Nicholas Gardner and Saša Štucin focus on creating work with conflicting functions and imagery, without abandoning beauty or consumer logic. They are keen to blur the boundaries between acceptable furniture typologies and conceptual representative objects. Making plays a big role in their practice. They are designers and manufacturers of their objects. Their interest in various materials results in a diverse body of work. The refined, simplified forms of their works reflect principles of mid-century design, but the pieces also veer toward conceptual territory by evoking the malleability of how objects are seen and mediated today.

Their work has been exhibited at the Swiss Institute, Friedman Benda and Patrick Parrish in New York City; Royal Academy of Arts, V&A, Christie’s, Somerset House and the Design Museum in London; RM68 in Beijing; Gallery Sohe in Shanghai; Etage Projects in Copenhagen; Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam; Museum für Gestaltung in Zürich, A Palazzo Gallery and Palazzo Monti in Brescia; Barbati Gallery, Biennale Architettura and Biennale Arte in Venice.

Biography

Despite the prophecies of software and technology replacing the hard world, we are still an extremely object-oriented species. There is satisfaction in owning things; satisfaction that feels embedded in our bodies to the extent that the objects start to own us. Of course, the idea of ownership is learnt but, in the timeline of the human species, it is a relatively recent invention. Instead, a shared cultivation and stewardship of objects was commonplace in small groups. Now we must have our own version of whatever niche product and pseudo-function is presented to us in the marketing streams, otherwise it feels inauthentic.

Modern attempts to work around this urge – for example, the sharing economy, linking people and eliminating 'excess objects’ – have largely failed. Loaning or sharing would theoretically maximise the use of a particular item. Ironically, this would work for objects that quickly become obsolescent: most software-based technology becomes redundant after a few years, so it makes sense to share the harvest while it is fresh.

Mediated through phone apps, the corporate versions of car-, bike- or scooter-sharing systems have, for example, only become widely successful when one entity owned all of the objects and had a near-monopoly on a city or area. The community driven versions of the object sharing economy never really took off. Platforms for photo equipment rental, power-tools, luxury clothes or cars have been categorised as optimistic tech fever-dreams of the 2010s or have been bought up and squashed by the giants. Perhaps it was futile anyway: the forces that connect ownership and authenticity are ingrained in the capitalist system, and they feel as natural in the West as breathing, eating and fucking.

There is an evolutionary metaphor that often gets applied to consumer items and capitalism in general. The market has organically created environment for an object to exist, and because it can exist, it has every right 'to be’. A kind of sympathy that we have for unusual creatures in the natural world, which have evolved to survive in niche or co-dependant circumstances. Supply and demand are compared to species' population explosions or extinctions. Innovations and disruptive products are successful mutations in the wild. Regulations and unnatural government or market interventions that disturb the natural flow of commerce are akin to an animal or environment being subject to a man-made harmful intervention, such as geo-engineering projects or logging. Maintaining the comparison, unforeseen and unavoidable catastrophic market events and the risk of doing business are synonymous with the volcanos and meteor impacts in the wild, acts of god (although in the natural world the insurance companies won’t cover the damage, the taxpayer bails out the same catastrophic events in the market). It is all a story that validates the idea that the endless sea of products and technology, mass production and growth are part of the natural order. In the organic sphere we are encouraged to a have sympathy for what exists, in the commercial system it is a commandment to have the same sympathy for whatever market supports, no product kink shaming. As a result, we are constantly entertained by surreal poems and the muddled aesthetic faux pas that are being passed off as lifestyle innovations. These weird creatures in the evolutionary tree are the deformations of a relentless search for new markets.

There are problems with equating the majesty of the natural world with that of man-made innovation and manufacturing. We shouldn’t fall into the trap that validates the pure existence of any object and function. There are a few key differences between the Amazon jungle and the Amazon warehouse. The evolution and gestation of our items are reflexive and rapid, a timescale far faster than the natural processes: mutations can therefore be more deformed and violent. The force that is required for these items to come to the market on such a short timescale, low price point and high volume, leaves social and environmental damage: a collateral impact that is often absorbed by the bodies of people in low-income countries. We would no longer be the dominant species on Earth if other organisms could metamorphose at the same rate as our desires. Another difference is that the number of individual items designed, manufactured and sold is on the rise, this being the opposite in the 'products' of the natural world, where extinctions are increasing. This is an inversely proportional equation that is never mentioned in pitch meetings or launches: which endangered beetle will the new iPhone replace?

Unlike the natural world, what we want, need and buy is subject to an omnipresent force recording and influencing our desires. Algorithms and feedback loops control online marketing streams, constantly refreshing themselves: a god program. It feels like we are all dancing freely in the West, but we are subtly under the influence of a digital pantheist cloud. We have completely accepted personal data collection as a compulsory sacrifice to this deity. Any pretence of this being used as a tool for supply chain optimisation or marketing efficiency (you only see what you would actually like!) has dissolved. By agreeing to terms and conditions, we are baptised into this new faith.

Despite pitfalls of equating the ecologic and economic systems, imparting a pseudo-consciousness onto inanimate objects can help us think more critically about what we consume and design. We as Soft Baroque are often anthropomorphising the items we make, referring to pieces of furniture as characters or pets. ‘Dancing furniture’ is a continuous series of pieces of furniture with a mechanism that makes them rotate and gyrate, trippy gimmick meets modernist purity. The naive attraction of dynamic or moving inanimate object is an attempt to suggest that the the piece itself can enjoy something as uninhibited as dancing, a very human form of expression. We made them originally to be visually stimulating, but after making the prototype, we found it therapeutic and calming to sit on and 'dance' with the chair. Other motifs in our work, like rounding a classic wood finger joint into fat sausages resembling actual fingers, are a kind of pun, but also something people say it is satisfying to look at – perhaps closer to the warm feeling of intertwining fingers with someone else. We have sympathy for most living things: by viewing items as having a soul and charisma, we can transfer that into an important reverence for the lost empathy in current consumer culture. Perhaps objects should be viewed as living with you rather than being owned by you. If you own something, you're empowered to dispose of it; conversely, we can think of them as roommates or we are their steward of a long and varied life.

A useful way to think about the archaeology of objects since the turn of the millennium, particularly from a masculine point of view, is the hobby culture. There is a loop created between a niche hobby or subculture, the clout obtained by showing off on social media and the design manufacture and sales of products. This is a new and more rapid machine, but it is also driving more extreme versions of the gear one has to invest in order to participate. Inevitably the investment also demands some return.

In the past, model-making was a massive industry, scale models of trains, ships or military vehicles, like planes or tanks, were sold in kits and assembled. It was a shrunken and removed version of the violence of actual war. In the white West there was a homogenous insularity to it, an escape from reality. Now such recreation is validated if it is published and expressed outwardly through social media.

In the US, gun and the related tactical gear sales are on the rise, maybe driven by a kind of fear – but it is also a completely immersive hobby, with invented storylines and gatherings: for example, militia groups coordinating to 'help' police during BLM protests or the January 6th storming of the capital. The hobby must be lived and live streamed, LARP and the political reality converge. We understand that there are heaps of reasons for these events and movements, but it is important to also view the marketing behind ’the gear’ contributing with extreme narratives that spill over into violence. An ideology driven by a fetishisation of objects rather than an ideology of creating objects to represent their ideas. Guns and tactical equipment become the cosplay, an extension of a soldier fantasy against a tyrannical government. Like with any purchase, we are invested in the idea that the item was worth it and we want to use it as much as possible. This is an extreme example, but more versions of this mechanism occur in fitness culture, cars, fashion and wellness.

The warmth and pride towards our hobbies has been replaced with a competitive stress about having the right gear. There was a period of bewilderment about predicting millennial consumption habits, a large and allusive demographic about to achieve peak income. Prophecies based on the ‘90s nostalgia and hot takes on their psyche failed to predict a trend that would capture a market. In the end, the answer was not one idea or trend, but a system of creating and monetising hyper-personalised experiences and artefacts validated (or humiliated) through social media. A multiplication of cultural streams and the gear to match. We as designers are struggling to find innovation in our everyday functional needs, and so, we explore niches within niches to the point where even benign hobbies are supercharged. Designers are encouraged to keep finding solutions to 'problems' that were created by this system, without questioning the broader value of it. Simultaneously, it feels like there are many real issues that can be resolved through design, despite often coming across as token and aesthetic. An anxious duel between decadence and genuine deprivation.

One antidote to this is considering ‘thinking and making’ versus ‘wanting and owning’. We are not seeing them as two distinct territories, but rather as a spectrum, and sometimes as being soluble in each other. The hollowness of buying an item can be filled by fixing, making or customising it to solve the same function. There is an active attachment formed, a soft subversion of the existing system of products.

 by Zürich University of the Arts. Zürich, November 2021. 

Despite the prophecies of software and technology replacing the hard world, we are still an extremely object-oriented species. There is satisfaction in owning things ...

Natural Order & Violent Hobbies

 is a talk where the guest shares their screen live, exploring and narrating the contents of a specific folder on their computer. Our folder contains a collection of images harvested online over a long period of time, accompanied with original 

 These are inspired by the titles and descriptions of product listings online. Distorted, surreal and wonderful caches of words, normal collected enhance search optimisation and promotion of products.

 by Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome. Rome, December 2020.

Damascus Steel, Anodized Titanium, Carbon Fiber, Abalone, Fossil Mastodon Ivory, Timascus, Super Conductor, 24k Gold, Semi-Transparent Shell, Gemstones, Meteorites ...

Tag Poems

Placeholders are by definition generic beings, functioning as a cosmetic representation of something more important. We can also view the term as as holder of place, a plinth or a frame holds a place for a sculpture or a painting, a barrier holds a place without people. Objects for the presentation of other objects.

Institutional gallery infrastructure is stylistically modernist domain, a plain backdrop optimised to create a contrast with the idealised progressive and weighted content. They’re most uncontroversial part of a permanent collection but the most passive-aggressive. A string diagonally across a chair, a ring of tape on the floor, a white plinth, a glass vitrine, chair in the corner for security bodies.

The mainstay sterilised gallery tools are worth reworking. Bounce off the corporate fetishes and modernist heritage. Critical objects that perform esoteric and decorative functions that contribute to the nature of a gallery as a space for presentation of ideas. A catalogue of subversive utilities, revising aesthetic and functional expectations of this equipment.

 exhibition at Museum für Gestaltung. Zürich, October 2020. 

Placeholders are by definition generic beings, functioning as a cosmetic representation of something more important. We can also view the term as as holder of place, a plinth or a ...

Gallery Infrastructure Catalog

A progressive radii on every corner, particularly on electronic devices, has become a kind of default in design circles, settings fetishised by Apple. We have all seen those advertisements of the close ups and dynamic shots of crescent reflections dancing around corners and bezels of phones and watches often on a black background, as if it was some undiscovered horizon in space. We find this shapes attractive haptically, but also it’s non threatening, no sharp edges or pokey bits. We are more worried about damaging it (our most intimate object) than it damaging us. But in this language there is no place for simulation, like an acupuncture needle, a sharpness or awkwardness can produce new sensations.

This softness has extended into our homes in the form of fully upholstered couches to the extent where softness is pure decoration. We have all at some point removed a cascade of 'excess to requirements' throw pillows from a hotel bed. Not to mention the cushion cover as the ultimate medium for domestic self expression, as the t-shirt is to the outfit and the mug is to the office.

At the same time the fully upholstered megastructure of a sofa becomes a status symbol. There is a desire to keep padding our lives out with foam, fearing contact with anything that has a shore hardness greater than our skin. Designs are bloating out and inflating to absorb any element that poses a risk to our vulnerable bodies. Removing the effects of gravity in the same way we have tried or insulate ourselves from the natural world in so many other ways. We are trying to bypass the laws of physics. But on the other hand, we also need to feel the presence. For example, in space, with no perceivable gravitation pull, and in theory infinitely comfortable, astronauts report strapping themselves down, with like space straps or something, to simulate the feeling of weight. Too much of a good thing. This is a reminder that our bodies have adapted to gravity as an environmental factor, in the same way as evolving with the environment and with other living organisms. DON’T BE SO SOFT.

While we are more and more driven by softness and comfort we are becoming less tolerant of discomfort, hard surfaces or flat planes. A cycle given by no longer having to be physically mobile for stimulation or social interaction. It’s ironic that the mobile phone was a liberating device, allowing us to communicate from anywhere. And it is true that it has fulfilled its promise of digital nomadism. But as a matter of fact I would expect that most of our phone screen time happens to be spend in bed. The most immobile, homely and soft place in our lives.

In contrast there is a cultural revival of a certain hard minimalism in work of Donald Judd and alike. However this is more sympathised visually rather than functionally. Luckily Donald Judd’s chair is too valuable to be sat on anyway. This stems from nobility that is associated with Zen and aura and the beauty of the simple and rejection of the complexity and excess stimulation. But does this really cross over into our real lives? We are happy to invite Marie Kondo to blast our physical objects with fire hose onto the front lawn, but if we are asked to simplify our digital presence, a metaphorical tangle of wired headphones and old chargers, we would have fewer converts. This is under estimating the power of hypercapitlaism’s dependance on our digital footprint.

We are not against comfort or softness, but we believe that functions and needs are more plastic than the market demands of us. You need this thing, then you need this thing, and you may also like… We feel it’s our role to question these functions and programs, as people have done for centuries, and not just reset to Apple's default settings. Let’s not take it for granted that most comfortable is the best. For example, we often say that the best chair for your back is the most uncomfortable chair, because it forces us not to sit for a long time and to get up and walk around or change positions.

Softness is also digital movement, a metaphysical promise. Software over hardware. Objects can service us in a physically intangible world. The ultimate soft object is the computer program. The cloud is the softest throw pillow of them all, but it also alienates, the feeling that we are not in control of our digital objects, dictated by a sometimes fragile internet connection.

In various computer learning circles there is a desire to create programs with outcomes that fool or seduce humans. This enviably leads to the questions about whether it could replace the creative industries. GAN or Generative Adversarial Networks are AI systems that are a reasonably new field of machine learning. They rely on learning from the vast body of data like other systems, but are more successful because part of the framework is constantly being ‘adversarial’. Two systems: generative and discriminative, simply put, fighting each other for the best results. This is often associated with realistic outcomes. For example, you might have seen a website thispersondoesnotexist.com that is using this method to create realistic head shots of people that don’t exist. This method has been applied to interiors, stories, poems, recipes, music…. creating artworks, some more successful than others.

A friend was telling us about a job where they had to produce a modern wall based artwork for hotel rooms. Abstract blocks of colours and sprinkle in some found objects maybe. Making agglomerations and hybrids manually from a mood board, where authorship is not important, brings us to completely decorative furnishing exercise. In this case one of these programs and a "painting/found object scattering robot” could replace our friend.

We could see that functional objects could be rudimentarily converted to an equation, something like. Function + decoration/surface + material/form. We could design objects with a series of sliders by turning the volume on each dial. Similar to the tool we use to change the brightness on an image. We can imagine Amazon using some algorithm that evaluates the meta data of products and use this tool to predict, manufacture and market objects, and shape our reality. We would be surprised if there wasn’t already a simple version of this. A system that trawled the internet for popular memes, photoshopped, uploaded onto a platform, sold and printed on demand. A generic object, with no human creative input (apart from the source image, which we now know can be realistically generated without human input).
We are not thinking about these systems, because we are worried about losing our jobs, but more as an exploration and interpretation of our creative process. In other words. Not what a computer can do for us, but what it tells us about ourselves.

As a thought experiment how do the objects we design fit in this data set? What would the computer think? Would it be disruptive? Thrown away as an outlier or a valuable data point? I wonder what the trash pile of this system would look like, the stuff that doesn't fit the parameters of the system? What objects can we make that would fool AI systems in the same way that they are trying to fool us? Programs can have hallucinations too.

Our needs are becoming more and more perverse and service based. Mainstream object design flattened to not be controversial anymore. People are rethinking post modernism because it is not optimistic and solution based, and seems too egotistic in a time for urgent action on issues like climate change, racial equality and human rights.

We think this is completely understandable, but we have lost a way we can critically think about design culture though the act of participating in the system. We like to make items that are part of the market, but also question the value structures underneath. For us this represents the ultimate soft sell. A product that is friendly, subtle, humorous, beautiful and with a strange aftertaste. It inspires us to think critically about our world. It can backfire and we find ourselves get stuck in a quagmire of self aware meta one liners and realise that no real meaning or solution is presented. So it is important to think about the power of beauty or sympathy in these scenarios.

A progressive radii on every corner, particularly on electronic devices, has become a kind of default in design circles, settings fetishised by Apple. We have all seen those ...

Soft Skin, Software and Soft Sell

Soft Renaissance

So much of what was physical has become digital, fantasies of wading out into a digital ocean, never to return, are becoming an everyday dream for some, the end of humanity to others. For now we still have to come up for air in the real world, produce content, or to eat, which in itself has become a digital commodity via food-graming. Our tolerance for experiencing the 'natural world’ with no digital interactions is becoming more and more rare, our dreams are intertwined with being represented online.

The conviction of form has been expanded in the rise of digitally-generated architecture and software has become an integral part of utilitarian objects, generating new genres of contemporary products like Wifi enabled latte cups. Similarly, surface is entwined with digital principles and exists indifferently from the physical matter. An object can now appear in multiple aesthetic arrangements with the variation of its surface, for example the growing world of on-demand printing and branding services. A liberation from the aesthetic limitations of the substrate material properties. Rustic textures are a common and popular feature of laminate flooring catalogues, delivering a floor complete with idiosyncratic cracks and knots; embossed and printed with high resolution surface texture. Objects also exist as a digital commodity, things are created, photographed, as a means to produce content exclusively. Could we skip a step here and craft objects digitally without the need to satisfy the structural characteristics of that material? Release ourselves from earth's gravity and the weight of the human body.The symbolic value of materials has been divorced from the value of the actual substance for a long time. This is well visible in the 90s marketing: watch Carmen Kass walking into the liquid gold pool for J’adore, a seductive rebirth, baptised in gold as she emerges from the water. In Metahaven’s White Night Before A Manifesto they call out this impossible alchemy: “Surface is a transformation of the valueless into the valuable by means of psychological deception.” They continue to say that black in American Express ‘black card’ is a step further, the invention a pseudo-solid, largely masculine, marketing substance.

Surface is predominate design principle in the lexicon of consumer objects. It is a from of camouflage, each warring product is competing to wrap all exposed edges in embossed hi-res textures, a ploy to be unseen by the consumer. Paint jobs, images, printed parts and veneers are trying to disguise and endorse their host, are developing in sophisticated and diabolical ways, striving to replicate a material with a more desirable cultural heritage. More research goes into making an item look more valuable and cost less than to actually perform, leaving everything hollow, with a mass of petrochemicals, circuits and wood pulp underneath. Like finding yourself in a glitch in a game, walking through a rock or a wall, a bug in the design revealing its back, a mirrored inside out skin, a realisation that the world is created from the thickness of one pixel. Surface can be as thin as a layer of ink, but critical to the production of value.

What happens when you bite into this apple? Cut reveals the truth about its core. Chipboard, honeycomb, foam, air: void fill. Surface is the warm embrace, removing the need to confront the mess of industrial supporting systems and treasure secrets.

 by Superposition. Zürich, September 2020. Photo by Max Creasy. 

So much of what was physical has become digital, fantasies of wading out into a digital ocean, never to return, are becoming an everyday dream for some, the end of humanity to others ...

Liquid Tension

The trickery of sensory perception has been a prominent feature of aesthetic production since the high Baroque, initially through the technique quadratura, which sought to extend spatial planes through the manipulation of perspective via trompe-l'œil effects. We know trompe-l'œil mostly from art, but perspective illusion served a purpose in many realms including architecture, interior decoration, and even garden design: as Luke Morgan traces in one essay on the 17th century garden, trompe-l'œil outdoors had the ability to improve “a cramped urban outlook at relatively little expense: a kind of early modern virtual reality.” Reportedly, this ‘early modern virtual reality’ tricked humans and animals alike as they mistook the grapes on the painted vines, and branches of the trees, as real. In 1644, a particularly impeccable life-size perspective tableau by French painter Jean Lemaire, in the gardens of Duc de Richelieu’s château at Rueil (modern day suburban Paris), even led the strasbourgeois traveler Elie Brackenhoffer to note in her diary that “if [he] had painted so artistically that men and birds were deceived, this [the mural] must be no less esteemed, but must be contemplated with the greatest admiration, and regarded as its equal'.

Brackenhoffer’s anti-Platonic comment highlights an important question regarding the perception of value in objects. In materialist terms, “regarding an illusion as the equal” would mean an equalization of value between the real and its copy. Can the virtual ever match the value of ‘the real’, and how do we measure such value? This question resonates only more urgently today. What Morgan calls the ”sixteenth-century Italian preoccupation with dissolving the boundaries between interior and exterior space” through trompe-l'œil effects can be compared with relative easy with today’s preoccupation with blurring the boundaries between the physically tactile and the virtually rendered. This is the case in art, cinema, video gaming and design, amongst others. But while high baroque’s preoccupation with visual trickery was most often in service of aristocratic, hagiographic, or more broadly, religious powers (to symbolize grandeur and dominance), Soft Baroque investigates the use of trompe-l'œil in contemporary interior design, which, through the digitized appropriation of particular materials, triggers a confrontation of how we appreciate and consume commodities as and through surfaces. It erases what Rem Koolhaas once described as the boundary between “the real and the virtual, between information and architecture,” or rather, it integrate them into each other: a deterritorialization of virtual images into space, as surfaces, thus shifting the strategies of reading and critiquing objects.

Illusionism forms the basis of Marx’ critique of commodity fetishism. The disparity between use value and exchange value (later expanded by Bourdieu to encompass symbolic value), which drives capitalism, is enabled, amongst others, by “the look of things” (the illusionism of objects). This translates more-or-less directly into surface decoration. Somewhere along the line, surface decoration and ornamentation was equivalized with design as a whole (weirdly, despite being a fundamental part of every structure of an object, design is still largely considered as a luxurious ‘add-on’), so much that theorist and critic Hal Foster premised his infamous critique of design predominately on the importance of surface and decoration. Drawing on early modernist Viennese architect Adolf Loos and his disapproval of Art Nouveau, he criticized the ‘surface’ of the decorative, and reproached design for its engagement with it today, “when the aesthetic and the utilitarian are not only conflated but all but subsumed in the commercial.” To Foster, contemporary design is “a part of a greater revenge of capitalism on postmodernism,” completely unable to resist the dynamics of the neoliberal market. This is only enabled further by technology and the deterritorializing of images through virtual means: “as Deleuze and Guattari, let alone Marx, taught as long ago,” he writes, “this deterritorializing is the path of capital.”

However, why should this capitalist cooptation and instrumentalisation (which, quite frankly, seems inevitable today in any sub-chamber of culture) be the end of artistic inquiry into the effects of illusionism and the way we valorize commodities? Today, a critique of capitalism must come from within its dynamics rather than from an illusory avant-gardist outside. Foster’s understanding of design is limited not at least due to his strict conceptualization of design as a commercial commodity. Of course, this is not the case – and today, as the potentialities of ‘conceptual design’ and ‘speculative design’ are increasingly addressed, we know that there are alternative forms of design that are not entirely driven by market forces – rather, design that provides a space for thinking, for trying out ideas, and ideals (for example, the way in which surfaces translate into value). Anthony Dune and Fiona Raby, authors of Speculative Everything, argue that “design speculations can act as a catalyst for collectively redefining our relationship to reality” and defines its subcategory, critical design (of which Foster thought was an impossibility), to be using “speculative design proposals to challenge narrow assumptions, preconceptions, and givens about the role products play in everyday life.” Under the banner of critical design, speculations on the complexities of interior design, virtual space, photography, and technology might be studied further and more rigorously.

Visual Tactility and the Valorization of Surfaces

Soft Baroque’s trompe-l'œil shifts its ‘visual trickery’ of perspective to a ‘trompe les sens’ of tactile perception. “Touch is a compelling sensory,” writes Maria de la Ballasca in her research, arguing that in a masculinist landscape of modern scholarship, it is the tactile sensory that is the most neglected and most frequently ignored (enabled by modern photography, vision and the gaze is the ultimate modern condition of perception).

Just as baroque art primarily engaged dichotomies such as far/near, digitized printing of materials in the field of interior design initially engages the dichotomy of soft/hard – but expands quickly into other perceptual dimensions such as sticky–slippery–cold–warm–dry–rough (‘surface roughness’ is an actual measurable concept in science, for example, complete with its own schematic symbol). Tactile perception, however, is precedented by a visual expectation of tactility in the brain: as neuroscientists Hideyoshi Yanagisawa and Kenji Takatsuji argue, “humans predict a product’s tactile quality based on its appearance before they have touched it.” They continue: Surface texture is a design factor that consists of physical attributes created by a variety of materials and surface finishes—attributes such as roughness, glossiness, color, and hardness. People perceive and/or predict a surface’s characteristics corresponding to each physical attribute through sensory information, a process that we call perceived features (e.g., surface roughness perceived through touch). Using a combination of perceived characteristics of surface texture, people perceive a tactile quality, such as “nice to touch.”

This illusionism of “tactile feelings,” which can be measured scientifically, engages normative modes of perception in interior design objects and the signifiers of value embedded in them. As the researchers hint at, visual perception of tactility has a central place in contemporary product design, more specifically, in their value creation: “this information can help designers select and create product surface textures with certain combinations of visual and tactile characteristics in order to elicit specific tactile feelings.”

Obviously, what scientist deem an abstract quality such ‘nice to touch’ has a larger economic connotation and implication beyond the immediate sensory. This is a kind of value deeply embedded into the sociocultural dynamics of taste. The customer’s (in the case of Soft Baroque, we can interchange this title with viewer’s) “psychological response to the surface” is dependent on the psychological and personal association to this material, particularly, the aspirational signifiers of newness, familiarity, cultural otherness, luxury, apathy, and aspiration (“this is shiny and modern: so cool and sleek!” or “this is Balinese wood, how authentic and exotic!”). This is what Baudrillard understands by symbolic capital; “the value of status bestowed upon objects or people by those in recognised positions of authority” – namely, the ruling middle-class consumer that, since their emergence after the French revolution, have dictated what constitutes high taste. This is most often done in opposition to the behavior and taste of the working class. As fashion and design trends teach us, every material’s tactility (and shape) has a cultural association, but can change from one socio-cultural context to another. Wood, for example, can, dependent on context, be regarded as unconspicous, organic, natural, authentic, historical, clichéd, co-opted, naf, scary, or old-fashioned. Equally, the prevalence of marble in contemporary interior design suggests a return to ‘the natural’, but simultaneously, the prevalence of pastiche-like corporate aesthetics in art and design (Metahaven, Shanzhai Biennial, DIS) suggest a meta-appreciation for the cold, machine-made and technological. These contradictions can sit and coexist perfectly, not only between different cultures but in individual consumers. Today, we value materials not just by their tactile and visual properties, or their intrinsic codified forms of manufacturing (“it’s handmade, it’s cute!), but in a mismatch of perception and meta-perceptions of our own consumerist and aesthetic behavior.

In their essay White Night - Before A Manifesto, Dutch design collective Metahaven discuss the valorization of surface in today’s design climate. “The multiplication of surface, formerly called information overload, is the new reality of design. Its unit of measurement is virtual,” they write, thus translating the semiotic logic of tactile surface value into data in digital networks. Like Metahaven, Soft Baroque constantly oscillate between the units of the real and the virtual, highlighting a flaw in the materialist understanding of design value, but simultaneously insisting on a material element in the digital. Take a material like marble. Marble is a ‘natural’ compound, fetishized for its visual and tactile attributes by thousands of years by various civilizations. Simulatenously, it has also been a victim of changing taste in the global middle-class, having fallen out of style in several periods in the past (some of us cannot help to think clinical Dubai hotel lobby when we see marble). However, not long after early post-internet art appropriated marble in the digital sphere of Tumblr (as a contrasting signifier of materiality in a digital time, virtual neo-neo-neo-classic aesthetics, etc.), marble once again began surfacing as an aspirational material in Western interior design stores (marble slabs to decorate tables, marble beauty containers, or most memorably, when Kim Kardashian announced she would pay her mother $1 million if she managed to source new slabs of imported Calcutta gold marble that Jenner has supposedly ‘stolen from her’). In this translation, “surface, representing no particular meaning or message, is the precondition for virtual capital, projected revenue and speculative value” – occupying a range of different forms of valorizations, real and virtual, at once.

Metahaven gives the example of a Visa Gold and Platinum cards, which “has understood correctly that the informational properties of surface do not need to correspond to its material worth. Surface is a transformation of the valueless into the valuable by means of psychological deception.” The symbolization of wealth through other materials (paper to plastic) is a classic virtualization of value, but this is complicated by the Visa Black card, an even more exclusive object of extreme wealth, or as they put it, “a piece of surface only available to the ultra privileged.” (Visa designates this card to the top 1% of their customers). Beyond the symbolism of precious black metals, and clichéd codes of fashion (“black is the new gold”), it takes the concept of value to its “decisive, post-material (virtual) stage:” the black card is made of titanium, making it durable (non-breakable), and thus, virtually valuable in the sense that durable material is generally, or at least historically, valorized higher than non-durable material. The Visa Black card is post-material in that it negates it, yet returns to a materiality in a meta-normative fashion.

The ‘trickery’ in Soft Baroque’s project gently agitates a similar dynamic in the viewer. Design, and particularly furniture design, requires exactly the kind of codified form of viewership wherein we regard objects both for their surface value and their use-value, simultaneously (we want a couch to be pretty but we also want it to be comfortable). The visual expectation of tactility functions as a commentary on consumerism rooted in manufacturing: the expectation of a material is connected to our expectations of a product. As Tim Parsons writes in Thinking Objects, “In the case of surface texture, a photo of a product in an advertisement may suggest a quality better than that of the actual item, leading to disappointment. This disconfirmation of prior expectations is a factor that affects both positive and negative emotions toward a product and its attributes.”

The incorporation of furniture creates a subtle collage of ‘real’ and ‘fictional’ perceptive tropes, effectively blurring that line. This is pure speculation. In the objects, there is an immediate transgression of realism, functionality and solution – arguably the three pillars of modern design. Yet, these objects are not non-functional; they are not all hard; they are not ‘useless’. They posses a materiality, albeit a different one from expected; they are surface, yet are more than their surface.

Soft Baroque’s project employs the visual trickery enabled by digital materiality to question our understanding of value. How might bourgeois taste and value be formed in the anthropogenic future, wherein not only more and more design processes are automatized, digitized, and virtualized (extending surface-based trompe l’oeil effect to virtually impossible to distinguish from 3D printing to real), but wherein natural resources such as wood become a global scarcity?

The ultimate question, of course, is how these dynamics of valorization are connected to how we measure and valorize the ‘reality’ of objects, or reality as a whole. The objects of Soft Baroque are physically present in space, posses their own durability, and could theoretically be used to sit on, to store books in, etc. Yet, at the same time, they are ‘fakes’ – they claim an ontology that is not theirs, at least not, in pre-virtual terms. They posses a functional and ontological flexibility between decorative object, art piece, and interior element: the objects come with no instructions regarding their function or use value.

Illusionism, or trompe-l'œil, here, is a subversive practice that highlights the constructed systems of value embedded in objects rather than, as Foster and Loos claims, cover them. It is a critique of spectatorship and consumer fetishism, but it is also, somewhere between the lines, a proposal towards a new form of object appreciation and engagement in the post-virtual. By humorously exposing these dynamic, embracing them rather than policing them, we are encouraged to reconsider and move beyond our fetishisation of certain forms of materialities. In the digitized future, all elements of representation, manufacturing, and reality are subject to redefinition.

 by Soft Baroque. Copenhagen, June 2016. 

The trickery of sensory perception has been a prominent feature of aesthetic production since the high Baroque, initially through the technique quadratura, which sought to ...

Trompe-l'œil and Value in the Age of Digital Reproduction

Surface Fictions By Jeppe Ugelvig

There is a feeling that we have reached a point where the abundance of the variety of products, their methods of proliferation, and the internet marketplace have allowed us to somehow subvert the unrealities that were born in consumer culture and advertising in the last century. In the domestic landscape, this feeling is satisfied – we watch (like a weekly sitcom) Ebay items for second hand goods in the same way that we discover/shop in the vast multiplex of warehouses available through Amazon. These ways of shopping allow for more discretion, and arguably are a better representation of free market capitalism - a proposal for a continuously self-adjusting and equilibrating ecosystem.

At first, online shopping was a matter of convenience - a means to an end. This information, now able to be perfectly recorded as data entries, has evolved to being a way to specifically advertising to unique users. On the cusp of online advertising, trillions of data points are compared and run through algorithms and mathematical models and converted into targeted advertising every minute. Accuracy is increasing with the build up of data.

Do we get closer to a more accurate representation of our individual taste the more one participates in the system? Can we capitulate to the "all-knowingness" of the mathematical system-at-large to decide our future consumer choices? Are the recommendations/feedback of this cycle disallowing people to independently arrange their lives according to his/hers own desires, needs, and tastes? Are these needs and desires a product of the cycles or recommendations themselves...?

These images are modeled on some of Richard Hamilton's paintings and collage. He responded to the habits of the consumer culture since the 1950s, before his recent death in 2011. His work was an artistic response to the contemporary domestic system of objects. The images below are remakes of these works, furnished with possessions individually recommended to me by online shopping advertising. They are interiors crafted by computer algorithms comparing and collating my shopping and browsing information, as well as personal factors such as age and sex. These are not glamorous commercials appealing to our inner desires, but low-res images with white backgrounds and watermarks. Renderings of new property developments that don't exist, yet are complete with sunset views and scale models of blocks with solar panels and parking.

 by Many Many Publications. Melbourne, November 2013.

There is a feeling that we have reached a point where the abundance of the variety of products, their methods of proliferation, and the internet marketplace have ...

User Agreement

Fashioned from plate aluminium, spiky tabs and bent over to secure the joints of a typical panel desk. The claws protruding from the furniture are kind of a graphic representation of the angst of college, the desperation of trying to come to terms with your creative voice with institutional and economic pressure. The bamboo desktop has an Ikea coded, green washed passivity in contrast to the forged raw metal structure. Oval foot holes for resting ones feet and a paper shredder for destroying ideas.

In the Weeds

We enjoy mixing making processes into singular objects, it encapsulates a contradictions in production methods and material in the wider consumer landscape. In this piece we used scraps from our carved aluminium series and welded them before shaping and gluing infill sections from European walnut. A round-about way to weld wood together, but also implying that one can buy this standard material somewhere, wood stuffed inside aluminium box section for some reason after all you can buy aluminium printed with wood grain why not the other way around?

Infilled

chair, morphing its iconic holes into 91 hearts, reminiscent of traditional vernacular Alpine furniture with pierced heart holes.

Heart Landi

Most wood furniture today is made from veneered chipboard, it conveys its value with its outer surface. These pieces work backwards from that layer, starting with veneer and applying fiberglass and resin as a structure, capturing the ripples in the wood formed when drying. These panels are bolted together with segments of an aluminium bar bent into a spiral, a corporate worm cut into pieces.

Diet Wood

Fountain using a frame from the MR chair, designed by Luwig Mies van der Rohe in 1927. Tubular steel furniture designed in the golden age of modernism is here misappropriated to serve as plumbing for a fountain. Since their conception and original production, they have become the top choice for lobby furniture and show homes. Perhaps spurred on by off-shore reproductions and lapsed design copyrights, they are ubiquitous in the interior landscape and paradoxically seem to simultaneously represent personal luxury and good corporate values. This is is politically at odds with the vision of the original designers, they are an example perception of a design or idea can change swallowed and regurgitated by market forces. While modernism holds an efficient, industrial and hygienic spirit, fountains can be feminine, decorative, dynamic and communal. Further on conversely, when water gets into something, into a house or a boat, it has sprung a leak. It appears neglected in a same way the original vision of these pieces has been neglected. Modernism has sprung a leak.

Modernism has sprung a leak

Traditional log furniture is defined by its construction technique, round mortice and tenon, and rustic raw material, small logs. We are bisecting this definition by using square and planed timber rather than round wood. 

 furniture is a pathetic gesture to force us to come to terms with our pathological role as fixers of the nature.

Square Log

There are certain architectural and hardware typologies that seemed to have reached a dead end. The stainless steel handrail has become a ubiquitous silver worm in institutions and homes. It is an object that strives to have no aesthetic, practically and culturally hygienic. For us it represents the pervasiveness of a certain brand of corporate modernism, desperate to create value but not offend, a hollow snake silently constricting stairways and balconies indefinitely. 

 is a series of pieces using standard stainless steel tubes, rotary laser cut and bent. The handrail material is taken to more extreme conclusions, escaping the dead end.

Inox Detox

 stool is a composition of three identical laminated beech parts. It appears to be slumped in the rain like a piece of road side chipboard furniture but is sturdy and well finished. It is rational, standardised, modular and semi-industrial approach, using components that can be assembled in many configurations and functions.

Kiko

Aluminium bar is twisted, bent and bolted together before being shaped with power carving disc. A Wegner chair or sculpted mid-century Danish classic distorted and fossilised into a reflective aluminium surface.

Power carved

The traditional and tapered mortice and tenon have been rebranded many times. We continue this evolution, converging to a sharp a point, becoming a piece of domestic hostile design. It represents parts of modernism that have been fetishised to loose a connection with the human body.

Toothpick

We have become fascinated with strange genres of furniture, office desks with integrated fitness equipment or shooting range furniture, both what is designed to be shot from (a picnic bench cut in half and some extra bits), and shot at (extremely durable polyurethane cartoony wardrobes). Stealth grow cabinets, used for growing weed in your apartment undetected, is another example. Hi-powered grow lights, ventilation and a watering system all camouflaged as a chifforobe. We like this object as a strange combination of deception, technology and the natural. 

 series is our own stylised versions of these, illuminated from the inside. An example of the extremes of our migration from the natural energy of the sun.

Stealth

Angular joints are sanded down, producing a chubby, anthropomorphic result, strong enough for basic support, but supple and bursting like sausage fingers.

Lipos

Seven interconnected benches that appear to be melted are inspired by the sun and its both life-giving and destructive potential. We love the unintended damage the sun can cause on material, particularly plastics and non-natural substances. The chalkiness of plastic chairs, bubbling of window films, scorched billboard images, bleached out gradients in fabrics and slumping of plexiglass or laminates. This lounge mega structure are a weird homage to this, refined frozen versions of furniture in a slow fall, melting in the sun, providing somewhere to rest and play on the way down. Each bench element is made from a wooden body and covered in patches of polyurethane rubber to create a soft, bubble-like surface. These graphic embossments were poured at pressure points corresponding with a relaxed body. The spindly stainless steel legs, finished in rubber caps, are kept at a minimum thickness to accentuate the bench’s upper body volume. Benches were covered by hand with Marsèll’s classic yellow calfskin leather by the artisans in the company’s Venetian factory. The leather acts as an ersatz for a human skin, complete with droplets of sweat (made from polyurethane rubber).


 series is based on extracting functional sculptural object from a flat 2-D plane. This lends itself to the two sides being in contrast with each other or emphasizing the fact that it is a manipulated flat surface. Large format images or wood veneer are applied to one face while leaving the other in anodised aluminium. It is an attempt to suggest a distortion of the surface world that we live.

Soft Metal +

Made with coppiced hazel and grey paint. Log furniture has always been maligned to the cabin or rural setting, but it is a really economical (not ergonomical) and responsible way to make furniture, little waste and fast growing trees. This is a suggestion to bring it into the corporate sphere.

Log Furniture

Cuts are made in 10mm plate aluminium, with heat and muscle, structure and function is unfolded out of a 2D plane. No aluminium is added or removed. Powder coated and finished with polished stainless balls, where fixings are needed.

Soft Metal

We like the idea of things that are animated and struggling to grab your attention (first in this series was moving baby crib). Our dancing furniture references common furniture from design history. The crib and chair reference Joseph Hoffman-type Viennese modernism and the armchair references early 2000s Ikea, which itself is derived from mid-century typologies.

Dance Mix

Tufnol is an industrial laminate made from layers of linen bonded with resin. It is used as a non-conductive and corrosion resistant replacement for metal parts such as gears and bearings. Similar to bakelite it is credited as the first completely synthetic plastic material. When carving though the layers of fabric it produces a pattern similar to wood grain, a high performing object camouflaging as a natural material. Made into a visually pared-back Shaker style, the chair is a homogeneous reference to the sometimes antithetical forces of craft, industry, style and religion.

Tufnol Shaker

We have historically seen image and object as separate entities, however it has become increasingly difficult to define the point where one ends and other begins. Heightened resolution is clouding the space between the physical and the digital and dissolving our desire to differentiate between the two. The visual and physical languages are often incongruous, but the prevalence of image as a material pervades architecture and objects. Large format prints of juicy droplet bedazzled tomatoes confront you walking past a supermarket or construction site hoardings and  print a graphic version of the building being restored, or they simply monetise this space through advertising. Printed scaffoldings wood grain on laminates for flooring or furniture have become more and more hyper-real and verging on the psychedelic. A strange mix of deception and decoration. These objects encourage a dialogue between craft, image and the digital, in a very direct way. We used direct to media print technique to transport images onto the wood. Afterward it is worked in a relatively traditional manner. Cut, arranged and jointed.

Fotoprogettazione

Using standard aluminium box section we conducted simple objects. The aluminium members, reminiscent of 2x4 timber, has sections graphically cut away revealing the hollow structure. It is a technical replica of a rustic primitive construction.

Carved Aluminium

High-performance materials have become a form of decorative masculinity. Carbon fiber car bonnets and phone cases have caught up with other materials and surfaces, such as leather or burr walnut, as symbols of quality or value. Its desirability comes from its hi-techness, an aspiration that technology will guide us to a shining future. A way of escaping gravity and the environmental damage. Bezos, Musk, Branson. Strength to weight ratio, has become a mantra in this faith. Designed for displaying flowers fiber vases both celebrate and reject this idea. Made without a mould, the form is generated by free-hand manipulating resin soaked fibers. The unsystematic and unique shapes are then built up with clear resin and polished. First stage has very sculptural attitude towards shaping the material, while the second one requires a lot of control and patience. It is a process of applying resin multiple times, curing, sanding and polishing before finish is perfect. The pieces feel as though they are collapsing but are extremely strong and rigid.


Hi-performance Flowers

Material purged from the plastic recycling machine in-between changing colours or polymers has a grotesque quality. This low grade material is used to build simple panel pieces. Working with what plastic recycling facility has on the day we create assemblies that suit everyday household functions.

Purged Plastic

By injecting concrete into balloons and arranging them in a mould, a set of perfectly fitting set of concrete bricks is made. A new method of generating distorted soft architecture and objects and an exploration in the visual and tactile exchange between soft and hard. The idea for this technique was born during our trip to Naples in Italy. While walking the streets we noticed an old arch - later identified as 

 - holding up a stone seawall. Washed by the waves, the material around each stone had softened up, becoming round and cartoon-like. It was a rational object that became decorative, almost comical. It got stuck in our heads as the representation of an unintentional piece of progressive architecture.

Puffy Brick

Brass tube reminiscent of exhaust pipe is heated and deformed by hand and the hammer to be shaped in quite forceful and chaotic process. It’s finished in black nickel coat, fitted with remote control colour changing LED light and decorated with fresh flower. 

 series is playing with ideas about stereotypes in gender aesthetics and material expectations.

BN&F

A series of pieces constructed from lines derived from Photoshop hard round brush tool. The worms are converted from a digital sketch into a substantial object, connected by hidden joinery. They reference the clumsy expediency of digital image production in contrast to 20th century craft movements. A language that is stuck between our persistent values about the natural and the growing dominance of computer generated aesthetics.

Hard Round

I will love you forever if you bring desert to my living room,

 is recreation of a fictitious natural substance, a domesticated mini desert. The sand surface changes when touched, like dunes in the desert. Dig your latte in the sand or rest your feet to relax. In contrast with the sand, the table is constructed from aluminium T-slot framing, a popular profile for making custom machinery and equipment. A structural host that can support any substance.

I will love you forever ...

Project Surface Service sees the sensory manipulation of interior design objects like benches and shelves, and the automated value inscription embedded in everyday objects. The surfaces of materials, like exotic wood and granite, are scanned 1:1 and digitally printed onto silk textiles. Analysing the idea of a digital veneer, these objects negotiate what happens when materiality travels from the physical to electric signals and pulses, and back again. As objects, they defy any obvious compartmentalisation in art or design, and humorously explores the critical hierarchies that exists between functionalist and aesthetic objects. The project lends itself to trending discourses of object oriented ontology and speculative realism, without abandoning our perverted sense of consumer logic.

Surface Service

Renderings are becoming more diabolic and sophisticated, representations of reality are appearing in higher resolution. Meanwhile in the real world thin skins wrap cheap composites to imply value, these imitations, often of the natural, are functional fictions. 

 is a visual system that examines infinite digital capacity versus the real world. Flexibility of digital imaging allows surface references to fade in and out, without the burden and expense of manual labor. Out of the blue, the digital skin enables the surface to absorb different material identities. The southern yellow pine planks of a uniform dimension are flocked chroma blue to make a pre-finished material, which is cut and assembled together. This type of construction is a reference to Gerrit Rietveld, Enzo Mari and other lo-fi plank wizards, but it is soft and plush, padding out modernism’s sharp corners. By keying out the blue colour, the surface of the furniture can be digitally substituted for another surface input. A live camera feed displays the chairs with altered surface textures applied to deceive the eye. Surface exists indifferently from the physical material and can be more finely tuned to commercial feedback loops.


New Surface Strategies

Screws are a super normal and universal method for creating structures, however it is often embarrassing for designer to leave them exposed. Possibly from a nostalgia for traditional timber joinery or the desire for the visual purity, screws are usually filled, plugged, hidden or covered. Even the cheapest furniture, where every possible cost has been trimmed, we still place equate their appearance as a negative value. 

is an overcompensation for this delusion, a marriage between a over looked economical construction system and the cultural mythical value of natural freshwater pearls.

Pearl Screw Top

 is a mirror that emits a water particle cloud. Mirror is connected to a reservoir containing water and ultrasonic atomizer. The device emits a vapor cloud partly obscuring the reflection as well humidifying and perfuming the air. Cool, dry and fragrant mist. It’s cloud is continually changing shape in response to the swirls and vortices in the space. The concept is inspired by our collective human desire to replicate natural phenomena for pleasure or relaxation: wave pools, indoor tropical islands and snow resorts in the desert. The piece simulates a natural climatic occurrence which almost disables the mirror’s traditional function, in doing so it produces a new sensory experience. Mirror becomes a pseudo functional screen, a zen portal that reinforces the dream like sense of new private reality. Like an open fire, it is mesmerising and hypnotic.

Lenticularis

 bench is a monolithic steel form created from a combination of a few simple actions. Working with a bespoke metal fabrication company, a standard 2.5 x1.5 meter flat sheet of steel is manipulated in three operations: it is rolled into a tube, pressed flat and the ends are bent at two points to form the verticals. The resulting contours and curves are a result of this rather violent process. The Standard Steel Bbench was developed in collaboration with David Horan and first released in 2013.

Standard Steel

Looking at the vast corporate foyers of Liverpool Street, clad with back-lit Carrara marble, these pieces reference the forceful use of a symbolically luxury material. Marble slabs, cracked and folded, are forced into precarious shapes. A symbol of permanency and geological authenticity, marble is used as a tool to inspire confidence in clients and potential investors. These vacuous and excessive spaces, derived from a Modernist formula, are informed by professional conduct.

Corporate Marble

Shards of the bluest blue are made by a process of cutting, splaying, bending, and drilling, following an informal set of making rules.

 Kiko Kostadinov

Carved Aluminium hooks

Interior for Addicted: Kiko Kostadinov. Korea, 2024.

Kiko Kostadinov

Addicted interior

 chair, developed by Hans Coray for the Swiss National Exhibition of 1939. We reworked the parsimonious proportions of the chair and redesigned it with different criteria. It is inflated, widened and lowered, like digitally changing and scaling the sliders on a piece of software before being fossilised in European Walnut. It’s a critical response, but also carries an aesthetic and functional appeal. Soft and rounded holes and proportions are comfortable and pleasing, in the style mid-century sculpted furniture, but completely betray the egalitarian, industrially produced and financially accessible (15 francs at the time) original.

Zurich Design Weeks x Vitra

Llaannddii

This project began for us when we encountered an old stone seawall with an arch leading into the water on the coast of Naples. Later identified as Arco Borbonico, the structure has since collapsed and is undergoing restoration. The sea had eroded the spaces between the blocks, resulting in a cartoonish structure with exaggerated, fat, round blocks. The once monumental became comical—a unintentional piece of aesthetically progressive architecture.

Gufram

Pietre edition

The Dover Street Market interiors are a series of structures that once formed a building, a theoretical Kiko Kostadinov shop, chopped up and sent around the world. A showroom in fragments. The anodised aluminium parts have the typology of a wooden dwelling but are strangely fossilised, with large sections cut away to revel a hollow core. A digital game-like glitch, hi-tech stylised version of a fake rustic wood texture.


Dover Street Market interiors

Performing aerial acrobatics with laser cut stainless steel tubes. Finding new ways to dissect this corporate and sterile material, create joints and features. Maybe we should just learn to weld?

Tabar by Dan Adlešič

Inox Detox LED

The gates and other elements were incorporated in the existing structure of the Danish pavilion at Giardini in Venice and formed the scenography of an installation by artist Uffe Isolotto, combining objects, sculptures and other artworks with a quality of an immersive video game.

We Walked the Earth by Uffe Isolotto

59th Venice Biennale

 is a research project by artist Uffe Isolotto about the lakes in Copenhagen, their history and abstraction. 

 jetty, engraved with notes from Christen Købke who mused, documented and painted these structures and the life surrounding them. A sculpture of mutated bird is presenting its wings at the end of the bridge.

Sekaleht by Uffe Isolotto

Den Frie 21 exhibition

 is exhibition addressing the themes of growth, worship and destruction, with each theme occupying its own designated space in a 3 floor building. Growth talks about life, natural energy (light) and technology. We have become fascinated with strange genres of furniture, office desks with integrated fitness equipment, shooting range furniture or stealth grow cabinets, used for growing weed in your apartment undetected. Hi-powered grow lights, ventilation and a watering system all camouflaged as a chifforobe. We like this object as a strange combination of deception, technology and the natural. The worship area is space for relaxation and prostration. Series of brass relics, polished and luxe but crudely bent form a standard plate with a few simple cuts, is presented here. Also objects that reference the religious craft traditions of Quaker and Shaker groups, now so stylistically revered. Last is a series of melting sun lounges, falling all over each other as a frozen megastructure depicting destruction. Think about sun as a beloved enemy here and destructor. As we have got more and more of our energy form mined hydrocarbons we have lost our reliance on the sun's power, but now we will need it again, let’s look directly at it!

Marsèll x PIN-UP

Sun City

The joints of traditional Finnish log houses are transmuted into a substantially proportioned table, a comical and irrational act but ultimately satisfying and built forever.

Vaarnii

004 Coffee Table

 imagined by Jean-Pascal Flavien is made as a model, not a real house and was translated into a VR house. We furnished the three rooms upstairs, which we based on the idea of different states of mind. There are three in the house; the Trader, the Anarchist and the Idler. The furniture is the result of what they need, according to what they are, or have decided to be in life. We are interested in the concept of home furnishings as a representation of current political and social tensions. There is a perception that we are becoming polar, but inwardly we inhabit hundreds of perspectives that are incongruous or sometimes antithesis of each other. This can be seen in taste, but more in a more complicated way, in functions. What do these personalities each need to survive, how do we furnish an ideological state of mind?

Greenhouse by JP Flavien

States of Mind interior

We have always been fascinated by frames as functional objects, serving the purpose of presentation by creating a border between an artwork and the wall. Recently this line has become thinner and more invisible under the modernist philosophy of letting a work speak for itself. However we think there is something lost in negating the conversation between a frame and an artwork. How can one change the context, value or objective of the other? We often make distortions of traditional furniture to typologies, not necessarily as a solo ironic gesture, but also to try to create something beautiful, functional, and valuable.

C Henrot, M Jacotey and more

Frames

What is a super bench? Does it suit modern functions (USB charging stations and WiFi clouds), contemporary aesthetics, or foster conceptual dialog? No. Being super is being ideological pure, but somewhat irrational with an element of fantasy. This project allowed us to experiment with the “what could be super” within a everyday typo-logical object.

Works

Projects