exhibition design

'Delving the future in a data mine'

Data Mine
2018

Since 2009, the Ghent (BE) city council has been actively working with citizens, schools and associations to make Ghent a climate-friendly city. With its "Climate Alliance", the city wins the Eurocities Award and aims for a climate-neutral city by 2050.

To achieve that, new ideas and views are needed. Following the competition and exposition in Utrecht, the Foresight Team at Digipolis Ghent is organizing a design competition in which designers, artists, thinkers and makers are invited to show a "new" Ghent: a Ghent without fossil fuels. The results of this competition are shown in an exhibition in NEST.

Studio LONK created a strong visual visual language that both communicates the context of the exhibition and invites the visitor and challenges them to actively relate to the works and their themes. In keeping with the digital character of Digipolis, we created a futuristic landscape that refers to underground "data mines".

In a post-fossil society, “mining” is definitely a thing of the past. The nostalgia around the extraction of fossil fuels is, however, already embraced by the tech industry. The only form of "mining" that we will know later is the "mining" of cryptocurrency. For the exhibition we translated the aesthetics of these data mines into a landscape where you imagine yourself in a futuristic mine with the artworks forming ten "treasures". Large volumes of the same format with complete with digits refer to the endless rows of scaffolding that are so typical of data mines. Bright blue cut-outs create the frameworks for the ten works, five of which are Ghent and five are Utrecht finalists.