Photograph: © Vitra Design Museum, Bettina Matthiesen. 

July 25, 2019 / Events, News
Better Nature

Curated by Viviane Stappmans, Better Nature opened on the 19th July at Vitra Design Museum Gallery at the Vitra Campus, Weil am Rhein. This first solo show includes six projects made between 2009 and 2019. 

'British artist Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg (born in London in 1982) investigates the relationship between nature and the man-made, exploring how this interconnection changes through advances in design and technology. The resulting artworks tell evocative stories that are at once provocative and ironic. From 20 July to 24 November 2019, the Vitra Design Museum Gallery presents a solo exhibition tracing Ginsberg’s journey as an artist and critical designer. Trained in architecture and interaction design, she has been especially interested in the emerging technoscience of "synthetic biology" – the design of living matter. Within this context, Ginsberg has been intrigued by the premise that underpins all approaches to design: the desire to make things »better«. But what exactly does better mean? Better for whom? And who decides? These questions, which are crucial in times of radical technological and scientific advances, are the basis of "Better Nature".'

Photograph: © Vitra Design Museum, Bettina Matthiesen.

Photograph: © Vitra Design Museum, Bettina Matthiesen.

Photograph: © Vitra Design Museum, Bettina Matthiesen.

May 11, 2019 / Studio, Events, News
Nature– Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial

The Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial opened simulataneously at the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum in NYC and at Cube design museum, Kerkrade, Netherlands, on the 10th May. The organising museums commissioned a new work, The Substitute, and a new edition of Resurrecting the Sublime where visitors can smell the extinct Orbexilum stipulatum, last seen (and smelled) in 1881, in Kentucky, US. 

Digital reconstruction of the extinct Hibiscadelphus wilderianus Rock on the southern slopes of Mount Haleakala, Maui, Hawaii, around the time of its last sighting in 1912. © Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg.

February 18, 2019 / Studio, Events, News
Resurrecting the Sublime launches at Centre Pompidou, Paris

Resurrecting the Sublime, a major new collaborative project, launches today in the exhibition La Fabrique du Vivant, curated by Marie-Ange Brayer, at the Centre Pompidou, Paris. The project is a collaboration between Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, Sissel Tolaas, and an interdisciplinary team of researchers and engineers from the biotechnology company Ginkgo Bioworks, led by Creative Director Dr. Christina Agapakis, with the support of IFF Inc. You can read more about the project here

At the Centre Pompidou, a 1m x1m suspended smell hood diffuses the smell of the extinct Hibiscadelphus wilderianus Rock, which was lost around 1912 as its habitat on ancient lava fields on the southern slopes of Mount Haleakala, Maui, Hawaii, was destroyed by colonial cattle ranching. Using DNA extracted from a pressed flower specimen from Harvard University’s Herbarium, Ginkgo’s scientists predicted and then resynthesized gene sequences that encode for fragrance-producing enzymes. From this information, Tolaas reconstructed the flowers’ smells. While we know which smell molecules the flower may have produced, the amounts are also lost. Thus, fragments of the smell mix in the hood: there is no “exact” smell. The lost landscape is reduced to its geology (a large lava boulder, as found on the slopes of Mount Haleakala), and the flower’s smell: the human connects the two, and in contrast to a natural history museum, the human becomes the specimen on view.

The work will appear in a number of exhbitions this year, in different iterations and with different flowers. For more information, visit resurrectingthesublime.com


September 13, 2018 / Daisy, Events
The Conference

I spoke at The Conference Malmö last week as part of a panel on Designing Nature, and introduced some of the new projects we're working on in the studio... check out the talk here.

 

September 13, 2016 / Daisy, Events
London Design Festival 2016

 

I'm looking forward to doing two talks at this month's London Design Festival, taking a little time out from my PhD write-up (6 months to go!). 

This Saturday, I'll be talking about my favourite design topic, turning Shit into Gold with radical design expert Cat Rossi and Luca Cipelletti, the director of Italy's extraordinary Museo della Merda aka The Shit Museum. The talk is part of Dirty Furniture Magazine's festival exhibition, Toilet Break. Free tickets here.

As part of the Global Design Forum hosted at the V&A Museum, I'll be joining curator Rory Hyde and Anders Sandberg of Oxford University's Future of Humanity Institute to discuss Imagination for the Future, exploring different methods to project into our future. Tickets here.

 



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Photograph: © Vitra Design Museum, Bettina Matthiesen. 

Photograph: © Vitra Design Museum, Bettina Matthiesen.

Photograph: © Vitra Design Museum, Bettina Matthiesen.

Photograph: © Vitra Design Museum, Bettina Matthiesen.

Digital reconstruction of the extinct Hibiscadelphus wilderianus Rock on the southern slopes of Mount Haleakala, Maui, Hawaii, around the time of its last sighting in 1912. © Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg.