Natural Order & Violent Hobbies

1 Natural Order

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.

2 Violent Hobbies

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.

Published in Take a Seat by Zürich University of the Arts. Zürich, November 2021. Download ⤻