User:Arthur Vince/UTC12/RDA

RESEARCH DOCUMENT

CRAFT AND TECHNOLOGY

“Consumption makes maximum exclusion from the (real, social, historical) world the maximum index of security. It seeks the resolution of tensions – that happiness by default. But it runs up against a contradiction” between the old morality of action and the new values of passive, removed consumption."

The above quote is from the book “The Consumer Society” written by the French sociologist Jean Baudrillard. Baudrillard criticises the meaning of consumerism in our contemporary time. The quote reflects on our urge to consume played by advertising. We constantly feel the social pressure to update and evolve which leads to more consumption.

The core of my craft lays not criticising our consumption society, my interest lays more in how companies use advertising, product design and graphic designers to design new desires. My discipline is graphic design and there was a time that I worked in very commercial agencies. Here I had to find ways to present the list of features that came with the product. I had to finding way to get peoples attention and making them feel like they wanted the product.

The adds present the features in a stable and perfect form. They are adapted to a cultural aesthetics, wherein there is something for everyone. The promise in comparative with reality is very interesting. They often appear less spectaculair, the imperfections are hidden under a layer of sales-talk and are seen as waste, but for me they are the keynote as the characteristics of the product of service. The core for my craft is to show the perfection within the imperfection.

To elaborate on this by using my own work. “Translation” and “Collective Memories”, two projects I did over the last year. Both project have something relevants to the topic of my craft. I will explain them briefly.

In my project “Translation”, I explored the function and disfunction of the 3d scanner. I decided to use the consumers versions because I found it important that my project could be employable by a broader audience. The promise of the different scanning tools lays in most cases in the creation of an 3d model that represents an real object/space or person, but in reality the scanners have a lot of flaws and imperfections. Each imperfection is an signature of the tool. In this project I created a chair collection from a desktop chair with three different 3D scanners. These scans where all completely different and the machine became more than a tool, It became the co-creator of my collection. The leaking date became readable and each chair had it’s own characteristics, translating a product of mass production into an unique new form.

In the second project “Collective Memories” lays the focus on mobile photography. We constantly capture our life as prove of our existence and although most photographs don’t leave our phone we spread some on platforms like Instagram. My original idea was to explore the possibilities of making a panorama with Instagram photos from different angles. The Image Merge function of Photoshop became my tool. The result became something different than I expected, it became an abstract representation of our cultural relation towards our surrounding, with the focus on artefacts.

Although both projects are completely different they have something in common. I started with exploring the tool and by pushing the ways to use them I found the imperfections. Those imperfections lead to new outcomes that were unexpected. They were not created by the knowledge I gained from the features promises but they where found in the unknown.

Although both projects are completely different they have something in common. In my craft I wanted to perfect the way to show imperfections. Show that it’s not only important to know the function of your tool but also the disfunction. Exciting results come finding mistakes, errors and bugs. Not only are they part of the tools we use but they can give us an insight of how the tool works and bring us outcomes that were not scripted, predicted or have completed designed functioning. My craft consist out of pushing tools and finding the flaws. They can generate design that we could not have thought of and tell us more about the time we live in.

"Television tortured the intellectuals for a long time... it is about time that the intellectuals torture television”

Nam June Paik quote from the 60’s is an example that can be applied to all sorts of new media. The torture became more subtile, hidden in an overload of information streams. With the arisen of new media, we have to be the one that pushes the medium in the search of unexpected results.