Yesterday's post looked at some of the new materials designers are experimenting with, but also mentioned the work of Studio Drift on display at the "Waste Age" exhibition at London's Design Museum.
The Dutch duo is also the protagonist of the show "Fragile Future" at New York's The Shed with experimental installations - from shimmering lights that traverse the gallery to massive concrete blocks that seem to be magically suspended in the air - that invite visitors to ponder about the problems of the planet and find alternative solutions.
The concrete blocks in this installation call to mind the solids designed by Studio Drift for their "Materialism" project.
As explained in the previous post, Studio Drift are masters of deconstruction: for their "Materialism" project they dismantled a series of everyday objects, including a Dyson vacuum, a VW Beetle, a Nokia phone and an iPhone, identified the materials composing them and displayed them as neatly arranged solids reproducing the exact quantity of the specific raw materials from which they are made (obviously, for safety reasons, many of these prisms are just representations of the materials to avoid displaying in exhibitions toxic or hazardous substances).
For this project the studio dissected and analysed a wide range of objects, from pencils and PET bottles to disposable cups, lightbulbs, a bike and even AK-47 and M-16 machine guns and their bullets.
The neatly arranged blocks, clear and crystalline, silver or black, amber and green, look a bit like models of urban conglomerates, but the main aim of Studio Drift's Lonneke Gordijn and Ralph Nauta is not architectural. The purpose is indeed to consider the materials and view the objects from a different perspective and with a renewed sense of wonder.
We usually think about the objects dissected by Studio Drift from the point of view of their function, but the duo's focus is re-shifted on the materials.
At the same time, while reducing these everyday objects to blocks and questioning in this way matter and materials, the two designers attempt comparisons with Abstract Art, mentioning on their site 20th century artists such as Kazimir Malevich, Hilma af Klint, and Piet Mondrian.
In some cases, like the 1980 Volkswagen Beetle, reduced to 42 blocks and masses, including horsehair, cotton, and cork, materials allowed the duo to point at craftsmanship and technical knowledge.
In other cases, comparisons between raw materials prompted the duo to spot immediate differences: modern smartphones, for example, incorporate special glass for state of the art screens (think about iPhones, that also incorporate steel, polycarbonate, graphite, copper and nickel, among the other materials), while the key part of ordinary (and nowadays obsolete) mobile phones was the circuitry, as engineers concentrated on the function of the phone, while nowadays there is an emphasis on the visual aspect and on other purposes (think photography, videogames, video calls, etc).
In the course of their project, the designers made some startling discoveries: they found out that the amount of plastic and copper used for a single meter of electrical cable is simply shocking and the duo visualised in their minds the amount of materials in the meters and meters of cables used in their studio, home city of Amsterdam and in the rest of the world.
If represented in real life with the same system used by Studio Drift the amount of copper and plastic used for cables would therefore generate huge solids, maybe more similar to super tall tower blocks.
When you think about this project along these lines, you realise that it is not just about design and the consequences of overproduction.
There is another intrinsic aspect to consider: by exploring materials in this way, Gordijn and Nauta indirectly hint at sources and therefore at complex issues such as geopolitical tensions (we talk, for example, about "conflict mining" and "conflict minerals" when we mention cobalt, tin, tantalum, tungsten and gold as they come from conflict-affected and high-risk areas...), resource extraction, manufacturing, and distribution. Solids representing a Big Mac meal or a Starbucks Cup, point instead at human economics and fair-labor practices.
The solids turn therefore into an expedient to build awareness and contemplate the way these materials represent collective consumption and the excessive use of the earth's resources.
Let's hope that Studio Drift will do a series of studies dedicated to fashion by dissecting garments and accessories: it would indeed be intriguing to see what kind of skyscraper-like solids could be built out of a dress or a luxury bag and what we could discover and learn from them.
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