- Creative direction
- Still image
- Moving image
- Visual identities
- Design systems
- Websites
- Code-based art projects
The work begins with what should exist. The medium follows.
Creative direction across image, design and code
Founded by Jacob Hägg. Campaigns, identities and digital environments for fashion, culture and technology. The Brashy Studios archive, 2011–2020, remains working material.
Image
A machine will hand you a thousand versions and no opinion. The scarce thing is the eye that keeps one.
Design
An identity is a set of decisions that has to survive everyone who made it. Most do not.
Code
The studio writes what it directs. Nothing is handed off, so nothing is lost in the handing.
A digital institution walked in first person, built for the browser. A permanent collection with no client and no brief.
Choose a body and receive a protocol. Five generations sorted by the speed at which they first connected, from 2400 baud to fibre.
Direction sets the rules. Software runs them a thousand times. One is kept, and the keeping is the work.
The portfolio became a building.
There is no brief
Negative Space is where Intelligence Matters puts work that has no client and no brief. A white building entered in first person, with galleries, a lounge and an espresso counter.
The building is an autobiography made architectural. A crashed Chevrolet, a machine error, a women’s streetwear archive, a hand-burned CD, one sock before use and one after: private evidence is given public scale, an accession number and a room of its own.
The white cube is not neutral. It changes the charge of whatever enters. What was ordinary becomes archaeological; what was embarrassing becomes exact; what looked finished opens again.
New rooms open when the work requires them. There is no client, no delivery date and no brief. The institution is the work.
| Permanent collection | Holding |
|---|---|
| Recent Archaeology01 | Relics of the pre-algorithmic self · 1998–2012 · the portable memory shrine, the bivalve communication device, the hand-inscribed data wafer |
| Strumpism02 | The first ontological textile system · one sock before use, one after · the last room anyone reaches |
| The Main Gallery03 | Currently showing — An autobiography with collision detection |
| Brashy Studios04 | The women’s streetwear archive · 2011–2020 · the only room in the building that is not white |
| The Lounge05 | Espresso, the table, the drink · where people meet and talk |
| Museum of Nous06 | A six-room wing assembled from the public record of Nous Research · an expanding gift, not a commission |
Lineage
Brashy Studios, 2011–2020 · Intelligence Matters, now
Before Intelligence Matters, there was Brashy Studios: the women’s streetwear brand Jacob Hägg founded with Axel Hägg in 2011. Built across Stockholm, New York and Los Angeles, Brashy made clothing, images and objects with one conviction: fashion could behave like a complete cultural world.
Colette. I.T Hong Kong. T Magazine. HYPEBAE. MoMA, Items: Is Fashion Modern?, 2017.2
Brashy ended in 2020. Nothing about the thinking ended with it. Garments became campaigns, campaigns became images, images became rooms you can walk through. The name changed because fashion had become too small a container to keep the practice in.
2 Items: Is Fashion Modern?, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1 October 2017–28 January 2018. Curated by Paola Antonelli with Michelle Millar Fisher.
Stockholm. New York. Los Angeles. Nine years.ACTIVE PERIOD — the brand’s run; its archive remains working material.
The container expanded. The standard did not move.
Clothing became image. Image became architecture.
selected press (links)
Brashy Studios
Women’s streetwear · 2011–2020
Press
The archive is written in real time
THE WIRE records the studio from inside the work: rooms opening, collections growing and objects entering the record. Each release is part press notice, part wall text, part timestamp.
| Wire | Release |
|---|---|
| WIRE_2026-09-03 | The art professor’s lens deconstructs the void — 3 September 2026 → |
| WIRE_2026-08-23 | The Brashy Room: One room refuses the white — 23 August 2026 → |
| WIRE_2026-07-30 | Identity once had hardware — 30 July 2026 → |
| WIRE_2026-07-27 | A museum opens for a research lab that did not ask for one — 27 July 2026 → |
| WIRE_2026-07-21 | An autobiography with collision detection — 21 July 2026 → |
| Press kitZIP | im-press-kit.zip — the marks, the wordmark and the boilerplate, zipped → |
Contact
Commissions and collaborations
Studio across image, design and code. New commissions and selected collaborations. Correspondence →