Systems Art and MetaDesign: The New Frontier of Art, Architecture and Design

by Julia Kaganskiy June 06, 2011

**Article by Julia Kaganskiy for *The Creators Project*.**  Julia Kaganskiy is a New York–based curator, editor, and cultural producer specializing in the intersections of art, design, and emerging technologies. In 2011, she served as International Editor of *The Creators Project*, a platform founded by VICE and Intel dedicated to contemporary creative practices in the digital age. She later founded and directed **NEW INC**, the New Museum's incubator for art, design, and technology.

_Fresh from our triumphant four-day exhibition in Lyon for Nuits sonores, The Creators Project is taking over Paris and the Gaîté lyrique from Thursday onwards. We’ll be debuting several digital installations and films in France (including the French premiere of Spike Jonze’s short Scenes From The Suburbs), as well as holding what we expect to be two really great parties.

But we’re not just there to party. In collaboration with the Gaîté, we’ll also be hosting an array of workshops, high-level round tables and interventions. Artists, designers, creative practitioners and digital art pioneers will bring into context the changing face of these media-friendly mediums and the problems these emerging disciplines are encountering.

The monumental Belgian design studio Lab[au], who we’ve mentioned here a couple of times before, are holding a conference on “Systems Art,’” a new practice that they feel is emerging from the collision of disciplines and mediums we are experiencing today. The Belgians, masters of combining art, technology and science, lay claim to System Art’s beginnings, working from inside and, at the intersection of, the various systems emerging: namely generative, reactive, performative, interactive and connective. Through a panoramic look at the evolution of art, design and architecture over the course of the last century, Lab[au] will attempt to explain the shift from industrial design, which emerged in the early part of the 20th century, to today’s “MetaDesign” process (a term of their own devising).

We caught up with Manuel Abendroth, one of LAb[au]’s founders and principal designers to find out more about their unique approach to architecture and design, and to have him explain to us just what, exactly, MetaDesign actually means.