Liquid Tension

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.

Published in Hardcore Home by Superposition. Zürich, September 2020. Photo by Max Creasy. Download ⤻