VENICE.- The GAA Foundation and the European Cultural Centre present Data & Matter, a group exhibition of projects by leading international designers, including New York-based design studio SOFTlab. The exhibition focuses on the use of emerging and novel forms of reading and producing spatial conditions that connect/visualize data, responsive systems, and sensing/actuation technologies, through micro and macro scales. Data & Matter takes the opportunity to exhibit a range of projects, side by side, that transform data as an abstraction into spatial and experiential configurations. It aims to trigger discussion and debate on how the use of data in design methodologies and theoretical discourses have evolved in the last two decades and why processes of data measurement, quantification, simulation, ubiquitous technologies and algorithmic control, and their integration into methods of making architectural form and spatial experiences, are becoming vital in academic and industry practices.

SOFTlab’s contribution to Data & Matter features a series of recent projects that synthesize various media the studio has worked in over the past few years. These projects combine an interest in technology and craft with interactivity. The office’s continual engagement with their body of work imbues material assemblies with character, responsiveness, and even in some cases, new forms of empathy that expand the capacity for projects to be truly open-ended. SOFTlab’s range of projects can be thought of as a series of currents: they not only run off of the process data flows, but also direct flows of electricity and power. Like a field of flows which are not always explicit, the body of work responds to external factors as well as each other.

SOFTlab is a design studio founded by Michael Szivos and based in New York City. The studio has designed and produced projects across almost every medium, from digitally fabricated large-scale sculpture to interactive design to immersive digital video installations. As the studio adjusts to a wide range of projects, they focus less on medium and more on ideas.

SOFTlab embraces projects through a mix of research, ideas, and craft. The studio is invested in projects that require significant research and experimentation, taking advantage of what they learn from the design of client-based work. The constraints of these client-based projects are treated as opportunities and tested through a collaborative studio environment with the hopes of solving typical problems in new ways, with new tools. Through a unique blend of backgrounds as designers, artists, architects and educators, the studio is able to approach every project from a fresh perspective to create rich spatial, graphic, interactive and visual experiences. By mixing research, creativity and technology with a strong desire to make work fun, SOFTlab attempts to create new and unique experiences.

Data & Matter is on view from May 26 to November 25, 2018 at the Palazzo Bembo in Venice, Italy.