ARTIST’S STATEMENT:
Our installation work is always a chance for us to push some of the more experimental ideas and techniques produced by our studio. There is always nostalgia for some of the ideas in the studio that never really get a fair chance to be fully tested. These ideas are usually the ones that are a little more radical in their agenda or implementation. It is this threshold of implausibility that we like to test with our installations, they are a chance for us to explain what our studio dreams about when it sleeps.
Through an efficient complexity, we try to offset a form of extreme digital design and fabrication with a simple and playful idea. Every piece is meant to showcase the space between the anxiousness and optimism that exists in every experiment. As architects we can’t really control ourselves, so every project turns into a spatial installation. We have realized that it is the spatial nature of these pieces that invite them to be experienced rather than viewed. We take advantage of this invitation to propose new ways to organize, see, feel, and make things. These Installations become the vehicles for us to blend the studio’s dreams about color, fabrication, geometry, material, space and all other mediums that we use in the studio. In that sense, the work is an extension of the studio in its purest form.
An exciting part of this type of work is that it always re-injects itself back into the studio and helps invigorate the more typical work that we do. Our hope is that we will begin to blur the line between everyday design and art.
BIO:
SOFTlab is a design studio based in New York City. The studio was created by Jose Gonzalez and Michael Szivos, shortly after receiving graduate degrees in architecture from the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia University. The studio has since been involved in the design and production of projects across almost every medium, from digitally fabricated large-scale sculpture, to interactive design, to large-scale digital video installations. As the studio adjusted to a wide range of projects , it began to focus less on the medium and style and more on ideas.
As a studio, SOFTlab, embraces projects that are strange, difficult, blurry, and straddle multiple mediums. The constraints of each project are treated as opportunities that are tested through a collaborative studio environment with the hopes of solving typical problems in new ways, with new tools. Through the studio’s unique blend of backgrounds as designers, artists, architects and educators we are able to approach every project from a fresh perspective to create rich spatial, graphic, interactive and visual experiences. SOFTlab privileges adaptability and infuses every project with the capacity to evolve and grow into something new and unexpected. Rather than thinking of a project as finished, the studio thinks of a project as a chance to cultivate intelligent change. By mixing research, creativity and technology with a strong desire to make working fun, SOFTlab attempts to create new and unique experiences.
SOFTlab has produced a wide range of design projects and collaborated with various artists, designers, publications and institutions including MoMA, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The New York Times, eVolo Magazine, Surface Magazine, Columbia University and Pratt Institute. The studio has also exhibited work in galleries throughout New York City.
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Design Team: Carrie McKnelly and Elliot White
Installation: Julia Schleppe and Brandt Graves
Photo Credit: Softlab and Alan R Tansey
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