Surface Fictions By Jeppe Ugelvig

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.

Design and Value

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.

Self published in Surface Service by Soft Baroque. Copenhagen, June 2016. Download ⤻