with Calypso Mahieu Laurent Soldini, Sophie Wietlisbach
The project aims to shed light on the career of Richard Authier (Lausanne, 1925–2018), who was an industrial designer at Hermes Paillard International in Yverdon-les-Bains and a pioneer of industrial design in French-speaking Switzerland.
with Jonas Berthod, Louise Paradis, Gilles Gavillet
Matter’s career was that of a multidisciplinary, international designer working across commerce and culture. He was not only a graphic artist but also a photographer, type designer, art director, teacher and film-maker. His work in the field of advertising and editorial design, his collaborations with artists, his self-commissioned work, his photography and film outputs and his long-serving position as an educator provide as many entry points to analyse the impact of migration and an international network on a graphic designer’s career. It also provides a case study to analyse the professional model of the designer working as photographer and layout artist simultaneously.
TYPE DESIGN
with Matthieu Cortat, Alice Savoie, Kai Bernau, Radim Pesko, Roland Früh
In the early age of digital type, several methods were explored to draw letterforms. One of them, the Bézier spline, an algorithm that generates curves with a small quantity of data, has the crucial advantage of sparing computer memory and processing resources. It is today the industry standard. This project aims to question and reevaluate it, to move beyond established trends, to develop innovative ideas by exploring alternative methods of drawing curves, and letterforms.
with Sophie Wietlisbach
Between the 1940s and the 1990s, three companies manufactured type components for typewriters in Switzerland: Caractères SA, Setag and Novatype. During more than fifty years, they supplied the biggest manufacturers of office machines in Europe and around the world, such as IBM, Remington, Olivetti, Paillard-Hermès or Triumph-Adler. Having held a leading position worldwide, the three manufacturers played a key role in the design, development, and production of type components and typefaces for typewriters, as well as for all kinds of impact printers.
with Quang Vinh Nguyen, Cynthia Ammann, Chi-Long Trieu
Cà phê (coffee), atisô (artichoke), xi nê ma (cinema), căng tin (canteen) or xi-măng (cement): in the Vietnamese language, many words bear the imprint of a French origin. And what if the same were true of everyday objects? Somewhere between cultural anthropology, the epistemology of Vietnamese design and the sociology of objects, this research project analyses the production of objects in Vietnam in the light of French colonisation and decolonisation.
PHOTOGRAPHY
with Milo Keller, Marco De Mutiis
The MAST Foundation is presenting the seventh edition of Foto/Industria, the world's first biennial event devoted to photography of industry and work, at a number of historic venues in Bologna and at MAST. The 12 exhibitions in Foto/Industria 2023 represent a chronology of points of view on the theme of PLAY, from the end of the 19th century to the present day. They offer an opportunity to observe and delve into the research of a selection of international artists. The ECAL is presenting an exhibition of its research project Automated Photography. An increasing number of images are produced autonomously by machines for machines with a gradual exclusion of any human intervention. Automated Photography is a research project developed by the Master Photography that addresses this situation by examining the technologies of image production and distribution such as: machine learning, CGI, photogrammetry.
with Davide Fornari, Jonas Berthod, Chiara Barbieri
The research project investigates the discourse on graphic design in Switzerland in the under-researched period from 1980 to 2020. While the 1950s and 1960s saw graphic design in Switzerland reach international recognition and commercial expansion under the label “Swiss style”, a paradigm shift emerged in the following decades. The attention of many practitioners turned away from design as a pure service for the industrial and service sector and moved towards cultural commissions on a local, national and international level. Instead of aiming for maximum return, they chose their commissions according to whether they promised them creative freedom and whether they contributed to the profiling of their portfolio in alignment with their new definition of the profession as a lifestyle. This project examines the emergence and the development of this phenomenon, which became known as “cultural graphic design”, in professional graphic design in Switzerland.
FINE ARTS
FILM STUDIES
FINE ARTS
FILM STUDIES
with François Bovier
Artists who produce archives from their own work approach archival activity as a creative gesture: here, the archive literally becomes a work of art. In parallel with the “archival impulse” that has run through contemporary art since the 1960s, this research project examines the “performative agency” of archives when they are constituted from “image acts”. The selected corpus is based on an extremely singular case, the cinematographic work of Gregory J. Markopoulos (1928-1992) and the Temenos archives.
UNITE DE THEORIE
FINE ARTS
with Vincent Normand, Stéphanie Moisdon
This research project questions what has come of youth – a conceptual, aesthetic, and political figure that was born with modernity – in the visual arts, popular culture, and the humanities. Conversely, the project addresses what the problematic category of “youth” has brought about in contemporary art and thought.
INDUSTRIAL DESIGN
MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN
with Alain Bellet, Andrea Anner, Thibault Brevet, Martin Hertig
Robotic arms have long been a common sight in many industries. They are currently making a rapid entry into art and design studios and practices. Yet, at the same time, difficulties remain in accessing the workflows and work methods demanded by these machines given a clear lack of reference resources suited for this community. The same applies to Art and Design schools, which are increasingly investing in this type of equipment, often without having the resources to run it. This research project uses applied case studies to explore and define a set of exemplary work methods, capable of both informing and inspiring future users.
PRODUCT DESIGN
with Camille Blin, Anniina Koivu, Anthony Guex, Marvin Merkel, Arthur Seguin
In 2023, the significant role of renewable energies in tackling the environmental crisis is blatant. In this context, wind power has once again been presented as a promising avenue for regions seeking to transition to renewable energy. However, concerns about their visual intrusion on surrounding environments pose a significant obstacle to their deployment. From a design perspective, this aesthetical factor is not insurmountable. On the contrary, it highlights the need for greater consideration of how we shape these technologies and integrate them into the environment and our lives. This project, completed by 16 MA Product Design Students of ECAL, has set out to explore how wind turbines can fit into natural landscapes and cultures not only sensitively, but beautifully – if we focus on their design. To complete the project effectively, a case study location was required. Fogo Island (Newfoundland, Canada), described locally as "this rock in the battering Northern Sea," was chosen due to its natural beauty, abundant wind, and tight-knit community of approximately 2,500 inhabitants. The island's climate and geography make it ideal for wind turbines. Additionally, Fogo Island is home to Shorefast, a non-profit organization dedicated to building a sustainable, renewable economy for the island. In October 2022, the students and tutors of ECAL visited and immersed themselves in Fogo Island. The project resulted in eight speculative yet practical wind turbine designs, considerately informed by various perspectives. U.F.O.G.O. is a sustainability project grounded in reality, but not limited by what already is. Collaboration Partners: Shorefast HEIG-VD/School of Management and Engineering Vaud (Marc Pellerin, Philippe Morey and Marco Viviani) Media Partner: Disegno Funding: Summer University Programme of the Board of Higher Education (DGES) State of Vaud HES-SO Recherche Transdisciplinaire en Durabilite (under the project title 'INTEGRATED WIND TURBINES’)
PHOTOGRAPHY
with Milo Keller, Clément Lambelet
From February 3 to 19, 2023, on the occasion of Yebisu International Festival for Art and Alternative Visions in Tokyo, ECAL is exporting the exhibition resulting from the Automated Photography research project, which explores the aesthetic and conceptual potential of automated photography.
PHOTOGRAPHY
with Milo Keller
Following the success of the exhibition resulting from the Automated Photography research project at Paris Photo in 2021 and then at the Galerie l'elac in 2022, the ECAL is exporting this project to Plateform-L in Seoul from 17 September to 8 October 2022, through an immersive audiovisual exhibition.
FINE ARTS
Symposium : HOW SOON IS NOW? HISTORIES AND FIGURES OF YOUTH This symposium is the first stage of the research project How Soon Is Now? Histories and Figures of Youth. It questions “youth” as a conceptual, aesthetic, andpolitical figure born with modernity in the visual arts, popular culture, and the humanities. At the same time, this project proposes to examine the implications ofthe problematic category of "youth" in contemporary art and thought. By exploring the processes in which youth is constituted through its forms of representation, thisproject intends to render intelligible the aesthetic and political dimensions of youth, and to grasp it as a historical allegory allowing for a reconsideration of thecontemporary in the light of its most lively site. What image(s) does the notion of youth carry with it? What idea does it have of itself? How can we talk about it beyond ingrained ideas and the fantasies that society projects on it (at least in Western culture), making it simultaneously a force, a market, an age, a culture, a piece of a history which which we only began writing inthe twentieth-century, and which today has reached its critical stage? In recent history, the notion of youth has so often been conflated with “bringing down the house” that we now expect everything from it: to reinvent us, to shake us up, to carry us, to succeed in what others have failed at (establishing the most open communities possible), to build bridges for the future, to be radical, to be uncompromising where anyone outside of youth has already given up, to be desirable where others are overwhelmed. But with what means? If not those that young people make themselves, for themselves, with elements that they alone will have chosen? With their culture, their places, their clandestinity. Because that which is not yet over happens in the shadows of the world. Youth is a secret. “How Soon Is Now?”, The Smiths once asked. When is it, now?
with Patrick Keller
(Re-)Viewing Paik is a joint research initiative between Switzerland and South-Korea that involves Prof. Patrick Keller from ECAL/University of Art and Design Lausanne (HES-SO), Dr. Sang Ae Park from the Nam June Paik Art Center and archives (NJPAC) in South Korea, and Dr. Christian Babski from fabric | ch, an architecture and information technology collective based in Lausanne. The main long-term objective of this joint and interdisciplinary research, based on the archives of Korean artist Nam June Paik (1932–2006), is to establish novel types of online exhibition curating and design, which must take shape digitally at any viewer's (visitor's) place or housing, and to virtually populate it, in an autonomous way. The results of this initial joint work, which will take the form of a functional "demo" (proof of concept), will be used in parallel to formulate a more detailed research project which will then be submitted to a national funding agency.
with Davide Fornari, Jonas Berthod
The research project Swiss Graphic Design and Typography Revisited is divided into three sub-projects: ‘Principles of Education’, ‘Networks of Practice’ and ‘Strategies of Dissemination’. This three-year project is the biggest research collaboration established in the design field since the SNSF began its activities.
Artificial Intelligence-Aided Type Design AIZI research projects is a collaboration between ECAL and EPFL Computer Vision Laboratory. Its aim is to develop an artificial intelligence tool to help the creation of hanzi. The idea is to train an AI to generate glyphs from a small number of ‘seed’ characters, using Generative Adversarial Network (GAN): two algorithms fighting each other, endlessly attempting to outperform one another. Chinese script is rich of thousands of hanzi, but their construction is, on many point, very logical and systematic. It processes by assembling a limited number of radicals in order to produce new signs. For the designer, a major difficulty is that depending of the surrounding components, the design of the radicals changes, always self-adapting to the context, in order to achieve harmonious forms.
with Davide Fornari, Matthieu Cortat, Jonas Berthod, Chiara Barbieri
Jan Tschichold’s essay Die neue Typographie (The New Typography, 1928) is a game-changing book, acclaimed as the curtain raiser of modern graphic design. While it takes the form of a critical essay and an operative manual, its sources have been understudied because of their difficult identification. This project aims to reconstruct the body of sources that Tschichold drew on to understand the broader cultural context of the book, through an international conference on its impact and a travelling exhibition.
This research focusses on ways explored in typography to use letters as means of expression in order to emphasize the semantic, phonetic or visual qualities of language.
with Stéphane Kropf, Thibault Walter
Phantom Power questions the social configurations of the non-audible narratives of aural practices in performances and public sound installations.
with François Bovier
To date, there is no European-wide history of video art. It is this gap that the present research programme proposes to fill. Firstly by gathering data on the artists, the works and the events that enabled the emergence of this new artistic practice in the 1960s, or that were important in its development in the following years in Europe, and by bringing to light specific national conditions of production and distribution.
with Younès Klouche Camille Blin, Christophe Guberan, Anniina Koivu, Julie Richoz, Anthony Guex, Chris Kabel
The potential of shape memory materials in furniture design.
with Florian Amoser, Claus Gunti, Milo Keller
The Automated Photography research project (2019–2021) is conducted by Milo Keller in the framework of the MA in Photography at ECAL/University of Art and Design Lausanne. It is a continuation of the research project Augmented Photography, equally conducted at ECAL (2016–2017), which aimed to question the mutability of the digital image, transformed both in its physical materiality and in its virtual expression.
Enabled by Design is a joint research project between EPFL and ECAL, funded by Gebert Rüf Stiftung, which aims to foster collaboration between young entrepreneurs involved in technological projects and designers.
The research project Design management for start-ups focused on the integration of design in innovation processes. Its objective was to promote the use of design within mainly technological start-ups and to create tools and methodologies to foster collaboration between designers and entrepreneurs.
This research project looks into the shift from video art to new media, taking a major but little-studied event, the Locarno VideoArt Festival (1980-2001), as a case study: a pioneering space for broadcasting video art in Europe and a place for exploring electronic art which took place every year from 1980 to 2001 on Monte Verità.
MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN
with Mario de Vega
This project is both a book and a portable server programmed to open a WiFi network. Your smartphone becomes a sound device by producing an assigned frequency and creating small ephemeral communities. Programming ECAL/Callum Ross
The research project Smartphone Peripheral Companions explores new forms of interaction with the data flows passing through our smartphone, questioning the status of total object that this device has acquired.
The project is an investigation into the creative process of visual art through the concept of aurality, which explores sound, listening and auditory perception from a cultural perspective. It is about stepping beyond object culture to look at listening as part of the broader and richer cultural approach developed by studying the case of ECAL, its (human) actors and (non-human) agents.
with Camille Blin, Augustin Scott de Martinville, Maxime Guyon, Nicolas Polli Margherita Banchi, Thilo Alex Brunner, Christophe Guberan, Carolien Niebling
Aesthetics of Sustainability aims to explore and define the aesthetics of a new generation of sustainable materials.
Letterforms carry messages – in public space, they are powerful propaganda tools. Witness to this fact are the inscriptions placed on display by Emperors to showcase their power across the Roman Empire. During a Summer School at the Swiss Institute in Rome, ECAL MA in Type Design and ISIA Urbino students explored a more recent avatar of this communication tool.
Bobst Graphic, 1972–1981, with a preface by François Rappo, an interview with six important actors and further selected texts, documents, at a distance of 48 years, the hitherto relatively unknown history of a Bobst company division: Bobst Graphic, pioneers in photocomposition.
with Calum Douglas, Philippe Fragnière, Maxime Guyon, Benoît Jeannet, Marvin Leuvrey, Calypso Mahieu, Nicolas Polli, Jean-Vincent Simonet, Justinas Vilutis Anniina Koivu, Davide Fornari, Carolien Niebling
The Fuori catalogo research project calls into question the way we think about the life cycles of contemporary design objects by shifting focus from a product’s birth and lifespan to its “end moment”.
A Materialist History of Exhibitions
with Milo Keller Maxime Guyon, Joël Vacheron
Can we count on the sausage to provide a solution, in order to reduce the consumption of meat? And can the use of new ingredients increase the diversity of our diets? Can the sausage make a considerable contribution to a sustainable food culture? To answer these questions, a chef of molecular gastronomy, a master butcher and a designer have teamed up to look into sausage production techniques and potential new ingredients – such as insects, nuts, and legumes – to reinvent the sausage of the future.
Artists’ films, video art and exhibition of moving images in French-speaking Switzerland
The design research I&IC (Inhabiting and Interfacing the Cloud(s), explores the creation of counter-proposals to the current expression of “Cloud Computing”, particularly in its forms intended for private individuals and end users (“Personal Cloud”).
The Senior Living Lab is a laboratory dedicated to the quality of life and welfare of seniors and their caregivers.
Digital Strategies in Genre-Defining Magazines
Performance and situated action, from social sciences to artistic practices
This project questions the potential for glass in contemporary art and design to adopt a pragmatic approach with a view to producing extraordinary results. This research project also offers a cutting- edge model in the field of creative research, which places students at the heart of the process.
FINE ARTS
John Graham Ballard’s literary technique influenced by Surrealism, his explicit or indirect references to artworks or artpractices and the relationships the author had with the british Pop artists attest that The Atrocity Exhibition has an affinity with the discipline of contemporary art. The aim of this research project was to design the parameters of an exhibition dedicated to The Atrocity Exhibition. The student-researchers inquired into the status of exhibitions - such as documentary, historical or thematical – and into more recent experimental displays. They decided to conceive an exhibition that articulated documentary restitution and creation. The few selected documents were used to blur the notions of context and reference in order to echo with the ambiguous media criticism in Ballard's work. The display structure created for the exhibition points towards devices as eclectic as contemporary commercial fairs, world’s fairs or the Independent Group’s Pavilions, in an elliptic and entropic gesture involving oblivion, decay, mutation and sedimentation. A book gathers all the lectures by invited experts, the interventions by the professors and the results of the sudents’ research in the conception of this exhibition. Main applicant Ecole cantonale d’art de Lausanne (ECAL) Julien Fronsacq (project leader) Andreas Hochuli (assistant) Students of Master en Arts Visuels de l’ECAL Partners Circuit, centre d'art contemporain, Lausanne Maison d’Ailleurs, Yverdon-les-Bains Period From February 2012 to February 2013 Publication Atrocity Exhibition Archive Paradoxe Déambulations dans La Foire aux atrocités Published by ECAL with the support of HES-SO Edited by Julien Fronsacq Funded by the HES-SO (University of Applied Sciences Western Switzerland)
by Thibault Brevet, Mark Mussler, Happy Pets, Cem Sever