London Design Festival 2012
September 14, 2012 § Leave a comment
Beginning today, Friday September 14th, London will play host to ten days of annual design-based events across the capital, showcasing leading movements in the cultural, the commercial, and the creative. With a remit of courting design democracy, London Design Festival is open to all and largely free of charge, and with the launch of its Global Design Forum this year to mark its 10th anniversary, the focus is very much on emphasising the importance and impact of design within socially and economically-sensitive contemporaneity.
Encompassing talks, trade stands, installations, press events and parties, this celebration of design creativity will see some of London’s best-loved venues and public spaces devoted to pushing this global sphere and London as a hub within it. Among the hundreds of events on offer from the 14th – 23rd, a few of the usual and important design suspects will be Decode (celebrating its fifth year this year,) Tent London and Design Junction, all of which I will be attending, imbibing the best of contemporary design.
MisinforMation: A Double Room In A Single Bed
May 26, 2011 § Leave a comment
Decay, dilapidation, demolition.
Lately, my life has been overtaken by, and forcibly devoted to, the annual ballache that is flat-hunting. Annual in regularity is this event because of the perpetual trap of too many dictatorial constraints, all of which filter through from the all-pervasive annoyance known to far too many UK-dwellers as overpriced housing and insufficient funds. The chasmic disparity between these two factors is, of course, amplified in London, where I find myself once again in the daily-escalating panic to find anything that’ll vaguely do simply because it’s next to impossible to secure a London home once you’ve had to leave the capital. And so it goes on.
Anyway, I was remembering Mordant Music‘s 2010 collaboration with the BFI on the DVD MisinforMation, of which the above section A Double Room In A Single Bed forms part. With its 1970 Ideal Homes images set to a sampling of 1983’s Tackling Priority Estates, the juxtaposition of promise and consequent reality seemed rather fitting. This is, of course, a vast subject that could and should be examined further, but that’s a whole other show. For today, a topical illustration of how it feels to be faced with paying £270-per-week for a tiny shithole of a one-bedroom flat. A flat with three different types of mismatched, 20-year-old-looking, Holiday Inn-style carpeting in an area so unsavoury I’d not be able to go round the corner for a pint of milk in the daytime without the greatest concerns I’d likely get raped, murdered and raped again. At a cost of £270 every week. Hopeless and utterly disillusioning is how it feels.
Eclect Elect 