Chicago Design Through the Decades-NeoCon Preview

The Chicago Design Through the Decades project is a swift, exciting journey through the history of Chicago design spanning the last one hundred years (1920s–2020s). I had the opportunity to lead the national collaboration between Chicago, New York and NASA in this project, which is based on the vast collection of the Chicago Design Archive (CDA), a permanent online record of Chicago design, currently holding over 3200 examples of work by over 1100 Chicago designers. It was exhibited at ART on THE MART, one of the world’s largest digital projection viewing area in the world — 2.5 acres (approximately two football fields) — on the front of the massive (has its own zip code) Merchandise Mart architectural landmark building on the Chicago River in downtown Chicago.

The preview exhbition was presented as part of the NeoCon Design Conference in June 2022. NeoCon is the world’s leading platform and most important event of the year for the commercial design industry, which offers ideas and introductions that shape the built environment today and into the future since 1969. Summer boats were passing by, people were cheering and the "Decades" NeoCon party was just wonderful!

Investigating a human-centered approach and following engaging characters and textual tidbits from archived design works, the journey begins in the 1920s with the era’s painterly and illustrative techniques. Forms then evolve under the modes of photography, minimalism, futurism, three-dimensionality, and postmodernism throughout the 1930s–2010s. Ultimately, the journey ends in the 2020s with digital portraits produced by using neural networks, a machine learning (ML) approach that formed the foundation of much of modern artificial intelligence (AI)—technologies becoming increasingly prevalent in contemporary art. This part is a tribute to Chicago as an alma mater of neural networks, where in 1943, Warren McCulloch, a neurophysiologist at the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC), and logician Walter Pitts from the University of Chicago, proposed the first mathematical model of a neural network.

The exhibit is dedicated to Wayne Stuetzer (1938–2020), a founder and director of the Chicago Design Archive.

Daria Tsoupikova, UIC School of Design & UIC Electronic Visualization Laboratory
Sharon Oiga, UIC School of Design & Chicago Design Archive
Guy Villa Jr, Columbia College Chicago
Krystofer Kim, NASA
Jack Weiss, Chicago Design Archive
Cheri McIntyre, Chicago Design Archive
Lauren Meranda, Chicago Design Archive
AI/ML contribution by Fabio Miranda, UIC Electronic Visualization Laboratory
Music by Louis Schwadron, Sky White Sound
Featuring vocalist/activist: Nnelolo Karen Wilson-Ama’Echefu, and rapper Elijah Robb
Curation by Cynthia Noble

NeoCon Design Conference 2022 June 11–15

ART on THE MART website