Let’s get rid of all dictates.

Let’s get rid of all dictates.

I remember buying a poster from the Irish artist Les Levine, showing George Bush senior holding his hand up, shouting: “No new artists!” Was this supposed to portray Bush’s ultimate attempt to stop artistic activism, or his final endeavour to dictate other people’s minds? I never found the answer but it certainly felt that way.

Sometime in the late nineties, after having reorganized my studio, I wrote the following: “Graphic design is entering a new era. It will assimilate visual, complex relational tasks, which requires total cross-platform thinking, make use of the most appropriate technologies & link a general to a specialist approach. As designers, we will have to look beyond the boundaries of design, starting from a sharply defined visual strategy and strong interaction with viewers’ expectations. Design with social and economic relevance. Sometimes related to art, at other times to technology.”

One decade on and two Integrated conferences later, this observation seems not to have lost any of its relevance. Since then, numerous discussions with designers, artists, teachers, curators, clients and –last but not least– students, have focused the minds and confirmed our earlier assessment: today’s design and artistic landscape has become more complex and more complicated, but also more interesting - fascinating, even. Over the same period, human activities – including thinking processes – have become inextricably intertwined with technology. Alongside the influence of rigid conceptual thought, intuition and passion have regained their rightful place as instigators of the creation of ‘form’. Anything goes, anywhere and everywhere, without any restrictions – which is a quite a reassuring thought.

Integrated2011 – third edition already! – is more determined than ever to establish connections between graphic design and other fields and disciplines. Integrated2011 is ambitious, inquisitive, eager to make use of a refreshing mix of images, ideas and words, with a view to uncovering the complexity of design and all processes of any kind which may occur in any creative discipline - such is the scope of Integrated. …

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