Austin Redman Austin Redman

What's behind your webcover design for Het Nieuwe Instituut Online?

The character is one of a series of chess pieces I'm designing. They're made out of reconstructions of Warhammer miniatures. I worked together with the artist Octave Rimbert-Rivière to turn them into 3D objects to print and play chess with. The image is of the king in a setting that's meant to convey a kind of 'born ready' attitude. 

How does this piece relate to the rest of your work?

I've been thinking about modifications or customizations that don't contribute to optimizing a practical function. In this case, using alternative pieces doesn't change the game play, since the logic of chess has its own self-contained boundaries. The craft that goes into making the pieces just adds an additional personal investment to playing.

Lately, I've been playing chess on a board that has a lot of missing pieces, so I've been using scraps of paper marked with letters to indicate which pieces they represent. The game takes a long time to play this way. Something about not having a physical object to attribute the moves to adds more steps to thinking about strategy. The scraps of paper were already a kind of low-budget modification. Octave literally sleeps above a 3D printer, so the idea to upgrade the mod to dimensional objects was really just the logical next step.

I don't necessarily think that this logic is indicative of my overall work. It's really a pretty standard 'design as solution to problems' type of access point to generating ideas or a work. The use and abstraction of the Warhammer models turned chess pieces relates more to my working method, generally speaking.

Is the coronavirus pandemic changing the way you work? 

I've felt a need to keep levity high and impact to the nervous system low, especially now that my work-life balance plays out in the same room. K.I.S.S. (keep it simple, stupid): it's just good feng shui.

Originally from Los Angeles, graphic designer Austin Redman moved to The Netherlands in 2017 to pursue an MA from Werkplaats Typografie in Arnhem. He now lives and works in Amsterdam. His commissioned works, usually in the cultural sector, are often collaborations with other artists or designers. He describes his work as, "Orienting varying and typically disparate logics in order to conflate and propose alternatives through a weave or mesh of disconnected signs."

Octave Rimbert-Rivière studied at the ENSBA in Lyon and recently participated in the Dirty Art Department, a programme of the Sandberg Instituut in Amsterdam. His work cross-references various sources, linking them together without hierarchy: from history of art to popular culture, and from craft techniques to industrial mass production. The results typically stand somewhere between the humorous and the uncanny. He has exhibited widely in international galleries.