The Kingsman National Institute’s School of Design & Visual Arts has formally opened its 2024 Graduate Biennale, an annual exhibition that marks the culmination of the BA and BFA degree programmes. This year’s showcase, titled Metron Ariston (Measure is Best), moves decisively beyond a traditional art show. It presents a profound and challenging body of work where the city of Athens itself is not just the subject, but the primary raw material, collaborator, and data source.
This exhibition is the most ambitious expression to date of our “Athens Studio Model,” a philosophy that insists our students must engage directly with the historical and contemporary fabric of the city. Under the guidance of faculty from the Design School and the Studio for Generative Art & Interactive Media (SGAIM), our graduating students have spent their final year capturing the city’s invisible systems—its data streams, acoustic signatures, and hidden networks—and translating them into tangible, interactive, and often unsettling works of art and design.
The Metron Ariston showcase is built on a direct, and at times imperfect, collaboration between our creative faculties and our computational research centres. Students were given unprecedented access to anonymised urban data sets from the Aegean Informatics Laboratory (AIL), treating data not as a spreadsheet, but as a new form of clay.
The results are striking in their diversity. One BFA graduate, for instance, has produced a large-scale generative art installation. The work uses a neural network trained by SGAIM to process 24 hours of acoustic data captured from Omonia Square. The resulting visuals are not a literal graph, but an abstract, moving digital “tapestry” that visualises the acoustic stress and linguistic density of a central urban hub, shifting in colour and form based on the time of day.
In another wing, a BA student from the UI/UX pathway presents a speculative “Civic Wayfinding” application. Rejecting the “fastest route” logic of commercial maps, this app analyses multiple data streams—air quality, noise levels, and even historical density—to offer users alternative routes, such as the “quietest route,” the “clearest air route,” or the “most architecturally significant route.” It is a functional piece of design that is also a political statement about urban well-being.
“This is the KNI synthesis in practice,” explained Professor Inês Marques, Director of SGAIM, who advised on the digital projects. “We are not teaching our students to simply ‘use’ AI as a tool. We are teaching them to collaborate with it. They are using computational logic to see and hear their own city in ways the human eye cannot. The algorithm becomes a lens to reveal the hidden poetry, but also the hidden biases, written into our urban code.”
This technological focus is balanced by a strong material practice. Leveraging the Hellenic Centre for Sustainable Engineering (HCSE), another student has 3D-printed a series of intricate, delicate sculptures whose forms are dictated by particulate pollution data gathered from different Athens neighbourhoods, from the industrial zones to the slopes of Lycabettus. The more polluted the area, the more fragmented and chaotic the resulting form, creating a visceral, physical representation of an invisible environmental threat.
Dr. Loukas Sideris, the BA Programme Lead, noted the showcase’s challenging nature. “The ‘Athens Studio Model’ does not always produce comfortable or ‘finished’ work. This year, the students have truly grappled with the maxim Metron Ariston,” said Dr. Sideris. “They are questioning what it means to measure a city. Is a city its data? Is efficiency the ultimate good? The work you see here is challenging, often unresolved, and deeply philosophical. It is not just an exhibition; it is an act of civic inquiry.”
The 2024 Biennale, housed in the KNI galleries, demonstrates a new maturity in our cross-disciplinary model, proving that the future of design lies at the complex intersection of computational power, critical humanistic thought, and a deep, tactile engagement with the world around us.
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