Global initiative to foster creativity and innovation
London, Wednesday 19 September: The BE OPEN Sound Portal has arrived in London’s Trafalgar Square. A mysterious, black, rubberised cube, it will host five soundscapes over the next five days so that the public can ‘switch on their hearing’ to appreciate the most advanced audio technology in the world.
Source: wallpaper.com
The ambisonic clamour of sea shanties, clattering percussion, classical guitar and lush synthetic vocals flooded the space inside the BE OPEN Sound Portal on Trafalgar Square today.
London, September 21, 2012 – Today the winners of the BE OPEN AWARDS, an international scheme for the promotion of young creative talent, were announced at 100% Design.
The winner in the CAST category is Alexandra Kharakoz from the UK, with Sonic Landscape, an interactive, real-time, sonic sculpture designed to heighten awareness about how sound is produced.
Tom Dixon’s west London canal-side HQ was the venue for BE OPEN’s first off-schedule event at the 2012 London Design Festival. Described by Dixon as a flash-market showcase of young design talent, BE OPEN SPACE consisted of eight site-specific raw-wood stands conceived by designer-engineers Pan Studio and JailMake. Their solid, practical construction made reference to pine art-transport containers while also echoing the old trade stalls of Florence’s Ponte Vecchio.
Nine talented young designers go forward to the finals of the BE OPEN Awards, which will be presented as part of the think tank’s activities during the 2012 London Design Festival.
“BE OPEN is about ‘intellectual development’, investing in the creation of added value for future generations. Our programmes are about generating original thinking from the most promising young minds of our time”, said Elena Baturina, founder of BE OPEN.
London Design Festival
17 th -23 rd September 2012
BE OPEN, the global think tank set up to foster creativity and innovation, arrives in London for the 2012 London Design Festival on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the largest design event in the UK. The Festival’s programme attracts visitors from all over the world, and the foundation will be part of this huge showcase with a whole series of activities. BE OPEN’s events in London are part of a broader project by the think tank to explore the five traditional senses – sight, smell, taste, touch and sound – the starting point for research into the next realm, that of the sixth sense, or intuition. Sixth sense design would represent the ultimate synthesis of human sensory perception and technological genius, offering an infinite variety of sensations that would overcome the perceived limitations of design today.
The international BE OPEN Awards 2012 has attracted over 300 first-class entries from young designers around the world. Entries were received from all corners of the globe including: Afghanistan, Cuba, Ireland, South Africa, Iran, Uzbekistan, Lebanon and Vietnam.
Over the next three weeks the BE OPEN Jury will select nine shortlisted entries, three from each of the nomination categories: CAST, FORM and CITY.
“I am not really a teacher,” says Ron Arad. A strange remark from a man who has spent 12 years as Professor of Design Products at the Royal College of Art. Especially strange when one considers that he was speaking on a platform – part of the Beopen Talks in Basel – to discuss how we educate tomorrow’s innovators. But then in his own work Arad has achieved greatness by going against the grain. His Concrete Stereo (1983) was a hi-fi coated with protective resin, then encased in concrete before being chipped away to reveal rusting steel beneath. It is often seen as the emergence of a punk aesthetic in design: an emblem of the times. However as the Museum of Modern Art’s citation describes it, it was also “a surreal challenge to the sanctity of consumer electronics.”
This September sees the arrival of the BE OPEN Sound Portal in Trafalgar Square as part of the tenth anniversary of the London Design Festival 2012. Situated within one of London’s most iconic public spaces, the BE OPEN Sound Portal is an entirely new kind of installation that focuses on the design that you can’t see – that of acoustics and sound – rather than visual spectacle.
Visitors to the current exhibition at London’s Barbican Centre on the Bauhuas would be forgiven for thinking that the Bauhaus was a style. The exhibition of course contained many beautiful objects in perspex boxes. There was some detailed explanation of the desire to respond to industrial production but there was no reference – apart from a few photographs of empty studios to the fundamental point. The Bauhaus was not a style – it was a school. Jean-Louis Cohen’s The Future of Architecture since 1889 addressed this issue in a fundamental way. He explains that the school rethought the relationship between art, design and architecture. The school championed the new principles of abstract art to challenge existing building forms and then under Hannes Meyer and Mies Van Der Rohe the shapes of cities.
