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As the beachfront began to fill up on Friday evening, with music and the smell of barbecue wafting on the Spring breeze, we sat down with Alex Knost to talk design breakthroughs, commercialism, tribalism, and the implications of wave pools on the future of shaping.
How important is it for you as a shaper to get together with a load of other experimental shapers and talk through ideas? Is it at events like this where major breakthroughs happen? Or do they happen in the bay by yourself?
I think generally this is where the breakthrough is, although it’s a slow breakthrough. Just having contemporaries that surf well and are making boards allows it to happen organically. Guys like Ryan and Tyler who are doing it for a profession are always making pit stops around the world, and we travel quite extensively with one another. I think that’s just where the ideas kind of gravitate, and some things stick with the other person and some things stick with you and some things you just chalk up to personal taste. This event is meant to celebrate the spirit with what’s going on consistently with this generation.
Do you ever hold on to ideas for new designs before you let them out there into the public space and share them with your contemporaries?
I think when I was younger I was a little bit more self conscious. Surfing facilitates a primal surge, being in the ocean and everything like that, so there is a matter of hydrodynamics, but at the same time it’s also barbarrick in that you’re crafting something that you use as a tool, so there’s not so much of a decorative sensibility where you’re trying to store something up and have it be this big surprise, for me and the people that I recognise, its more of an ongoing conversation.