Show Notes
There are very few experiences in contemporary design/art that make you forget where you are. In this episode I speak with Pauric Freeman, whose performances are one of them. He performs live audio-visual shows in venues where the audience watches someone make the work in real time. In the episode we explore his process and its slowness as a value, not a problem. He returns to this repeatedly and without apology speaking about programming a component that might take days and might not work. He doesn't frame this as a struggle, he frames it as how good work actually gets made. There's a quiet confidence in that, almost a refusal of the pressure to produce quickly.
He believes that what happens between a piece of work and an audience, in the room, in the body, in the brain's fusing of sound and image, is real, meaningful, and irreplaceable. He says this in the language of psychoacoustics and cross-modal integration. But underneath the technical vocabulary is someone who genuinely believes that being fully present inside an experience is one of the most worthwhile things a human being can do. And that it's worth spending years learning how to make that possible for other people. What you get in this conversation is an understanding of how that experience is constructed from the ground up. The years of slow, iterative tinkering that were the building blocks of his creative vocabulary. The realisation that when sound and image are experienced simultaneously, the brain doesn't process them separately, it fuses them into something that feels deeper and more present than either could produce alone. There's also one of the most quietly compelling conversations about AI and creative practice you'll hear, not the usual debate, but something more specific. About why the serendipity that lives inside slow, iterative, human-made work simply cannot be prompted into existence, and what is lost if we stop protecting that.
Pauric Freeman is someone who moves slowly, thinks carefully, trusts the process, and believes, without making a fuss about it, that the unrushed, human-made, fully immersive experience is something worth protecting.
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More from Rough Drafts from BOUNCE
In this episode we talk about the parish priest giving permission for Una to go to art college, designing Valentine's cards that backfired because all the boys thought Una had sent them, the second-hand Mac bought from a buy and sell magazine and QuarkXPress learned from a book in a week. This episode is thirty years in the making. What this conversation explores is what sustains a practice across three decades. The big project in this episode is Hi from a Human — a mark Una woke up one morning and decided to create, and released to the global creative community before she had time to think herself out of it. We go into where it came from — the anger, not the kind she feels often, at watching illustrators and designers lose work to AI systems built on their own creative output — and her ambition for it. We talk about the dementia-inclusive shopping project, that won the Universal Design Award at the IDI Awards. About the drawer of shame and about what Una tells young designers who are waiting until they're ready, she says, only good things come when you jump. Go to: https://hifromahuman.com/ and download your marque that showcases your human ingenuity. __ Episodes drop regularly. Listen or watch wherever you get your podcasts. Or subscribe to our Patreon, for more content, live talks, case studies and more.
Niamh McArdle is a designer from Galway, based in Dublin, and sometimes Florence. She works freelance to allow her the freedom that travels brings, but at the heart of her work is a distinctly contemporary Irish design aesthetic. In this episode she speaks about her interests that have enriched her design, from film, literature, writing and her family's habit of collecting and curating objects of place and ultimately of nostalgia. As a graduate into the world in 2020, she speaks about getting started when the world was in chaos, a pandemic graduation that came with no show, no ceremony, no moment of arrival. Not that it held her back - with incredible projects she deep dives into her work while at Slater, working collaboratively with the studio team on a book design that ultimately went on to win a D&AD pencil for Book Design. The process of making this book is incredible - with the artist Paul Yates described as ‘in concert’ with the team throughout. Everywhere she goes, she finds inspiration, a collector of ideas, from cafes in Italy to workshops, to keep her making and her hands busy. Her next rough draft may involve embroidery, Florence, and something she hasn't quite worked out the shape of yet. _ Episodes drop regularly. Listen or watch wherever you get your podcasts. Listen on Apple // Listen or Watch on Spotify, Patreon and YouTube
In today’s episode. I speak with Sarah Moloney, graphic designer and illustrator based in Dublin.
This years theme is FRICTION. Exploring what it means to resist, slow down, and make things that could only come from you.
Hazel Coonagh is an Irish photographer and visual artist who starts with a portrait taken in the ordinary way, and then takes it somewhere else entirely. Through digital manipulation, hand embroidery stitched through paper and canvas, and a visual sensibility drawn from Japanese art, surrealism, and Art Nouveau, her work creates images that feel both completely new and deeply familiar.