Three creatives tell us why coding is crucial to contemporary design

“With one leg in the physical world and the other in the digital realm,” duo Anny Wang & Tim Söderström have gathered quite the following for their satisfyingly real renders. As the creative industry grows increasingly fascinated with the world of virtual reality, Wang & Söderström offer a softer, less daunting introduction, particularly in their latest exhibition Transitional Speculation at Volvo Studio, Stockholm.

State-of-the-art sex robots received extensive media coverage in 2017 as the new animatronic lovers that are programmed to please. Inventors have argued that sex robots could help reduce sex-trafficking and loneliness, but London-based, multi-media artist Kate Davis has her doubts: “Man has created machines in the form of women or children to use as sex objects. This sends negative messages to society and reinforces sexist gender inequalities,” Kate tells It’s Nice That. This criticism is reflected in her ongoing project Logging on to Love where Kate explores sexbots and virtual companions through a combination of photography, video and sound design. 


In early October, Snapchat announced a novel way to display art that launched with a collaboration with Jeff Koons. With the integration of a new special effects lens, the app invites users to hunt for augmented reality versions of Koons’ sculptures in popular public sites around the world, and artists interested in having their own work similarly shown can submit portfolios online. Snapchat’s big reveal, however, was quickly overshadowed by news that artist Sebastian Errazuriz and his studio Cross Lab had made a replica Balloon Dog in AR and virtually vandalised it as “a symbolic stance against corporate invasion.” The critical gesture smartly asked us to question how companies are managing virtual public space, but it was also yet another reminder of how artists are typically always a few steps ahead of corporations when it comes to innovative design.
This is particularly evident when it comes to virtual reality and augmented reality, which artists have been experimenting with for decades. Now that headsets are more accessible and companies release freely available technologies such as ARKit and Poly that make 3D creation easier, VR and AR are more mainstream than ever. It’s clear that countless brands and artists are using VR and AR for the sake of being part of this movement, but many others, thankfully, continue to create apps that tinker with reality in truly inventive and impressive ways.

True/false, is a kinetic sculpture that explores what lies in between the fundamental states of on or off, true or false and which embodies the entities that are able to adopt either one of the two states and switch between them. Comprising rows of tubular lights and rotating black metal segments, the installation is constantly moving, forming an image or pattern and then instantly setting off the next via a series of mesmerising chain reactions.

“Virtual reality projects frequently promise experiences so realistic you won’t believe that you are in VR. I’m interested in the opposite,” Pittsburg-based visual artist, Claire Hentschker, tells It’s Nice That. Claire works at the Studio for Creative Enquiry, a “flexible laboratory for new modes of arts research, production and presentation,” at Carnegie Mellon University and last year spent nine months using every computer in the lab at night to find, process and stitch together thousands of video frames from hundreds of scenes of Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film, The Shining.

Brisbane-based Brock Kenzler has had a long career working in the field of digital design. Currently design director of Josephmark, a digital product studio where he’s spent the last five-and-a-half years, he has previously worked on the redesign of Myspace and as a digital art director at an advertising agency. Despite all of this, it was his ridiculously hilarious side projects that caught our eye.

The ability to understand and move with the times, while progressing your work accordingly, is a crucial skill for any designer. With our lives increasingly dictated by the screens that surround us, the importance of coding and digital design is soaring. In a series of articles in collaboration with SuperHi, It’s Nice That will be offering insight into the prominence of this facet of design.

You might not believe it at first glance, but Portugal-based illustrator Mariana Malhão’s bold and joyful illustrations are inspired by bacteria. Her series, “Microbios,” is full of lively bodies and colourful shapes that place you in the centre of a surreal fairytale. Her illustrations are about perspective: “We cannot see microbes, there are so many of them and they are everywhere. My illustrations relate to the idea of a world inside a world,” Mariana tells It’s Nice That. The characters that inhabit her universe invite us to change our outlook and re-imagine what might be around us that we cannot see. Perhaps we are surrounded by four-legged alligators with purple hands, four-armed boys with heads between their legs and fox-like creatures wearing rainbow suits.

Contemporary culture and the modern world is dictated by the digital image. As we continue to consume more and more of it through the illuminated rectangles that surround us, many creative mediums are experiencing rapid change. Having witnessed the transformation to her chosen medium over the last ten years, photographer Tereza Mundilová, along with four fellow Berliners and friends, decided to create XZY magazine as a space to reflect on and examine “the electronic image in the era of post-photography.”

As a parent, the compulsion to document every waking moment of your child’s life is always there, leaving most with boxes and boxes of photos or digital folders full of phone snaps. However, for fine arts photographer and teacher Steven Bliss, it was the spontaneous purchase of an 8×10 camera in the year his second son was born that prompted him to document his children in a more considered manner, resulting in his ongoing project, Boys.

This week’s Friday Mixtape is by London-based band, Shopping. Today the trio of Rachel, Billy and Andrew release their third record, The Official Body self-described as “100% bangers” and we definitely have to agree. Full of bands with new releases to discover if you’re still listening to the same records from last year, this mix is perfect if you’re looking for something new for 2018. h3. Why have you picked these songs, what do they remind you of or make you feel?

“Regarding the concept, I think I abused a brief to get a load of farm animals in a studio if I’m totally honest,” says photographer Steph Wilson on her latest cover shoot of Marques Almeida’s collection for Oyster magazine. Steph isn’t a photographer who uses the usual studio props, and her work is all the better for it. Yet this shoot in particular, including a goat, a greyhound, a Pomeranian, a turkey, chickens, a rat, a ferret and sheep, Steph created a setting more like a petting zoo than a fashion shoot.

Sitting somewhere between a photocopier and a laser printer, the Risograph firmly has a place in the heart of many designers, illustrators and printmakers. Despite being a cheaper and more environmentally friendly option to techniques like screen printing, the process is not without its drawbacks. In a recent zine titled Ideal Science, London-based graphic designer, Nick Greenbank, took the chance to celebrate the flaws and mistakes that arise when using the popular machine under his design studio, Pavilion.

As for so many artists before him, recognition came late to Taiwanese performance artist Tehching Hsieh. 30 years stretched between Hsieh’s first performance in his Tribeca studio to the artist’s inclusion in the 2009 Guggenheim exhibition “The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860-1989”. Now, the elusive artist is in higher demand than ever, last year filling the Taiwan Pavilion at Venice Biennale with “Doing Time”, an exhibition which took a backwards look at his work. When the Live Art Development Agency presented “Outside Again”, a film directed by Adrian Heathfield and Hugo Glendinning about the artist’s legacy, It’s Nice That took the rare opportunity to sit down with Tehching at LADA’s new home in the Garratt Centre, Bethnal Green in an attempt to find out why the artist gave over his life to art.

For Lithuanian graphic designer and art director Tadas Karpavicius, his career provides a means for him to indulge his interests by working with a variety of clients from artists to architects or curators and cultural institutions. In a recent project, it was his regard for the opera that he was able to utilise, designing the catalogue for the Vilnius City Opera’s performance of Faust.

“With one leg in the physical world and the other in the digital realm,” duo Anny Wang & Tim Söderström have gathered quite the following for their satisfyingly real renders. As the creative industry grows increasingly fascinated with the world of virtual reality, Wang & Söderström offer a softer, less daunting introduction, particularly in their latest exhibition Transitional Speculation at Volvo Studio, Stockholm.

Joe Mrava and Austin Ledzian met in their third year through mutual friends at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, and realised they had a lot in common. “We would take photos together – we loved to explore the areas around Blacksburg and stop to take photos anywhere we thought was interesting,” Joe recalls. When sitting on their balcony one night before school began, the pair decided it was time they completed a project together.