Commercial
products generally have a function--they play music, record sounds,
flash your images, serve your needs. They are most likely made
in foreign countries, out of tiny components which, taken as a
whole, add up to a defined and designed unit--it's purpose in
life honed and defined. On the flip side, products with elusive
functions generally don't have a ready audience, and quickly fail
in the marketplace.
Prop-like,
hollow, and visually flattened out, the sculptural "Multi-User
Interfaces" reference "products" while at the same
time play at basic formal concerns of color, line, and volume
in a kind of contemporary minimalism. Hand-made from foamboard
and contact paper, the basic units that form these configurations
are constructed from memory and personal approximation, with little
reference to copying an actual form. By doing this, I seek to
privilege my own memories and ideas of these things over pure
facsimile. These basic units (vaguely reminiscent of everything
from speakers, keyboards, clock radios, harddrives, remote controls,
and processors) are then reconfigured into more complex forms
and families, in order to build up as well as blow out what their
new purpose might be.
Inspiration
for this work comes from Third World modernist architecture from
the 50's and 60's, old and out-dated electronic equipment with
a familiar visual vernacular, classic Bauhaus constructions, and
Circuit City. In many cases, the sculptural work is modular and
can be posed and reconfigured in endless possibilities, almost
as if they were a set of building blocks of open-ended use and
ergonomics.
Flanking the sculptural components are commercial-grade banners
featuring snapshots of the units "in situ"--being used
in some way and injected into the world. Reminiscent of advertising
display, the images are blown up as large-scale digitally printed
vinyl banners. On one hand, these images reference commercial
product shots or "suggested use" diagrams, but in the
end, display situations that are undefinable and opaque, leaving
the viewer to summarize for themselves the functions of these
forms.
What
does it mean to meticulously hand-make what look surfacely like
mass-produced objects? And what happens when even the maker herself
is not quite sure as to what her products could really "do,"--as
if designing products and interfaces for a future function which
we have yet to define?
Multi-User
Interface C and Suggested Use (Monitoring), installation view
