Brendan McGetrick, curator of the Global Grad Show, says: “Each exhibit is a window to what’s happening in the world's best design schools.
Brendan McGetrick, curator of the Global Grad Show, says: “Each exhibit is a window to what’s happening in the world's best design schools. Together, the projects presented here reveal the fascinations, fears, and ideals of the next generation of designers. But, more than that, they offer an overview of the human experience and a new toolkit for making it better.”
If there is one project that epitomizes the fear that the digital world will replace manual skills such as handcraft and illustration, it is In the next room by Martin Guillaumie, a ESADSE graduate (l’École supérieure d’art et design de Saint-Étienne, France). Guillaumie turns this fear on its head by combining the best of both worlds with his inventive digitalized comic strip device that enriches a primarily hand-drawn art form with the benefits of programming language in the unexpected interactions of complex algorithms.
This is a comic strip created by a random process and not only that, it can be deployed on a scale that is unheard of, and printed as it is read. And, the outcome looks nothing like computer-generated drawings; on the contrary, it has all the imperfect charm of the actual medium.
By creating a ‘drawing strip machine,’ Guillaumie, a comic artist and illustrator himself, uses the digital realm to his full advantage, and also proposes a new, groundbreaking form of narrative art that experiments at once with the sensory qualities of paper and the narrative possibilities of the digital form.