Top artists at Design Indaba 2009

Javier Mariscal

When people ask Mariscal what he does for a living, he sometimes says he's a tightrope walker and other times he says he's an acrobat - even when he uses the world of the circus to describe himself, he takes on several jobs. In a circus, he would also be the ring manager, he would design the big top and the staging, he would go up on the trapeze and he would be most annoyed if he didn't find time to feed the elephants.

Furniture design, painting, sculpture, illustration, interior design, graphic design, landscape painting, gardening, horticulture and more, since Mariscal's life and career has been characterised by creative incontinence as vital activity. After entertaining the crowds at Design Indaba 2003 with his theatrical multimedia performance, he now returns to Design Indaba 2009.

Dunne and Raby

The shift from thinking about applications to implications creates a need for new design roles, contexts and methods. For Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, it's not just about designing for commercial, market-led contexts but also for broader societal ones. It's not just about designing products that can be consumed and used today, but also imaginary ones that might exist in years to come. Their designs are cautionary tales that highlight what might happen if we carelessly introduce new technologies into society.

Dunne and Raby use design as a critical medium to explore fields of science such as biotechnology and nanotechnology. Evidence Dolls playfully probes the implications of DNA knowledge between lovers, while Designs for Fragile Personalities in Anxious Times continues their obsession with the psychological impact of an atomised society. It celebrates humans as contradictory, complex and psychologically flawed.

Marcel Wanders

If Wanders' Knotted Chair and Crochet Series are his most iconic, then his most notorious must be his Airborne Snotty Vases and, his most anticipated, the new Mondrian South Beach hotel. The hotel is said to be an extension of the Sleeping Beauty fairytale - when we open our eyes after 100 years, everything will look fabulous.

“Throughout the 20th century, architects and designers strived to produce products that could be made by machines and that would help create welfare, equality and a political foundation for democracy. They created works that celebrated the poor possibilities of the available machinery. In this period bending metal tubes and cutting wood with a machine were considered small miracles,” he wrote in the foreword to 21st Century Design.

Wanders believes that machines should heed to humans and that we should all live like princes and princesses. We have the technology and the imagination, so what's stopping us?

DJ Spooky

In association with Design Indaba, DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid will be in Johannesburg on 13 December 2008 and Cape Town on 15 December 2008 for the SA leg of his Sound Unbound Tour.

If Rhythm Science were about the flow of things, Sound Unbound is about the remix. In his second book, Paul Miller aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid asks artists to describe their work and compositional strategies in their own words. Contributors include Steve Reich, Saul Williams, Bruce Sterling, Jonathan Lethem, Ron Eglash, Chuck D, Scanner, Pauline Oliveras, Brian Eno, Naeem Mohaiemen and more - as well as Miller himself.

Sourcing much of the content from the archives of Sub Rosa, the mix CD that accompanies this book features Nam Jun Paik, the Dada Movement, John Cage, Sonic Youth and many other examples of avant-garde music.

The show in Johannesburg titled "The Final Pixel Pop of 2008 with DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid" is supported by Mark Latilla and Sassquatch. The show is on Saturday 13 Decemberand admission is free. Cape Town audiences can see the show at Biblioteq featuring Paul D Miller aka DJ Spooky with a book reading, signing and listening party as well as at The Pan African Space Station also featuring DJ Funafuji (Stepup Sessions) as support on Monday 15 December.