The Golden Section Finder

The GOLDEN SECTION FINDER is a lens through which you can find proportional “perfection” in your surroundings. The golden section is a number regularly found when calculating the ratio between the dimensions of natural and geometric forms. Artists, designers and architects have used it as a means of defining beauty theoretically rather than intuitively. Designed and produced in Chicago with Tim Parsons

Lasercut and laser-etched acrylic in fluro orange, fluro blue, tinted or clear.
Currently available to purchase at ODLCO

Golden Section Finder Rings

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The Secret Return Of... Catalogue

MicrobeSky featured in The Secret Return Of... Catalogue

The Sci-Arc exhibition host committee—Douglas Chrismas, Frank Gehry, Greg Lynn, Jeffrey Kipnis, Eric Owen Moss, Thom Mayne and Wolf Prix invited Marei Wollersberger and I to send one image from our Citizen Evolution project exhibited last year at the MAK Vienna to become part of the Secret Return of Noever exhibition and exhibition catalogue.

This will be on display along with many many others including documentary videos directed by Peter, copies of every catalogue produced during his tenure at the MAK—more than 300 displayed on 25 custom-designed tables— and a 7,000-square-foot architectural installation listing the names of every exhibition under Peter’s direction.

Seeking to acknowledge Peter Noever’s unique contribution to the architecture discourse, SCI-Arc organized The Secret Return of Noever exhibition in recognition both of the “unprecedented interrogatories in art and architecture sponsored by Peter during his time at the MAK, and in anticipation of the “return of Noever” now in the offing.”

The exhibition runs at the Ace Museum on South La Brea from December 12 – 30, 2011 and will be open Monday through Friday from 1 to 5pm.

The Secret Return of Noever, exhibition design by Alexis Rochas

MicrobeSky from our Citizen Evolution project on display

Awning used to document 25 years of exhibitions at the MAK

The main exhibition space at the Ace Museum

Images from all exhibitions curated or directed by Peter Noever over the past 25 years.

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GOOD's Data Issue, Fall 2011

FOSKBoutique's Happiness Scale exercise on inside cover

Dear Reader, Are You Happy Right Now?

Tuesday September 6th, the day after Labor Day.
Martyrs’ @ 8p, 3855 N Lincoln Avenue.
Get tickets now at martyrslive.com
$1o a pop

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The blurb:

Chicago’s Volume 19 features 6 minutes and 40 seconds each of Go! afficianodos Bob Barber and Mark Rubenstein, Brit adhocist Jessica Charlesworth, the Factoter Tim Fawkes, CPS teacher Lucy Hilarides, mimicing musician Chris Neville, Circuit Court Judge hopeful RoxAnne Rochester, along with her Amber doll, we expect to see the real Amber Hawk Swanson, young architect and Rural Studio alum Evan Forrest, intelligent coffee dude Stephen Vicks, another Stephen, architect/urban planner Stephen Yas, and Dawn Hancock, who advocates good design for good reason.

The official poster of Volume 19 is designed by School of the Art Institute graduate, Rachel Yas.

Devised and shared by Klein Dytham Architecture. PechaKucha Night was devised in Tokyo in February 2003 as an event for young designers to meet, network, and show their work in public.It has turned into a massive celebration, with events happening in hundreds of cities around the world, inspiring creatives worldwide. Drawing its name from the Japanese term for the sound of “chit chat”, it rests on a presentation format that is based on a simple idea: 20 images x 20 seconds. It’s a format that makes presentations concise, and keeps things moving at a rapid pace.

Tim Parsons and I present ADHOCISM, an installation at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago from 19th – 24th July.

The title refers to the 1972 book Adhocism: The Case for Improvisation by Charles Jencks and Nathan Silver which treats the activity of solving problems directly using materials at hand as a liberating, inclusive and sustainable philosophy.

Parsons and Charlesworth present a series of interventions that meditate upon the continuing relevance of an ad hoc approach and demonstrate its ability to generate fresh opportunities in the design of objects. The show is part of We Are Here – Art & Design Out of Context, a month-long series of art and design situations with Chicago-based participants curated by MCA Design Director James Goggin.

About the Interventions

ArtPin,is a pin-badge that demonstrates the ad hoc principle, both in its construction and its use. Made by combining a Bulldog clip and a brooch pin, it enables any image or small object to be clipped into it and worn. Visitors are invited to take a free Artpin and make their own badge from the collected source material.

Instructions for visitors to create their own artpin using a handpunch & vintage Boys World & Popular Science magazines

ArtPin creation by MCA visitor

End of first day at the ArtPin table with Artpins pinned to board

American Adhoc Series

The American Ad Hoc tables is an ongoing series of objects designed by Tim Parsons that adapt classic American products, re appropriating them for interior domestic use. On show at the MCA will be three objects, a Radio Flyer wagon, a red steel wheelbarrow and a Weber grill that have been converted into tables via the addition of tops made from Carrara marble. All three source objects have a particular place in American consciousness, are robust due to their pressed metal construction, but are at the same time, generally overlooked as things of value. Bringing them into the home under the auspices of their use as furniture foregrounds their role as triggers of memories and offers them a dignified ‘retirement’ from their previous duties. The juxtaposition of old and new (all the source objects are second-hand and show signs of age, while the marble is freshly cut) and of the mass produced with the rarified, encourages the visitor to re-think conventional attitudes to what constitutes appropriate domestic furniture.

American AdHoc Series of tables

Radio Flyer with Cararra Marble tabletop

Weber Grill with marble top.

Exhibition Furniture

The exhibition furniture for Adhocism is made entirely from materials and tools borrowed from the MCA, including some left over from previous exhibitions. We followed a rule whereby everything used had to be returnable at the end of the show in the state we found it, hence gluing and screwing was replaced with clamping and strapping, and painting and cutting were avoided. The process led to enjoyable discoveries such as the way in which a beam made to “sight” Andreas Gursky photographs made a perfect bench, and the surprising beauty of moving blankets.

Some adhoc benches using moving blankets, ratchet straps and low trestles made by the proprietors from previous exhibitions

Along with other participants of the We Are Here: Art and Design Out of Context exhibition, Tim and I were invited by The Chicago Reader and the Museum of Contemporary Art to redesign/treat old Chicago Reader newspaper boxes to then be reintroduced into the Chicago cityscape.

Reflecting on our intention to use found objects and left-over materials in an ad-hoc way, our redesign of the Chicago Reader newspaper box borrows the language of protecting sculptures in transit. Each box has been carefully wrapped in colourful moving blankets, held on by orange strapping. The result alludes to upholstery, softening the object and dampening the tinny sound of its use.

Look out for them using this specially made google map at Clark and Lake and Logan Square!

Tim Parsons and I are proud to announce that we will be exhibiting for one week during the month long “We Are Here” – Art & Design Out of Context show curated by  James Goggin, the awesome Design Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art here in Chicago.  Our aim is to install ourselves and a range of work and interactive interventions under the umbrella title of ADHOCISM into the 12 x 12 gallery space for one week and invite all to come and see what we get up to.

ADHOCISM by Tim Parsons & Jessica Charlesworth
We Are Here: Art & Design Out of Context
Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, 12×12 Gallery
July 19th : 10:30am – 8pm (Free)
July 20th – July 25th: 10:30am – 4:30pm
Gallery Talk: Tuesday, July 19th, 6 pm

As they say here at the MCA site:

“We Are Here is a weekly series of four multidisciplinary art and design situations with Chicago-based participants. Using the gallery as a workspace, the activities of product design collective Object Design League, artist-run project space Golden Age, designers Tim Parsons and Jessica Charlesworth, and screen-printers Sonnenzimmer illustrate how the practical becomes performative when placed out of context. Curated by James Goggin, MCA Design Director.

Object Design League (July 5–10): Caroline Linder and Lisa Smith usually describe themselves as product designers, but under the collective name Object Design League they are known for projects that involve the intangible and temporal � events, pop-up spaces, charettes, and curated exhibitions � rather than actual products.

Golden Age (July 12-17): Artist Marco Kane Braunschweiler and Martine Syms run a small yet internationally connected West Loop project space/workshop/bookstore called Golden age. Projects from the space take on many forms: exhibitions, screenings, performances, and printed matter.

Tim Parsons & Jessica Charlesworth (July 19-24): Product designer/writer Tim Parsons arrived from London last summer to join the School of the Art Institute of Chicago as Associate Professor in Designed Objects. Parsons continues a series of ongoing collaborations with his partner, British designer, future thinker and researcher, Jessica Charlesworth.

Sonnenzimmer (July 26-31): Nick Butcher and Nadine Nakanishi are artists who both happen to have studied graphic design and now run screen printing workshop Sonnenzimmer, a space where they produce printed art and design work for other artists, music and cultural clients, and themselves.”