At Sonar+D festival, IED advances the dialogue between technology and art

Making its mark throughout Brazil, Italy, and Spain, the Istituto Europeo di Design (IED), founded in 1966, spreads its creative roots across the globe, offering an educational space for students to learn, thrive, and flourish. This year, IED is heading to Spain’s top electronic music and digital culture festival, Sonar+D, an artistic space that takes over Barcelona, helping paint a tableau of the creative industry’s future – a future rife with play, experimentation and collaboration. 

Taking the form of a groundbreaking trio of projects from its alumni, IED’s display, nestled in the bustling Project Area of Barcelona’s Montjuïc exhibition centre from June 13-15, promises to challenge our perceptions of where technology meets traditional art. It’s here, at Sonar+D, that the institute showcases not only their dedication to pioneering new creative languages, but emphasises their robust commitment to blending the analogue with the avant-garde.

Unwoven Memories, by Thinh Truong from IED Barcelona, who’s on the Motion Graphics pathway during their BA in Graphic Design, encapsulates this attitude, transforming intangible memories into not only a palpable tapestry intricately woven with threads of binary codes, but an entirely new digital language. Here, in Thinh’s immersive textile, editorial and electronic space, they reveal a sophisticated marriage of personal narrative and digital precision, highlighting the seamless integration of digital coding in fabricating textile art.

Opting for a less tangible yet equally philosophical approach, Plastic, by IED Milano’s Master in Visual Arts student Sofia Masiello, ventures into the realm of AI-driven art, exploring the intriguing conflict between artificial intelligence and video production. Created for singer Triquell, the video blends AI’s surreal capabilities with human artistic vision, producing a somewhat controversial visual experience that both captivates and challenges the music scene, as well as the role AI has to play in the industry going forward.

Approaching our senses from a different angle, IED Milano’s Master in Visual Arts student Kamila Lucarelli delves into the essence of absence in GliInvisibile, an avant-garde audiovisual project that focuses on the unspoken elements of books – from the blank spaces between paragraphs to the margins on every page. In doing so, Kamila crafts a narrative that invites the audience to perceive the invisible, challenging conventional storytelling through the means of digital expression.

Through their innovative approaches, IED’s students articulate a future where technology amplifies traditional art forms, crafting new methods that resonate within our digital era, exemplifying IED’s ethos of experimental and transformative education, and their commitment to advancing the dialogue between technology and art.