As part of Get It Louder 2010, China’s most influential and closely-watched exhibition of emerging, young talent across creative disciplines, Studio Proxy contributed a design for a public seating system - following this year’s topic “Sharism”.

Curator’s statement: “Ruediger Otte frequently reappropriates found objects and imagery in his work. For his Yintai Centre Benches, he searched Google’s 3D-Warehouse online archive for 3D models of prominent buildings in China. Settling on Beijing’s Yintai Centre, he transformed the complex’s image—a “digital readymade,” as he calls it, that he purposely kept in low resolution—into a design for a public seating system for Get It Louder. By adjusting the digital files in Berlin before sending them to Beijing, where the pieces were fabricated, Ruediger Otte (who has never been to China) has added another layer to the globalized condition of design and production, by which geographically-distant collaborators often never come into direct contact. Moreover, by turning buildings into furniture, he points to a digitized world in which properties like scale, resolution and usage become entirely relative.” (Aric Chen, Beijing/New York)

The Yintai Centre in Beijing

The Yintai Centre as a 3D model in Google Earth

The Beijing venue of Get It Louder 2010

IKEA Hacks are part of TechnoCRAFT, a major design exhibition that charts current movements blurring the boundary between designer and consumer. Curated by acclaimed industrial designer Yves Béhar, TechnoCRAFT looks at the different ways that consumers are personalizing design in efforts to assert creativity and individuality in an age of mass-production.

The exhibition will be held at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA), San Francisco (USA), from July 10 to October 3, 2010, featuring works of Enzo Mari, Martino Gamper, Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec, Studio Makkink and Bey, Olafur Eliasson, Max Lamb, 5.5 designers and many others.