Design has a special relationship to the public. Like the David painting, the design object has the capacity to shift in scale registering as both communal and personal at once. I am interested in Design as a meditation on what we are after collectively and how we experience that human desire individually.
The designers practice is always in play with the reverberations(RIVEER_BERATIONS) of their personal life. These traditionally separate poles are not easily kept apart in lived experience. Not for any of us. They are rarely if ever the mutually exclusive zones that we are, or were, led to believe them to be. And they often, if not usually must be engaged on more or less the same terms at the same time and in the same situations. Like at work, for example.
Returning to graduate school, I find it is more difficult than ever to try to separate practice from the personal. This stems from my competing roles as a father, husband, son and designer. My path from home to studio and back again is characterized by multiple detours/disruptions/interruptions. From the mandatory National Service back in Singapore, to getting married, being a parent, my rekindled bmx obsession and the Masters program at Yale, the projected path of my life is an improbable pattern produced through selective interventions, divine or human made. Surprisingly, these diversions have brought me unforeseen benefit – serendipity of sorts.
In most cases, admittedly, decisions were made for me. Growing up in a city-state, with what the western democracies consider an authoritarian form of governance, intervention is familiar, common. Throw in my strict monotheistic religious upbringing, which sometimes seemed incompatible with modern living, and it can be said that the doctrine of interruption is ingrained in my every fiber.
I am interested in the moment of contact, the instance when something from the outside, a foreign entity interacts with a set of systematic structures. Just the way those unexpected disruptions interacted with my daily life, the results could be a violent expansion of energy or just a mere puff. What I’m after is how the merging of things that don’t make perfect sense together can translate into a design methodology. (MET_THOD_DOLO_GIE))
Juxtaposition What are the various forms of interruptive strategies? What if I upset a set of regulated system or break the visual tranquility of a form or setting, what might happen? I’ll appoint myself the advocator, an agent of disruption, like a nosy father stretching his parenting skills. What if I insert my own fictions into the reality like placing an object that is foreign into a non-homologous environment. Will this result in a story that the space might tell if it were given the chance?
Anne Frank’s famous diary tracks her time couped up in a secret annex due to the religious holocaust by the Nazis. Her accounts humanized her experience and became vital markers for others to better understand the horrors of bigotry and hate. I believe that the diary is an invaluable tool in human insight.
In FaceShift, a computer controls the motions of human face muscles in order to generate unique, previously unseen facial expressions. The relationship between man and machine is inverted, and the human body co-opted, its human properties removed in order to turn it into a mechanical canvas.The digital system applied to his face contrasts sharply with the nuances of his facial tics.
I am fascinated by the odd juxtapositions one finds in India, of hand-made and mass-produced, intense poverty and emergent technologies, local and global. Frequent movement between two cultures has heightened my awareness of the unseen systems that permeate our existence, and of the malleability of human perception. My process is one of experiment—a juxtaposition or subversion of contrasting cultural phenomena in order to fracture ways of seeing, reveal new truths, and critique underlying systems of control.
We are currently experiencing a shift in available skills offered by the developing world, from those of manual labour to specialized labour, still at very low prices. I intend to expand my exploration of human as tool to include these emergent forms of affordable labour. I plan to further my studies of juxtaposition to include the area of convergence between digital and analog, highlighting the increased mediation of our experiences by technology.
Kari Altmann creates distorted three-dimensional monsters by disassembling and layering moving parts of the human head. Each frame of Dreamcaptchas is a unique result of the overlapping of individual orbiting parts.
In an examination of human being as graphic tool, I hired a sign painter to paint my business card on a billboard in India, in an approximation of Helvetica. Through this exercise, I attempted to highlight social disparity between India and the West.
Living in America has highlighted my own implication in issues such as the commodification and dehumanization of people by the urban Indian elite. Labour in India is often cheaper and more readily available than machinery. Rather than mechanized parking meters, India has human meters. On every sidewalk stands a man who collects parking fees in exchange for a slip of paper. For the privileged, labour and machine are indistinguishable. I am interested in exploring the relationship between labour and designer, and in considering the role of human beings as visual tools.
Two computers are connected to each other with microphones and voice recognition software, mimicking human conversation.
American artist Elaine Sturtevant is famous for mimicking other Defying our notions of artistic originality, as well as seriously infringing copyright laws, she reproduces the work of several important male artists in her own form of provocative imitation. Her intention may be to critique myths of creativity, but she also tells us how the act of imitation and mimesis is fundamentally human.
There is no way to distinguish between them. But in this way they offer a convincing image of the world in which we live, where many of its most authentic-seeming parts are imitations based on other representations.
Mimesis has stimulated the development of human thought and behavior. The history of shapes, and the form of man-made and mass-produced objects, including typefaces and graphic symbols, are themselves the result of long term mimetic connections. It may not be possible to understand who we are, or why we make the things that we make as artists and designers, without understanding the mimetic process.
Why are artists drawn to collections of similitude?
These collections and typologies are not only representations of mimetic human behavior but also have a mimetic logic in themselves: photographic formats also render things similar to each other.
When I was a little girl, I always daydreamed. I used to see a rabbit and a bear in the clouds. But now, I am afraid that I am getting to see mostly just clouds in the clouds.
By letting a robotized camera generate the film without any human intervention and blocking the viewer from identifying with it, Michael Snow’s film La Region Centrale relies on the viewer’s retention and anticipation. It brings us back to ourselves, and lets us see what we want to see in it.
Thus, inviting people not to see what we are supposed to see in the way that we are used to seeing, and uncovering how our perception can be controlled by our thoughts, or conversely, how our thoughts can be controlled by our perception, is what I am exploring as a graphic designer – although this is perhaps the reversal of what graphic design is usually assumed to be doing.
human form and