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Design in Motion

Travelling Gallery, Dundee until February 27th, then touring Scotland
Three stars

It's appropriate that the opening dates of this seventeen week, seventy-eight venue bus-bound pre-show to the forthcoming V&A Museum of Design Dundee's purpose-built waterfront takeover are where they are. Flanked on one side by the Caird Hall, which once doubled up as a Moscow theatre in John Schlesinger 's 1983 TV film of Alan Bennett's An Englishman Abroad, and Tony and Susie Morrow's statue of DC Thomson's comic favourites Desperate Dan and Minnie the Minx on the other, such monumental icons demonstrate exactly how the local could go global in a pre-digital age.

Back on the bus, meanwhile, five artists and two studios showcase wares drawn from fashion, textiles, jewellery, gaming and software in an understated array of state-of-art displays. 3D is all the rage throughout, most notably via Anarkik3D Ltd's duo of Ann Marie Shillito and Xiaoqing Cao, whose Cloud9 software makes for an appositely touching display. Digital Design Studio's real-time 3D captures of five of Scotland's UNESCO World Heritage Sites, meanwhile, takes you behind the scenes, and does for digital design what the Caird Hall did for Russia.

Elsewhere, vintage and classical art is reinvigorated by new ways of working. Such is the case with Holly Fulton's intricately patterned flapper-like frocks, which look akin to a hi-tech House of Elliot, while ancient and modern are combined again in the light and shade of Digital Lace, Sara Robertson & Sarah Taylor's painstakingly enhanced textiles.

Game Designer Sophia George's filmed show-and-tell of her William Morris-inspired creation, Strawberry Thief, offers up a pastoral alternative to Grand Theft Auto while also laying bare the collaborative nature of the game-making process. Lynne MacLachlan utilises computer design and 3D printing to pop out a line of primary-coloured retro-futurist accessories, while Geoffrey Mann offers up a more meditatively inclined study of a moth at rest and in motion as it orbits around a lit bulb in this bite-size trailer for the V&A's interactive fun palace to come.

The List, February 2015

ends

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