What happens when a construction moves from code to print, or from code to space? What gets lost? What stays the same? Ode to Construction – Abstraction in the Digital Age demonstrates the fluidity of a design’s materialization within the conditions of the digital.
Constructed from pixels and data, transformed into vector files, travelling through the cloud to an offset printer, and translated into physical metal objects – the project moves effortlessly between sreen, print, and space and simultaneously questions its context and medium.
Ode to Construction – Abstraction in the Digital Age started as an investigation into the visual strategies and ideologies of Russia’s early 20th century Suprematist and Constructivist movements. Through artistic research, graphic designer Polina Joffe searched for ways to reanimate their foundational legacies from a contemporary viewpoint. She designed a generative tool that creates constructions made of red and black rectangles, visually echoing modernist abstraction. With the tool, available at www.odetoconstruction.com, Joffe created a publication along with a physical construction, as presented at Onomatopee. The installation shows a translation of pages 488-489 from the Ode to Construction book, traversing from code to print to spatial objects.
