Richard Elaver
Bio-digital Design
7pm, Thursday, Sept 22
Room 100, Art Building
Growing objects
Starting with computation and natural mutation as sources for design development, my work integrates mathematical structures that replicate variance in nature. Each form is built through an unfolding expression of potential, revealing semi-determinant authorship through similarities and deviations, allowing the affordances of unpredictability to be a significant part of the process of form generation.
My current work is in the design and creation of modular systems used to construct sculptural and functional objects. The work is an investigation of organic, interactive building units. Taking a cue from L-system fractals, individual pieces accumulate into complex organic structures though simple connections of varying elements. Each piece bridges to several additional pieces, unfolding a cellular or plant-like structure as they are assembled.
Biography
Richard Elaver is a designer and metalsmith working in the overlapping spheres of art, design, and technology. In 2006, he completed a Fulbright Fellowship in the Netherlands where he worked with Droog Design and studied the history of design at the University of Leiden. In his work, Elaver integrates the tools of industrial design with the craft of metalsmithing. He develops computer simulations of biological phenomena, and uses them to create design objects.
Elaver received his Bachelors degree from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and his MFA from the Cranbrook Academy of Art. Following several years of work experience both as a jeweler and industrial designer, he is now an Assistant Professor of Industrial Design at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina.
This lecture sponsored by the Department of Art and Armstrong Interactive Media Studies
Jacob Tonski is a pragmatic optimist whose work explores dynamic balance.
A self-adjusting platform makes everyone the same height, probing ideas of equality and the origins of power. A larger-than-life top spins about the room, wobbling through themes of pleasure, danger, youth and decay.
These and other human-scale objects, both amusing and threatening, find an uncanny identity between toys and tools. The forces of time and gravity serve in these works as foils for those things we are powerless to direct in our lives, and with which we must instead dance and negotiate.
Tonski holds an MFA from the Design | Media Arts department at UCLA. He studied computer science at Brown University and worked as a Technical Director at Pixar Animation Studios. He has lived in Berkeley, Barcelona, Los Angeles, Paris and Providence, grew up in West Virginia, and is currently an Assistant Professor of Art and Interactive Media Studies at Miami University of Ohio.