Forward Festival Berlin

Stefan Sagmeister has designed for clients as diverse as the Rolling Stones, HBO, and the Guggenheim Museum. He’s a two time Grammies winner and also earned practically every important international design award.

Design has to work, art does not.
Stefan Sagmeister will talk about art and design and the difference between the two. He’ll show some examples from 500 years ago and some from yesterday. He will examine functionality and uselessness. He will try to figure out of it is more advantageous to be a designer or an artist. Or if it makes any difference at all.

Martha Cooper (b.1943) grew up surrounded by cameras as her father and uncle owned a family camera store in Baltimore, Maryland. She often accompanied her father on outings with the local camera club and took her first photographs while in nursery school.

Erik Kessels is a man of many facets. The Dutch graphic designer, advertising manager, editor, collector, exhibition curator and artist exemplifies the versatile creator of the digital age who engages in the full range of creative activities. In his projects, Kessels pays close attention to the most popular or trivial forms of photography, such as family albums and commercial documentation, which would normally be rejected by canon-defining museums. Taking advantage of the extraordinary abundance and availability of images today, Kessels sifts and recycles cast-off materials, like a waste-picker in search of overlooked treasures.

Florian Kaps got his senses hooked on „real things“ in 2001, when he first dived into the magic of analog photography as leading manager of the Lomographic Society, developing their worldwide online community and shop platform. Being attracted by the exercise of running into the opposite direction since his childhood, he reacted to the digital revolution by saving the last Polaroid production plant and founding The Impossible Project in 2009. Thanks to that there’s still Polaroid film in today’s digital world.

Jonathan Castro is a graphic designer from Lima, Perú based in Amsterdam. Jonathan uses graphic design as a colorful depiction of a living spirit always moving in search of new possible visual futures, tools and languages. As a graphic designer, he worked for Metahaven, Studio Dumbar, Bureau Borsche and The Rodina. Clients and collaborators have included Boiler Room, Nike China, 032c, Hypebeast China, Gallery W139, Van Gogh Museum, Mannequin Records, Pinkman Records, Borshch Magazine, Pin-Up Magazine.

FIELD is a London based studio working at the intersection of art, design and technology, led by co-founders Marcus Wendt and Vera-Maria Glahn. Creating expressive and dynamic digital artworks, immersive audio-visual installations and non-linear narrative experiences. The interactions between abstract and figurative form, sensual perception and synaesthesia, procedural systems and emergent simulations are recurring themes in their research.