We require authenticity. We renounce the shallowness of modern life. I revere my unglazed Japanese earthenware cups, I drink my morning coffee from them each day (unless we forget to run the dishwasher in the evening).
It is not the first time in history that western civilization has renounced the shallow surface. The relationship between the “surface” and “core” is a complex, thoroughly revisited phenomenon in western philosophy from Plato’s allegory of the cave’, to Adolf Loos’ “Ornament and Crime”, and later Boris Groys “The Obligation to Self-Design”. This is a recurrent central theme in design through modernism, postmodernism and post-postmodernism. It’s a love story between the two, in a constant oscillation between desire and contempt, authenticity and glossy ephemerality, the superficial, idea and form, form and material, material and tactility, body and soul. The ghost of modernism still lives in our design praxis’, we search for a core to guide our creation of authentic surfaces. But without the idea of a core how could we create surfaces that won’t become free-flowing add-ons?
I don’t like driving, or even biking, at night. The thing is that when it’s dark, I have difficulties perceiving depth. I have a tough time distinguishing between what is far and what is close, to the extent that I might assume, driving a car, that a car ahead of me is far further away than it...
There is a Greek myth that details a creature, or rather, a beast that had the body of a lion with the head of a goat jutting from its back and a serpent’s tail. In the Iliad, Homer described it as “a thing of immoral make, not human.” The creature named Chimera was feared for its hybrid body that...
The world I perceive by touching has texture, weight and temperature, but lacks perspective and color. The world I perceive by seeing has perspective and color, but lacks texture, weight and temperature. The two worlds that touch and vision describe don’t seem to have much in common. I can grasp an...