Thesis - 4th draft

At the following link is a PDF of my nearly finished thesis. Missing is the third appendix and the odd reference or figure number.

http://yugyug.sitesled.com/files/misc/Guy-Keulemans-Thesis-Draft-4.pdf

Below, a recent sketch and a 1:10 model, photographed by the rapid prototypers as proof of production, winging its way to the Netherlands, hopefully before mid-terms on Tuesday.

Models for Chest of Drawers

Chest of drawers, cabinets and bookshelves are suitable design opportunities for a topic dealing with atheism. The atheist worldview is very much concentrated on the accumulation of information and knowledge in order to ascertain the truth. The categorization inherent in the drawer/filing/shelving system is an analogy for this. And in this sense too, cabinets and drawers relate to the medieval "wunder cabinets", or Cabinets of Curiosities, that predate modern museums and which were important to the development of both scientific reasoning and secularism in the Enlightenment period in Europe.



With these designs, I am attempting to embed qualities that appeal to rationalists, such as the mathematically proportioned drawers, as well as those with an atheist perception of life as framed by the a vacuum of life before birth and after life. This last quality is manifested by the deep and reflective black, and highlighted internal color for the drawers.

Additionally, I am trying to create a sense of subtle conflict in the design - as a metaphor for secular/religious conflict perhaps, but especially in a contrast of the rational and the irrational, as a path to a sense of the sublime, as defined by Jean Francois Lyotard:

Lyotard defined sublime as pleasurable anxiety and spoke about the “dynamical sublime”, when our minds recoil at an object we feel is immensely more powerful than ourselves, something that could crush us with its weight, force or energy. This unique aesthetic occurs when we realise that while our bodies may be dwarfed by such power, our reason need not be; we can control our fear by reasoned contemplation. The sublime is both pleasurable and painful.

This is most evident in the sloping backs - that rationally indicate the reducing drawer sizes, but irrationally create a void behind the object - inhibiting the object from being placed up against a wall, and suggesting a placement inside the room, creating a greater and more dominant presence.

Ettore Sottsass: Rational | Irrational

Recently I have been reading a lot about Sottsass, some on the net, but mostly from the book Etorre Sottsass: A Critical Biography, an illustrated biography written by his third wife Barbara Radice. Generally I have found it very useful, especially when considered in the framework of my thesis topic of designing objects for atheists. This is because atheists tend to be very rational, and so embrace functionality instead of conceptual or metaphorical allusions in objects. Yet, for an object to reflect an intangible worldview and speak to the heart intuitively, it must contain some aspect of irrationality, to elevate it above conscious understanding and into the realm of the emotional. This contrast, one could say even a duel, between rational and irrational concerns is very present in Sottsass work, and produces much of its emotional impact.

The book opens with a description of Sottsas' urge to travel around the world intensively, running from place to place with fervour and a mad desire to photograph everything. At one point he took 1873 photographs in 12 days in South America. He is described as travelling to consume life, but yet he is also disgusted and appalled at the consumption of others. His travels to the United States in 1956 revealed American consummerism to him and led him develop objects that were "tools to slow down the consumpton of existence" as if he was designing to self-medicate his own manic personality. I think its clear also, reading between the lines of the introduction, that he had self-esteem issues, which he sought to surmount by constant and passionate ambition.



Sottsass wanted to get ride of rationalism, which he said, "did not cover by any means the necessities of existence". One of his reactions to rationalism was break it apart and reform it. Radice says that with the very rational Bauhaus, he took its elements and performed a "transplant operation". He re-arranged the ratios, distances and weights that he saw in the Bauhuas style into an "irony of dis-proportion" seen in much of his ceramics and furniture, but at other times into a playful hyper-rationalism, seen in his ground-breaking work for Ollivetti. These are streamlined, strict yet soft machines; as if he had thrown all the elements of modernism into the air to see the kind of chaos in which they would land, but they had reformed by chance into a perfectly formulated solution. Radice writes that this is because, for all his love of irrationality, Sottsass was aware of the intimate effect objects can have. Sottsass remarks:

"When I began designing machines I also began to think that these objects.... ...can touch the nerves, the blood, the muscles, the eyes and the moods of people. Since then I have never designed a product in the same way as I would design a sculpture, and I have been utterly obsessed with the idea that… …I was setting off a chain reaction of which I understood very little. "



Yet, this does not extend to all his designs, such as in his "super-boxes"; giant wardrobes that are more provocation than product. Covered in custom laminates that pre-date Memphis by 15 years, these shocking objects were derived from Sottsass' exposure to American pop art, and its appears a very direct influence from the minimalist Donald Judd, but also his early work on super-computer chasis design for Olivetti. But, Radice writes, their ultimate effect was to consume and dominate the the room in which they were placed as if "dropped into the cosmos"; an effect Sottsass learnt from his experiences in India. Etore said many years later "They were such crazy things they were hard to imagine".





(The first image of an electronic printer for Ollivetti, whose form feeds into Sottsass' later super-boxes. This last image is of a scultpure by Donald Judd - note the almost identical sketch from Sottsass notebook next to the sketch of the superbox in the photo above.)

Sottsass' Memphis period is famed for its rule-breaking and perceived irrationality. But it seems that the rule-brekaing is highly conscious and therefore very rational. Sottsass agrees:
"I'm always offended when they say that I play when I do memphis work; actually I 'm very serious, I'm never more serious than when I do memphis work. it's when I design machines for olivetti that I play."

To conclude, Sottsass had two distinct phases to his process. Sottsass was open about finding his inspiration in the realms of the irrational, and I believe the first part of his process was to explore irrational ideas agressively and intuitively. He remarks:

"...we draw our product-language stimuli not so much from institutionalized culture, not from technology, not from some sort of institutionalized certainty, but from spheres where everything starts afresh again, is uncertain, contradictory, without firm outlines."



And you can see that in the formation of his Memphis products. Yet their is a second phase of his process, the management of irrationality. Once he had a slippery hold on an certain idea, he would mold it with care and sensitivity to rationalism. This made it communicable to others, and can be seen in the gentle curves of contact surfaces, or the logical placement of knobs on his cabinets. I don’t think it worked all the time; personally when I look at a lot of his work I can only point to a small percentange of I actually like (although you can argue that virtually all are at least interesting). Sottsass’ impact today comes from that fact that when we remember the output of an artist, as with many things, as with life, we tend to remember only the very best.

Quotes and information from
"Etorre Sottsass: A Critical Biography" by Barbara Radice,
Design Boom article “Memphis Remembers”:
http://www.designboom.com/eng/funclub/memphisremember.html
and
"Memphis, Research, Experiences, Results, Failures and Successes of New Design" by Barbara Radice

EDIT:
I just discovered this wonderful little story on Artnet, about a young woman's journey to Milan to interview Sottsass when he was 89. It's perfect little vignettes include this gem:

"Over a meal at a nearby restaurant, I started bombarding him with questions about architecture, even though it wasn't really architecture I wanted to talk to him about. Sottsass seemed tired. He said his basic idea was this:

a room should have a few objects in it, and those objects should be so intense they vibrate.

I started to cry. Objects vibrated. I knew that, but I thought they did it only because I was lonely and I needed them to.

I tried to hide my sniffling but I could see that Sottsass knew, and that he felt exasperated and sorry for me and curious about the shape of my breasts all at once. And I smiled ruefully because I knew what a pain-in-the-ass stalker/journalist I must be being. And he smiled back and said, "Here is a story," as if those words would solve everything. "
The Curious Mr Sottsass by Amy Fusselman

Graphic Studies / Expessions in Furniture

Last weekend I designed some graphics to illustrate my topic. These graphics abstractly deal with the atheist conception of death and its inverse, life.
Atheists do not beleive in god, and the majority also do not believe in the afterlife. Death is seen as the ultimate cessation of consciousness. This frames life as a temporality, its vibrant complexity open for exploration, but framed by the nothingness of death on all sides.





Translating this into furniture objects requires a decontruction down into simpler archetypal forms, lest the execution be seen as overly decorative. This deconstruction involves a formation of the concept into functional components; the elementary units of everyday objects. Subtleties like a hidden colour along the edge of a shelf, or a cascading proportions of drawers, must suggest the possibilities of an entire universe of life.

Objects for Atheist - Sketches round 1

Here are some ideas for designing metaphorical or symbolic objects for atheists and naturalists. I did this by developing an atheist persona, a personality construct, based on my research of the atheist community. These ideas are somewhat jokey, and I am quite sure a final solution will involve a more sophisticated approach, but I think it is still useful to explore the stranger possibilities for object and furniture design.

What is the symbology of science?

At this stage in my research I am looking for a way to express the atheist world view in objects. One method I have considered is to apply, either directly or indirectly, some of the aesthetics used in graphic depictions of science. This is not to say that atheism is the same as science, it's not at all, however, one thing held in common by many atheists is a high regards for science, and according to intellectuals like Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennet, a good understanding of science will encourage and strengthen a belief in atheism.



The image above is a large collage of the "evolutionary tree" system of graphics. Its begins on the far left with Darwin's first diagrammatic sketch of his theory of evolution, taken from his personal notebook. Next to it is the first printed version, a rather dry diagram from the "Origin of Species". The rest of the collage is filled with the many subsequent and diverse forms the evolutionary tree system can be, although it is interesting to note that many follow Darwin's original sketch very closely in aesthetics. Other forms attempt to make it clearer with the use of color, overlay of historical bands, or depictions of the animals involved. It culminates with the common contemporary use of circular trees, radiating outwards, which allow maximum space for the animals on the periphery, our contemporary lifeforms. Many of these forms, and especially the tree motif, can be compared to other scientific depictions, such as those for neural nets, rivers, data structures etc. The final images on the bottom right are illustrations of evolutionary trees interpreted very literally as real trees; the big one by Ernst Haeckel is particularly beautiful.




The depictions of structures such as atoms and molecules scream "science" out loud; the incredible sub-microscopic discoveries of the latter 20th century are responsible for that. Spectography is likewise full of scientific "aesthetic". Interestingly, for all the depictions of molecules and the like on Wikipedia, the articles on Quantum Theory are curiously devoid of explanatory graphics. Is it to complex for even scientific illustrators to understand?



Fossils, and the illustrations of fossils, really put one's mind into the atmosphere of the 19th century, when the first major discoveries where made about evolution and our animal ancestry.



Finally I made this collection of photos and portraits of famous scientists and naturalists. Nothing critical can be analysed from this, but I find them interesting, especially the ID tag of Richard Feynman from when he was working on the atomic bomb and Los Alamos (middle row, second from the right).

Thesis Summary - Mid Terms - Semester 2

Introduction
Throughout history, the ability of objects to survive has had little to do with function or aesthetics, but everything to do with cultural significance. The existence of objects is sustained by their importance to the cultures in which they are born and later pass through. In this regards, there are two main types of culturally significant objects. Those that have a cultural significance based on their relationship to power structures, usually royal or aristocratic in nature, and those that have significance based on a relationship to religion. This thesis will critique the latter relationship and how this relationship has changed or will change in a society growing increasingly secular and non-religious. Specifically this phenomena will be explored by the ways in which deeper meanings can be invested into objects through the study of the atheistic worldview.

Chapter 1
The styles and forms of furniture and objects from the past reflect the worldview of the society in which they were designed. If this reflection is significant enough, the designed object can have the capacity to move beyond the time and place of it’s original gestation and continue it’s existence through proceeding cultures. For example, the Folding X-Type Stool was originally designed for ancient Egyptian royalty, but the form has progressed by being translated throughout history into religious contexts and finally into the secular context of today. (Lucie-Smith).






We see this progression in other examples of object design; even secular design from the 19th and 20th century is derived from an early religious forms. Kaare Klint, the forefather of Danish modernism was strongly influenced by the religiously inspired economic forms of Shaker furniture (Lanks), and German modernism was born from earlier Protestant designers reacting to the excesses of Catholicism (Betts).

A collection of Shaker furniture:


Shaker inspired Kaare Klint chair:



Chapter 2
Given that these perpetual forms arise from an intimate reflection of the world in which they were created, an understanding of contemporary society must be achieved to produce culturally relevant objects today. The modern world is increasingly being defined by secularism, the separation of religious activities from daily life, and atheism is increasing (Dale). Is there is a form of design deriving significance wholly from contemporary secular sources? In many ways, modernism tried to do this, via the application of rationality in design, as rationality is a fundamental aspect of the secular worldview. However, it is proposed that a study of the worldview of atheists, a contemporary social movement, may produce more culturally significant objects, and subsequently sustain their form.

Chapter 3
The world view of atheists is more complex than just rationality and includes a strong belief in science, democracy, secularism, a curiousness about the mechanisms of nature, and feelings of wonder about the transient quality of life (Dawkins). In addition, it is felt by many leading atheists that the atheist perception of life, society, morality and especially death are very important issues for the future of atheists and society in general. How can these qualities be invested into objects? The design of objects culturally significant to atheists have the potential to become long lasting forms, but a secondary objective is to express the atheist world view in an object and thereby improve the understanding of atheism by other cultural groups.

Methodologies
A review of design history literature and visual research is ongoing in order to summarize the effects religion has had on the history of furniture and object design prior to the 20th century. Additionally 20th century design is being studied so as to see the effect of secularism on design and to discover any prior attempts to invest the atheist worldview into design.

An expert, archaeologist or design historian, could be consulted to answer finer questions raised by the literature review.

Atheist literature, interview and documentary television have been studied to understand the atheist culture, worldview and needs. Additionally, an online dialogue with two atheist groups is ongoing, conducted through 2 online forums, private messaging and email. Visual research is also ongoing in an attempt to analyse the symbology and graphic devices used to depict science, logic and atheism. Proposed designs are submitted online for feedback from atheist groups.






Thesis Conclusions:
There is legitimacy in the formal manifestation of an atheist worldview into an object, based on the precedent of previous objects representing their historical worldview. However, there is seemingly little precedent for methods in which to do it. Partly this is because atheists, until recently, have not identified themselves as a group nor formed recognisable communities. This is changing as a result of the internet and also activities, such as from the scientist Richard Dawkins, who push for a bolder representation of atheism in society.

Image of Dawkins wearing the Scarlet A, a symbol of atheism:



As a result, a clearer understanding of the atheist worldview can now be discovered. One unexpected discovery is that they are very individualistic and some dislike the actual idea that they share a worldview. However, their shared respect for rationality, logic, science and the processes of nature is clear, and in fact their individualism is another commonality.

Design Conclusions:
The online dialogue has inspired a number of solution which are in the sketch and modeling stages. These solutions include applications of scientific symbology, hyper-rationality, and metaphorical form. It is hoped that feedback of these designs from the online atheist community will inform future iterations.



Bibilography
(in addition to previous bibliography published here)

Books
Betts, P 2004, The Authority of Everyday Objects: A Cultural History of West German Industrial Design, pages 66-68, University of California Press,

Radice, B 1993, Ettore Sottsass :A Critical Biography, Thames & Hudson, Limited, London.

Risatti, H 2007, A Theory of Craft: Function and Aesthetic Expression, The University of North Carolina Press, US.

Web articles
COTTER, H 1996, Shakers, a Modernist and a Lasting Utopian Spirit, Accessed January 2009, Source: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F05E2DD153FF931A3575BC0A960958260

Dale, D 2009, WHO WE ARE: Generational warfare, published in The Sun-Herald, Acessed February 2009, Source:
http://blogs.sunherald.com.au/whoweare/archives/2009/02/who_we_are_the_17.html

Lanks, B 2007 The Second (and Third) Coming:A new exhibition traces the Shakers’ distinctive influence on midcentury and contemporary furniture, Accessed: February 2009, Source: http://www.metropolismag.com/story/20070620/the-second-and-third-coming

Packham R 1998, Atheist Spirituality, Acessed: January 2009, Source:
http://packham.n4m.org/atheist2.htm

Seliger, J 2007, The Spiritual Atheist - Finding Spirituality Without Worship, Acessed: January 2009, Source: http://www.buzzle.com/articles/the-spiritual-atheist-finding-spirituality-without-worship.html


Television and Film
The Enemies of Reason, 2007, Dawkins, R (Writer, Presenter), Produced by Alan Clements, Distributed by Channel 4, UK.

The Four Horsemen: a discussion with Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennet, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens, 2007, Timonen, J (Producer), convened by The Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science, Source: Youtube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MuyUz2XLp1E

The Genius of Charles Darwin, 2008, Dawkins, R (Writer, Presenter) Directed by Russell Barnes, Dan Hillman, IWC Media, Channel 4, RDF International, UK.

The Root of All Evil?, 2006, Produced by Alan Clements, Written by Richard Dawkins, Starring Richard Dawkins, Distributed by Channel 4, UK.

Lectures
Dawkins, R 2005 TED Lecture: The universe is queerer than we can suppose, Long Beach, U.S Source:

Dawkins, R 2002, TED Lecture: An atheist's call to arms, Long Beach, U.S
Source: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/richard_dawkins_on_militant_atheism.html

Online Forums
The Brights Movement, accessed 2009, from: http://www.the-brights.net/

Atheist Forums, accessed 2009, from: http://www.atheistforums.com/

Atheistic Forums, accessed 2009, from http://debate.atheist.net/