Sam Jacob
Ground Xerox: Architectural Doppelgängers & Design Doubles
25 May 6-7pm
In China the art of faking has become a fully-fledged industry. The culture of copies stretches from the Venetian Macao hotel (a copy of a Las Vegas copy) to Dafen, an entire village of workers reproducing oil masterpieces stroke for stroke. Jacob's talk will explore this industrious fakery. What are its consequences for creative practice? Should we embrace copying as a new starting point for originality? And crucially, is anything truly original?
Sam Jacob is an architect and critic. He is a founding director of FAT, an internationally recognised architecture practice where he has been responsible for a range of award-winning projects in the UK and abroad, including the Heerlijkheid Hoogvliet, a cultural centre and park in Rotterdam. Jacob has taught and lectured at universities in Europe and the USA, currently at Yale, and at the Architectural Association where his unit's work explores the architectural potential of the deep copy. He writes Strangeharvest.com and is a contributing editor to Icon.
top picture credit Contrasts Gallery
credit Sylvain Deleu
Noam Toran and Onkar Kular
End Credits
26 May 6-7pm
Long-term collaborators Toran and Kular make imaginative installations that explore the relationship between design and film. Using past projects to describe their philosophy, the pair will talk about their MacGuffin Library (2008), a series of invented plots and fictional props (MacGuffin being a word Hitchcock used to describe an object around which the plot revolves), and I Cling to Virtue (2010), a vast and eerie collection of curiosities – the imagined belongings of a fictional family – made by rapid prototyping.
Noam Toran is a senior tutor in the Department of Design Interactions at theRoyal College of Art, where Onkar Kular is a design products tutor. Brought together by a love of cinema, their collaborative work involves creating objects and films that reflect on the intersection between moving image, mass culture, design and psychology. Toran and Kular give lectures worldwide and their films and installationshave appeared at the Museum of Modern Art, the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Saint Étienne Design Biennial.
To reserve seats visit clerkenwelldesignweek.com/icon-minds
