Astrid Seme, Studio

The work by Swiss artist Daniel Göttin delights in play and experimentation, while maintaining a sense of pragmatism in its minimal aesthetic. It is only through engaging with an accumulation of Daniel’s works that their inherent humour becomes visible. In contrast to the institutional air in its title, CATALOGUE, my intention was for this particular catalogue to appear more like a handbook for everyday use.
The book takes on, above all else, the role of providing space for the display of Göttin’s works—documentation images have been removed from their backgrounds, allowing frontal views to ‘hang’ on the page’s surface, and for perspectival views to ‘sit’ within the page’s surface area. This newly created space, while it might at times emulate three dimensions, also provides the conditions for occurances not normally possible within real life. Physically small works are scaled up to the largest possible size, whilst larger ones are forced to scale down in line within the page’s allowances.

The Tarabya Cultural Academy in Turkey is an artist residency programme initiated by the Federal Government of Germany. Tarabya itself is a magical place located on the shoreline of the Bosphorus strait near Istanbul. In an attempt to capture and communicate the atmosphere of its location, the website opens with randomised configured imagery of Tarabya that melts away with the loading of the site’s opening page. Furthermore, subtle animations and transitions on each page reflect the color shades of the Bosphorus as it changes, allowing the website to subtly shift its appearance from visit to visit. Fluidity and user-specific navigations are at the center of this website’s design. This is achieved through expanding menus as well as headers that are either visible or hidden, depending on the user’s device.
The visual identity and its manual includes a wide range of templates allowing in-house teams and local Turkish graphic designers to design communications with a high degree of flexibility. The consultancy is still ongoing.

“Past forward” is a record created by the artist duo kozek hörlonski (Peter Kozek + Thomas Hörl) in order to mark the celebration of 100 years of the Kunstverein Baden and its members. The vinyl’s jacket is produced from the same card stock used in the Kunstverein’s archives, stemming from the notion that the record will itself go on to form a part of the museum’s long history. I was intrigued by the thought that when the record is filed within the archive, it would blend in effortlessly with the rest of the objects, artefacts or texts that represent the previous 100 years of the museum’s work. This is, in material form, an acknowledgement of the past that has come to inform the record’s creation. The cover makes use of the typeface Akzidenz Grotesk—in reminiscence of its progressive past, which at the same time pointed to a neutral future. This seemed to be an ideal fit for the record’s title, in mirroring its own unique position in relation to posterity.

This single-page website, designed for Chilean artist Martín La Roche Contreras, is established within the fertile space between two parallel worlds: Imagery and Words. While a one-pager might initially appear to be finite in its possibilities, this website utilises the potential infinity of digital material to push associations between word and image beyond a simple 1:1 relationship. A single passage runs throughout the page, and hover states are used to activate specific images to lure the user in to explore further and discover major slide shows featuring Martín’s works. What results is not simply a series of binary associations, but instead constellations intended to illustrate important movements within Contreras’ work.

In 1994, American artist Barbara Kruger exhibited a German version of one of her large scale political wall-texts for the exhibition entitled “World morality” at Kunsthalle Basel (CH). 23 years later, German artist Doris Lasch and I were invited to participate in the exhibition entitled “Exposed Exhibitions”—to be held at the same location. For our contribution, we worked with the only known installation shot of Kruger’s 1994 work to be found within the Kunsthalle’s archive.
We re-scaled this photograph into what would have been original size of Kruger’s installed text piece, and fragmented the image into individual pages. The reverse sides of each of these pages offered up a window to link Kruger’s presentation to events and discussions of the present day. Pages carrying fragments of Kruger’s installed work are blacked out on their reverse sides. Pages carrying architectural fragments from the installation shot reveal on their reverse images of the same piece installed at Art Basel in 2017. The first exhibition was rarely documented, while the same work presented at Art Basel 23 years later became a hotspot for selfie-makers and Instagrammers. By acknowledging this, the publication connects two moments in time and perhaps poses some questions about how ways of exhibiting, receiving and documenting contemporary art have evolved over the past few decades. These page fragments were initially bound into a publication, and subsequently installed within the space to reference our own process of planning and laying out the publication’s content.

Mabimmune is a Zurich-based biotech company comprised of a dedicated team of scientists working in the fields of medicine, antibody discovery, immuno-oncology, and biology. The design for the website takes the form of a straightforward one-pager that uses simple visual elements, such as sticky sections, to structure information across multiple user-devices. My intention was to provide gradual insight into the team and their research by allowing content to wipe in with the user’s natural scrolling movement.

As part of an ongoing collaboration with TONSPUR Kunstverein Wien, I was responsible for the graphic identity of freq_out 12—a curatorial project staged by the Swedish composer Carl Michael von Hausswolff in 2016. freq_out is a sound installation, located within Vienna’s sewer, that presents 12 individual sound works that each utilise their own specific frequency range. The works were produced on site, and subsequently amplified to act as a single, generative sound-space. The scope of my work covered the design of all related printed matter. This ranged from newspapers, posters and flyers; to public signage and merchandise. The project identity was built around different forms and shapes derived from physics and acoustics. It was also made to reference the architectural conditions on site; drawing upon the floodgates, manhole covers and drainage ditches that characterised the location of the work.

This publication aims to address subjects of contemporary architecture, its problems and its symptoms. In reminiscence of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ song “Into the Great Wide Open” and its accompanying music video, this publication refers to changing narratives around well-known literary tropes such as the ‘hero’, the ‘rebel’ or the ‘(self) entrepreneur’. Bringing aspects of personified characters into the built environment; it is a fragmentary snapshot of an ongoing, constantly developing process to find agency within the contemporary urban environment. A thread that runs throughout is the implicitly posed question: “What is to be done?”

This pocket book brings together a selection of photographs by Swiss artist Bianca Pedrina. Pendrina’s photographs act as documents of her strong engagement with her surroundings. In combination with the text “Architektur   – Blick  – Körper ” by Salome Bessenich, the book is reminiscent of an architectural pocket-guide that invites its readers to re-experience their own urbanity. The layout of the book follows on from its content: the German and English texts are typeset into two different grids, thus allowing them each their own respective supporting ‘architectures’. The photographs themselves ‘pop-up’ almost coincidentally within the reader’s experience—allowing some insight into Pedrina’s practice of wandering, almost stumbling across her photographic subjects.

Finnish artist Mikko Kuorinki interpreted Michel Foucault’s famous book “The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences” literally—arranging all the words within the book into alphabetical order from “A” to “Zoophytorum”. Working within the tradition of conceptual art, Kuorinki reordered knowledge that is already available; decomposing a text into simple alphabetical material and at the same time creating a new visual composition. The entire book is printed on glossy paper, which is typically avoided for publications intended for deep reading due to unpleasant reflections that affect the eye. The proposition therefore made in the use of this material is that the book is to be ‘viewed’ rather than ‘read’.

The Fine Art and Design Library of Bergen University holds a monthly series of public one-evening events. It serves as a platform that encourages ideas and discussions around concepts of ‘library’, ‘archive’ and ‘book’ as well as on the conventions of the presentation, reception and discussion of art.

“He’s the only human being in recorded history to claim the distinction of swimming the entire length of the Mississippi River. He was buried alive for three days in a much ballyhooed effort to bring art to the spirirt world that included a New Orleans-style funeral complete with Christlike resurrection. He once imprisoned himself in a tiger cage to protest the inhumane treatment of POWs in Vietnam. Maverick? Eccentric? Full-blown madman? Billy X. Curmano will be delighted to let you decide.”
—Mary Beth Crain, LA Weekly, 1999

n+f (nights + friends) is a Vienna-based, artist-run company that produces bedsheets designed by artists and designers in limited editions of 100. This innovative business offers customers the possibility to encounter art not only literally, but intimately as well. The design of the webshop and printed matter playfully presents the visitor with imagery of the night; its homepage welcomes new visitors with a ‘dancing’ moon as it contentedly rotates on a backdrop of stars. The stars form a constant background to all of the site’s pages, and as the visitor moves into each subpage the stars shift into at times absurd colour combinations associated with the different phases of the night.
Outside of the usual work as the website’s graphic designer, I was also happy to have been able to run in a new direction with one of my own bed linen designs.

Swiss artist Doris Lasch’s practice is largely concerned with photography—its relationship to, and implication within representation. This publication detailing Lasch’s practice from 2017 incorporates staging and scenography as central themes within its design, in order to speak back to the same notions as they are explored within the artist’s work. The cover is comprised of a rough, grey card stock, which in combination with the two film stills printed on to it begins to take on the appearance of a projection surface. The book title, printed over these cover images, could just as well be part of the same projection—perhaps as part of a film’s opening sequence. The following pages all similarly set up scenes that aim to ask the same question: are the spaces depicted in Lasch’s photographs artificially staged for the camera, or simply natural moments captured by happenstance?

I dedicated the time spent with students to engage with ways of visualising and transcribing the acoustics of a single sound: The Big Bang. The Big Bang is a sound that occupies a significant part of our collective consciousness as the moment of the world’s inception. However, despite its prevalence in general knowledge, no one can truly know what this moment might have sounded like, or even what the circumstances around its occurrence might have been. My course with the students was therefore dedicated to a focussed period of imaginative research—as if in a time loop, this defining moment was reimagined again and again through various notations that detailed how its sound might have sounded. And, for a brief moment, the location of the genesis of the world became our comparatively small working space in St Pölten. The resulting book is on the one hand an imaginative visual sound portrait of the big bang, and on the other a collection of scripts with the potential to be performed.