In the late 1970s a group of people living in the borough of Hackney in East London began building a structure on a derelict lot in their neighborhood. They continued building until last January. The story of the project’s origins are a mystery. All that is known is that because the residents couldn’t decide on what they wanted to build, they made three rules. One: they would build without discussion, plan or blueprint. Two, when they were on the building site, no one was allowed to speak. And three, the building would never be completed, in that anyone at any point could decide to take it in a new direction. So the structure was built for thirty years, until last year when the council sold the land to a developer who tore it down in January.
The Rest is Silence is an artist book by Emanuel Almborg, designed by Konst & Teknik and published by our recently set up publisher Andperseand. Get your own copy at www.andperseand.se.
A book for our friends at Libraryman and Our Legacy with Dutch photographer Viviane Sassen.
Linkli.st is a website for sharing lists with links. An ongoing collaboration with Martin Ström.
BAC is the abbreviation of Baltic Art Center, a Swedish art institution based on the island of Gotland in the Baltic Sea. During the last years the organization has undergone a transformation from a traditional exhibition space to a flexible and dynamic production office and work place for artists and curators. To visualize this change a redesign was commissioned.
Based on BAC’s former typographical framework — a typeface inspired by an old sign on the facade of the previous exhibition space — we extended the identity with three new weights and a treatment playing with the idea of a dynamic institution in constant change.
Thanks to Aron Kullander for type design assistance.
The Fifth Tallinn Applied Art Triennial was aiming to challenge participants to cast aside artist-, designer- and producer-centred approaches by offering exhibition visitors an opportunity to (re-) create the exhibited work themselves. The artists were requested to submit a (sample) work as well as instructions on how to make it, both were then put on display in the exhibition.
Together with Risto Kalmre we designed the visual identity for the triennial. The exhibition runs until February 21st, 2010. More info: www.trtr.ee
Future Exhibitions is the first in a series of bilingual, yearly publications published by Riksutställningar (Swedish Travelling Exhibitions), highlighting new tendencies and trends within the exhibition world. The publication is designed as a hybrid of book, magazine and report with all headline typefaces taken from the online collaborative font creation tool and community FontStruct—a response to recurring discussions in the publication about amateurism, participation and open source in the context of the museum.
When asked to design and produce the website for Swedish design and architecture office Uglycute, we proposed to ignore the traditional relationship between commissioner and designer, and turn the entire process into one collaborative workshop. During two days in April, we worked together with Uglycute themselves, Martin Ström (programming) and Ola Bergengren (photography) on the new Uglycute homepage in their studio. We will later reverse this workshop, building interior to our new studio during two days in the summer.
In Real Life was an exhibition curated by Laurel Ptak at Capricious Space in Brooklyn, that invited innovative online art initiatives to each come and do a 4-hour residency inside the space of the gallery. The event attempted to explore how the distribution, production, analysis, and consumption of culture rapidly are evolving in an online context.
Inspired by the ambiguous nature of the exhibition, and its aim to explore the blurred border between the physical and the digital world, we designed the webpage and the catalogue as one and the same thing, using CSS technology only. The website was designed to fit the format of the newsprint catalogue and the catalogue was simply created by generating a printer file straight from the web browser.
For the independent Swedish record label Pluxemburg we designed a website that works as an aggregator, automatically gathering all its content from different social networks where the label is present, thus giving the label time to participate in communities rather than making sure the official webpage is up to date. In collaboration with Martin Ström.
Copypastecharacter.com is an online tool that gives people easy access to a selection of useful (and useless) typographic characters. In collaboration with Martin Ström.
Mono.Kultur is a magazine from Berlin. The 18th issue features two interviews with Dutch experimental architects MVRDV—one with visionary theorist Winy Maas, and one with the two more formalistic partners, Jacob van Rijs and Nathalie de Vries. Both interviews run parallell through-out the magazine but differ in terms of paper and printing based on the character of each talk. Images are treated in absolute relation to the text, to reflect MVRDV's faschination for data and statistics.
Trace a Face is a collaboration between Konst & Teknik and Jonathan Puckey. 13 fellow artist and designers were asked to trace a face using the Delaunay Raster, a custom-written Scriptographer image vectorization tool for Adobe Illustrator by Jonathan Puckey. The tool combines the intuitive and motion based character of a brush or a pencil with the distortive and manipulating characteristics of a filter.
The publication aims to encourage and discuss the development and usage of modern tools in contemporary graphic design practice. It was released in connection with a lecture given by Jonathan Puckey in Stockholm, November 2008, and is the first in an ongoing series of collaborative publications initiated by Konst & Teknik.
Info on stores carrying Trace a Face and online ordering can be found at www.andperseand.se
Is it possible to make a photograph of New Jersey regardless of where you are in the world?
is the title of a photo exhibition curated by Laurel Ptak, raising questions on how the internet and globalization has changed our idea of place.
The layout of the catalogue and the website is inspired by the way search engines deals with visual content—images are treated without respect for visual qualities and are instead arranged based on meta data.
www.aphotographofnewjersey.com
The exhibition was shown at the Pierro Gallery, South Orange, NJ, April 6–May 25, 2008.
Excerpt is a book series influenced by the current blog culture and its loose attitude to publishing. The series will contain shorter essays, collections of articles, republishing of older texts on art, philosophy and architecture. First out is Deleuze och mångfaldens veck, edited by Helena Mattsson and Sven-Olov Wallenstein.
The creative freedom of publishing online is not only appreciated by writers—the same attitude can also be found among typographers and type designers. The demands on a finished, commercial typeface are however very high and many digital tryouts never leave the screen. To give these unfinished typefaces a (new) life, we have dedicated the covers of the Excerpt series to them. First out is our own Aurora Neu, Garnitur II. Every new cover will feature another unpublished typeface from a different designer.
Excerpt is published by AXL Books.
Site is a quarterly journal for contemporary art, architecture, cinema, and philosophy launched in 2001. Starting with its 20th issue, the editors decided to abandon the former bilingual form and publish the journal in English only. For that reason a redesign was commissioned.
With the characteristics of the former Site in mind, the new format is designed with more white space, an openess towards the use of images and an updated typography.
Based on the journal's name, concept and Swedish origin, the typeface Site Specific—with clear references to the typeface Tratex, used on all Swedish road signs—was created for use in headlines and image captions.
Order online at www.sitemagazine.net.
Exhibition at Sandvikens Konsthall by Konst & Teknik on the foundations of decision making in graphic design.
The exhibition consists of a poster series and a publication with talks between Konst & Teknik and graphic designers Martin Frostner, Henrik Nygren, Jens Schildt and Andreas och Fredrika.
The german design studio Mendell & Oberer designed in 1984 a famous poster with the statement “Design is art that makes itself useful”. The poster is beautifully set in a geometric stencil typeface, cut up in different vivid colors.
The choice of typography and color is fascinating when thinking of the message of the text. Does a random colored stencil in this context have a useful function or must not this instead be seen as an ornamental choice?
Morse Alphabet is an attempt to re-inject functionality to the stenciled letter-form, based on the construction of Morse code.
Identity for Klubb:Europa, a club tour traveling through Sweden with DJs from six different european countries, initiated by Goethe-Institut Schweden and the German Embassy in Stockholm.
The identity is based on onomatopoeic descriptions for sounds in club environments, collected through an online survey with people from the participating countries.
Contribution to the exhibition T(ourist)-Shirts at gallery So Stockholm.
Posters for the techno club Kornel Y Barbaro at Teatron in Stockholm. Made out of beamed bespoke typography and custom-made projections by Eskils Junker Film. Photography by Daniel Norrby.
Record cover for Pluxus Solid State. Photography by Daniel Norrby.
Get the record at www.pluxemburg.com/shop.
Bonniers Konsthall is a new venue for Swedish and international contemporary art in the centre of Stockholm.
The website is concepualized, designed and client side programmed by Konst & Teknik in collaboration with Martin Ström. It's based on two main ideas:
A collection of packaging products for christmas gifts.
Traditional newspapers come out once or twice a day after having come to a final publishable version. With online news there is never a final version, news is always in flux and can be edited at any time.
With Zeitgeist we wanted to show this changing of news by bringing it back to a traditional newspaper format. Using different design treatments we created a number of articles looking at characteristics of online news.
Zeitgeist was awarded the
Items/Spinhex & Industrieprijs 2006, in Items Magazine and a Silver at the Kolla Award 2007.
Collaboration with Jonathan Puckey.
Books about computer languages rarely seem to be designed to express creativity or to encourage the use of programming as a tool for visual and artistic work.
During a workshop with London based design group Åbäke, we were asked to borrow a book in a library, redesign the cover and put the book back in the library. We chose to design a new cover for a book about the programming language AppleScript, by showing how to make the original cover − using AppleScript.
Publication and poster for the exhibition Dresscode about gender and fashion. The project was a collaboration between Beckmans College of Design and Rosebud and was shown at Bruno Götgatsbacken during the summer of 2005.
While working on the project we were trying to imagine a metrosexual printed matter — some kind of publication with a natural need to be more than just one thing at the same time.
Collaboration with Arvid Tappert and Lydia Putkinen.
Ongoing experiments with the concept of reality in moving pictures.
Colhour is a system for visualizing time, based on the spectrum of the rainbow. Every variable in the clock—second, minute, hour, day, month and year—cycles through the colors of the spectrum, beginning with the color purple.
More on Colhour and applications of the system: www.harald.net/colhour
Colhour is an ongoing project and collaboration with Martin Ström.
Catalogue and poster for the exhibition 4-Play, showing work from the students in the fourth year at the Royal College of Art in Stockholm.
Collaboration with Hanne Lindberg.
Together with a few other plastic tools the pen belongs to a rare but fascinating group of objects—objects we have come to consider natural to steal from one and other.
To enlighten the real story and the actual value behind every pen, Konst & Teknik always encapsulates a signed receipt for every pen we buy. We kindly encourage our friends to do the same.
Pen Pals was part of the Encounters workshop and exhibition at Färgfabriken, Stockholm 2005.
A book with questions and answers found at howthingswork.virginia.edu. By using experimental typography, the aim is to explain or give a hint to the answers of the questions. As an attempt to deal with existing content found on the web, the questions and answers havn't been edited at all.
Viragelic is a simple experiment with random sound and motion. A never-ending live concert playing a generated show unique for each visitor.
Three layers of different colored objects are randomly positioned in a grid. Each color representing one type of sound. Three solid squares moves over the grid randomly, triggering sounds when on top of objects with the same color.
The project was released as screen saver on floppy discs by Promenade Recordings in 2002 and has been featured in various online and offline publications.
Printed programs for two series of lectures for the students at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie.
The programs were designed as notebooks, providing the attendee with both the information of each lecture as well as a chance for her/him to write down notes during the attended lecture.
Lyrics for a song made out of spam e-mails. Made in a workshop on text in public space with poet Pieter Boskma and graphic designer Roosje Klap. Made into a song by Karl Josephson and Sverrir Gudnason.
Tabloid magazine about window shopping and the collaboration between Beckmans Collage of Design and Gallerian. About cheap and expensive, private and public.
Collaboration with Li Bjurholm and Ulrika Hellberg.
Konst & Teknik is a graphic design office based in Stockholm, Sweden dealing with art, technology and things in between. Konst & Teknik works with commissioned and self-initiated projects, in both cultural and commercial contexts. The work is mainly applied on printed matter or the Internet, often in close collaboration with programmer Martin Ström.
Konst & Teknik
information@konst-teknik.se
Twitter: www.twitter.com/konst_teknik
linkli.st: linkli.st/konst-teknik
Mattias Jakobsson
BA Graphic Design, Beckmans College of Design, 2006
mattias@konst-teknik.se
+46(0)702 644 238
Peter Ström
BA Graphic Design, Gerrit Rietveld Academie, 2006
peter@konst-teknik.se
+46(0)706 531 175
Address:
Konst & Teknik
Rutger Fuchsgatan 9
11667 Stockholm
Sweden
If you are in New York this weekend, or the next one, or the one after that, or even the one after that—do not miss out on the exhibition “In Real Life” at the Capricious Space in Brooklyn, for which we designed the website/newsprint (it’s the same thing).