeck & Silke Hohmann (Monopol Magazin)
Friday, 23 January 2015, 8:30pm
Pro qm
Almstadtstraße 48-50
D-10119 Berlin
Images are at the core of contemporary communication. No message, no design and no research is without images. We find ourselves in the age of images, but the required culture of designing is in arrears. SPACE FOR VISUAL RESEARCH proposes a teaching, a laboratory, and a manual. It is aiming for abstract images that are independent of visual references, and emerge from a free authorship of the designer. On 23 January, Markus Weisbeck will discuss the role of graphic design in art history as well and his approaches to abstract design thinking with Silke Hohmann, editor at Monopol Magazin.
About
Markus Weisbeck, who founded SPACE FOR VISUAL RESEARCH together with Mathias Schmitt and Michael Ott in 2013 at Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, introduces the project’s programme in an interview with Alex Marashian: “It’s possible that a method for the systematic teaching of form via abstraction could be developed. If you do graphic design with abstract images, you are more focused on composition and less distracted by questions of meaning.”
The publication of the same name as lab-log is able to assert its claim by demonstrating different modes of abstraction in 13 image series by 16 designers, who experimented with optical, physical, chemical and digital tools. The compositions push the limits of depiction, iconicity and exemplariness.
In his essay the artist Liam Gillick describes the necessary failure of representation in the abstract and reevaluates this crisis as a critical potential for abstract images. The aesthetics written by Karl Schawelka traces the history of the productive abstraction of forms from nature in the arts between the poles of pattern recognition and imagination.
The transfer of perception into form was the large-scale project of Max Bense. Sophia Gräfe provides insight into the thinking of the information aesthetician and the design theory of the 1960s. In the attempt to understand thinking in an aesthetic way and images as forms of thinking, the curriculum of the SPACE FOR VISUAL RESEARCH presents “the reflected investigation of the interrelation between knowledge and its representation, which trains the visual rhetoric of our thoughts and sentiments.”
SPACE FOR VISUAL RESEARCH has been published by Spector Books with two artistic interventions by Jason Dodge and E.Roon Kang and an original print by Enno Pötschke in autumn 2014.
Language: English/German
Pages: 184 pages
Format: 22.5 cm × 32.0 cm
Price: 26 Euros
Publisher: Spector Books
Editors-in-Chief: Markus Weisbeck, Michael Ott & Mathias Schmitt
Editorial advice: Alex Marashian
Text editing: Sophia Gräfe
With works by: Florian Apel, Manuel Birnbacher, Florian Bräunlich, Christian Krüger, Philotheus Nisch, Michael Ott, Enno Pötschke, Johannes Rinkenburger, Michael Paul Romstöck, Mathias Schmitt, Peter Schwartz, René Schwolow, Johannes Siebler, Anna Teuber, Julia Wagner & Markus Weisbeck
Image editing: Michael Ott & Mathias Schmitt
Graphic design: Enno Pötschke
Translation: Anton Hart
Proofreading: Romy Weinhold
Production: Benedict Press
Publication © 2014: Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, Faculty of Art and Design, Visual Communication (Graphic Design)
