Technical Aesthetics. Exhibition

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In autumn of 2018, an exhibition dedicated to the development of VNIITE, a large-scale network of design and research design institutes, which had no analogues in the world, was held in Yekaterinburg. The exposition includes issues of the popular in the USSR “Tekhnicheskaya Estetika” magazine, personal archival photos of Soviet designers, fragments of documentaries and production samples of industrial products.

The concept of the exhibition is based on short quotations of artists-designers, who in the 1960s actually reinvented their profession and tried to create a new attractive object world under the conditions of a planned economy and information deficit. By means of the short quotes from Soviet designers, we showed design objects through the eyes of the designers themselves. For each designer, the period of work in VNIITE turned out to be a very personal subject: each told his own story. Quotes are illustrated with projects and archival photos, and unrealized projects of VNIITE are recreated in 3D-graphics. This format allowed to show the attitude of Soviet designers to their work, to focus on the most important things and reveal the nature of the Soviet design. Exhibits were provided by the Yekaterinburg Museum of Soviet Life “Made in the USSR” and “Anti-Museum of Computers and Games”, while the Museum of Architecture and Design showed its large-scale collection of archival “the Tekhnicheskaya Estetika” magazines (Technical Aesthetics) at the exhibition.

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