02/12/2026
Workshop (In Progress)
“Tension & Release”
27 students building their own generative design instruments. Imagine a synth rack for graphic design. By the end of the week they’ll have exponentially more instruments than people in the room. Every instrument playable by anyone, producing consistent results because the intelligence is in the system, not the operator. Work authored by the system builder, the operator just tests, experiments and curates.
In this workshop, students don’t learn design by learning software. They learn it by building instruments and playing them.
Build an instrument, break it to the edges, build it further. Define constraints, improvise within them, generate takes, select. Repeat with increasing complexity. By Friday the systems are sophisticated but the method never changes. Rules first. Freedom after.
This week’s work is part of Vibrations Forward, a larger ECAL research project with Joël Vacheron, Francis Baudevin, and Olympe Boutaghane examining the Vibrations magazine archives (1991–2013). Full exhibition this fall in Lausanne.
Workshop results to be published via and Substack
Ink tool made as a demo during the workshop.