Studio At The End of the World
For London Design Festival 2020, SSS hosted an online studio, Studio At The End Of The World. Over the course of a week, we ran and hosted a series of events - workshops, lectures, discussions - which embodied the different types of work which SSS does, and the things which interest us the most. We bookended the week with (online) coffee hang-outs as a way to try and emulate where some of the best chat takes place.
Our original plan had been to run a working studio in the sunken Well Gallery, London College of Communication, where we’d collectively work on a large project in real time, whilst hosting a series of related talks and workshops. Here, we wanted to show the labour and choices that actually goes into producing the type of work that we make, both as SSS and through our own individual practices. When the pandemic happened we, like so many others, were required to step away from LCC’s physical premises and rapidly reconsider how to teach and do studio work in a distributed, collaborative way. ‘Studio At The End of the World’ was re-shaped in response.
In his workshop Your Phone Isn’t Listening To You But The Reality Is Far Worse, Wesley Goatley unpacked the common belief that ‘your phone is listening to you’ to serve you targeted ads based on your spoken conversations. Using examples from the audience’s own experiences, Wesley presented a more fascinating (and insidious) rationale behind the creepy accuracy of targeted advertisements – and how we can disrupt these invasions of our privacy.
For the panel discussion, The Guts of a New Machine, our panellists Maria Dada, Eleni Xynogala, and Michael Sedbon explored reflected on their own work and discussed how a technologically-driven creative practice allows them to grapple with questions around technology, power, and culture.
In What Worlds World Worlds, Annie Goh, Deborah Tchoudjinoff, and David King with host Tobias Revell asked: when we talk about ‘world-building’, what materials are we building with? Taking in games design, sonic cyberfeminisms, and sculptures, the panel chewed over how different creative approaches help explore what worlds are made of, and our role in making them.
Christopher Ludderodt-Quarcoo, Tobias Revell, and Georgina Voss led the workshop The World Is Something We Make, And Could Just As Easily Make Differently. From RAND forecasting to scientists in Hollywood to wild propaganda, ‘world-building’ is often held up as a means of prototyping futures. But what are these imaginaries based on and how do they work?
In this workshop, we dissected different forms of world-building practices, exploring their validity, and accessibility beyond design practice and teaching. Split between Zoom and Miro, we weren’t able to fully record this session, but please get in touch if you’d like more details.