Your monthly non-spammy-gif-heavy newsletter from your friends at oio.

Cold season is back oio friends, I hope you’re all getting cozy 🧦. On the warmer side, welcome to a toasty new issue of oio news. This month we’ve got some highlights from our recent project — ARCHIVIVES, then a week packed with lectures and talks, a few updates from Walkcast (remember the never-ending podcast?) and finally to wrap-up, all the usual goodies — oio stonks™ and ©ool links. Here we go ↓

oio news™

a peek into the oioverse.

ARCHIVIVES

If you missed it on our social media, in the past year we’ve been working closely with mudac — the Museum of Contemporary Design and Applied Arts in Lausanne, as part of a one-year residency that started with former Museum directress Beatrice Leanza, and continued with curator Scott Longfellow.

The focus of the residency was to investigate the fleeting nature of design heritage: what makes an object, a design object? How can we harvest, and eventually archive, the tacit knowledge that surrounds these artifacts? How can we explore the potential Museum archiving practices, even by using technology? We had so many questions when we started, and we ended with even more questions. But in the process, we created two machines (they prefer to be called “robots”, but here we go).

Curieux and Rêveur

Born out of a desire to explore human narratives, Le Curieux (“The Curious”) thrives on designers’ knowledge and their designed objects. It is used during live interviews to gather context, recording everything while also interrupting and asking additional questions alongside our human curator, Scott Longfellow. Its purpose is to extract as much knowledge as possible, record it, and save it into an AI model that represents each designer.

The AI model is then passed to the second machine, Le Rêveur (“The Dreamer”). As its name suggests, its sole purpose is to constantly imagine possible exhibitions and future objects that will never exist. It takes the AI model created by Le Curieux, along with other data from the Museum’s collection, to dream up fantastical exhibitions, brought to life through the most iconic artifact of an exhibition—the poster.

🤔 Why?

Getting to Curieux and Rêveur was a long process that took us more than a year, and with dozens of people involved. During this time we researched the Museum’s archiving practices, talked to knowledge workers, archivist, educators, curators, directors, pencil makers, artisans, humans and less-human, in an attempt to understand why we do what we do, on a fundamental level. We imagined a world where museums could find ways to capture the invisible network of context and tacit knowledge surrounding the collected objects, beyond the physical nature of design. But these are all just words. At the end of the day we just needed an excuse to make AI objects with heavy metal bodies.

👀 Come and see it!

The ARCHIVIVES project is still on! It’s part of the Archives du Design Romand exhibition at MUDAC, retracing the history of design in French-speaking Switzerland. Open until February 09, 2025 — come and see it if you’re in Lausanne!

👏 Thank you!

This project was the result of an intense collaboration among fantastic individuals:

Designers: Adrien Rovero, Ligia Dias, Dimitri Bähler, Laure Gremion, Frédéric Dedelley, Big Game, Fragmentin, Panter et Tourron, Bertille Laguet, Fabien Roy, Werner Jeker, Multiple Design, Raphaël Lutz, Atelier Oï, André-William Blandenier, Antoine Cahen, Christophe Guberan and Carole Guinard
Mudac: Marco Costantini, Scott Longfellow, Amélie Bannwart, Anaïs Devaux, Jolanthe Kugler, Sylvie Niederer, Magali Conus and Beatrice Leanza.
oio: Bjørn Karmann, Marta Fioravanti, Léane Beauquis, Norman Chen, Marijana Jankovic, Octavian Husoschi, James Mackenzie, Simone Rebaudengo and Matteo Loglio.

👟 Keep walking

🫡 We salute the thousands of Walkcast walkers out there! (how many?). Since we launched our self-walking podcast one month ago, we’ve heard a lot of feedback from you. From praises to critics, blog posts, newsletters, and angry mobs, our project made the rounds in our small niche of the internet. Looking back, it’s been a hectic month, and we can’t wait to walk the path ahead.

this quote feature is wild

🗣️ A week of yapping

Next week is going to be a pineapple avalanche of public speaking. If you’re in any of these three cities, come and say hi!

🇷🇸 If you’re in Belgrade: come to Made in Platform on Monday 9th, where oio’s co-founder Simone Rebaudengo will be doing a presentation, more info here.

🇳🇱 If you’re in Amsterdam: come to Thingscon, either on Thursday 12th or Friday 13th, where oio’s co-founder Simone again will be doing a panel and a talk. Can’t get enough of this guy.

🇮🇹 If you’re in Bergamo (Milan): come to CIID on Friday 13th, where the not-Simone founder of oio, Matteo Loglio, will be giving an open lecture as part of a workshop led by our very own Bjørn Karmann. More info and sign up here.
NB: i’m from bergamo so i know it’s not milan, but it’s ok.

❄️ Cool Links

Your monthly supply of fine goods, carefully handpicked from our Discord community (missing out? Join now🪽)

💨 trash as performance art _(tiktok.com)
🔅 svelte 5 is here _(svelte.dev)
📊 painting with numbers and formulae _{(thanks danilo)}
🤖 smile, zuck _(github)
📕 facebook’s red book _(map.cv)
🎮 nintendo64, reinvented _{(analogue.co)}
🌎 spatial intelligence company _{(worldlabs.ai)}
🤷 AI characters doing weird stuff _{(tech review)}
🗄️ conceptless competentless collective _{(the bomb.com)}
💠 brandOS _(brand.ai)

📈 Monthly stonks

🌐 www: filetypes = airports
🕹 game: jelly Mario
📁 are.na: fall of the simulacrum
📚 wiki: Gävle goat
🔧 tool: pageboy

✏️ words by matlo & normz

🍞 stay toasty, freakbob