Extending the Glass Chain
- Submitting institution
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University of Dundee
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- 52585477
- Type
- T - Other
- DOI
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- Location
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- Brief description of type
- University of Dundee
- Open access status
- -
- Month
- -
- Year
- 2020
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
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- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
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- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
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- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- ‘Extending the Glass Chain –100 years on’ was a
three-year research project funded by the Leverhulme
Trust (£90K), exploring digital manufacturing and
collaborative creativity through responses to the
methodologies and intent of the 1919 Gläserne
Kette (GK) ‘utopian correspondence’, a chain letter
between architects that formed the basis of German
Expressionist architecture.
Leading up to the centenary in 2019, Keay undertook
extensive research at leading archives (Akademie der
Kunst Berlin, CCA Montreal, Staatsgalerie Stuttgart,
Wenzel Hablik Museum) to analyse original work
by GK for evidence that they anticipated today’s
generative materials and manufacturing technologies,
then gathering an international group of leading
practitioners in art and architecture to exchange ideas
and responses across disciplinary and geographic
boundaries. Keay led them to co-create innovative
interdisciplinary artwork for exhibition in the UK and
Australia, in which the artist herself produced glass
sculptures, relief prints and virtual environments
modelled on scans of geological samples. Participants
in this contemporary GK were then invited to write
pseudonymous accounts in the spirit of the original
epistolary correspondence.
The project established that although the GK’s
utopian Expressionism has been under-researched
compared with rational Modernism, their visions of
materials that grow organically anticipates cuttingedge
materialism, algorithmic design and generative
manufacturing. Their anonymised collaborations are
striking antecedents of today’s artists’ collectives and
open-source creativity.
Keay is sole editor of a publication on the findings
of this project, with a contextualising chapter by Iain
Boyd Whyte, the foremost authority on the historic
movement. This unique re-examination of the GK’s
significance to contemporary material culture and 3D
creativity introduces new expressive thinking from
Keay and collaborators on innovative ways to create
across disciplines in the digital era. It juxtaposes
images of startling new physical, lens-based and
virtual artworks and speculative architectures with
previously unpublished archival drawings.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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