You Say You Want a Revolution?

            Effortlessly gliding up the crisscrossing escalators to the sixth floor of the Museum of Modern Art, briefly drenched by the dense yellow glow of monofrequency lights on the third floor, my field of vision is suddenly reduced to duotone. The phenomenal effect heightens my sense of seeing and gives me pause for reflection. On the far wall are the words Take your Time, the title of an ongoing exhibition of the work of Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson.
            Taking the advice in stride, three floors up I take my time as I negotiate Design and the Elastic Mind, the unabashedly ambitious and impressive exhibition organized by Paola Antonelli, senior curator for Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art. “Revolutions are not easy on us”, says the introductory text at the entrance, and neither is this exhibition.
           Touted by some critics as an oblique sequel to MoMA’s seminal 1934 exhibition Machine Art which helped to popularize the Bauhausian desire for the synthesis of art, design and technology, Design and the Elastic Mind takes a fresh perspective on the symbiotic and evolving relationship between design and technology, speculative research and its practical application. It highlights the dramatic changes of scale and pace that increasingly define our daily experiences in the online/offline world, and suggests new ways of responding to them.
           For Antonelli, simple adaptability is no longer sufficient to meet these “disruptive” changes, we must develop “elasticity”. Underlying this vision is what she sees as the changing role of the designer, from simple “form giver to fundamental interpreter of an extraordinary dynamic reality”, a shift increasingly made possible by technological advances. She states “what the computer has done for designers, the nanoscale is doing for scientists: It is giving them a whole new taste of the power of unobstructed design and manufacture.” Such a social mandate for designers is not new, but the speed with which emerging technology is transforming society has imposed a renewed sense of urgency.
           Organized as a reverse zoom and recalling Charles & Ray Eames’ seminal film Powers of Ten, the exhibition features a collection of 200+ objects, ideas and installations. Beginning with cutting-edge nanotechnology and the imperceptibly small, it passes through the ‘mesoscale’ (human scale) and debates on the ethical and cultural implications of design, culminating with the infinitely large challenges of dynamic data visualization.
           A few projects leak out from the entrance, as if fighting the very containment of the exhibition space, a portent of the intense compression of space and time that awaits the visitor inside. Suspended overhead and oddly anachronistic at first impression is the helium-filled, PET foil covered Air Ray, designed to “swim in a sea of air” and modeled on the water-based manta ray from which it takes its name. To the right is Biowall, a modular, woven scaffold inspired by the biological structures observed at the nanoscale, resembling an extruded lattice. To the left, the spray-paint output device Hektor has literally drawn the main title of the exhibition, connecting the words in one continuous, sometimes wobbly line, the paint dripping. The unrefined and imperfect aspects of the device suggest a certain frailty which help announce the show’s human dimension.
           Once inside, light gives way to a dense forest of images and sounds, swarms of people hovering around every product, projection and installation. Whilst scale provides a clear and powerful thematic backbone for the exhibition, a certain lack of visible scale and visual hierarchy sometimes characterizes its pacing and organization, making for a slightly bewildering first impression that evokes the sensory overload of a trade fair. In a different context this quality could be a virtue, but in a time when information and media overload is the norm, an exhibition that takes new media developments as its subject could be expected to offer some respite and elucidation. A little more clarity need not come at the expense of such complexity.
           Typifying this complexity is a new impetus for scientists and designers to devise organic, self-organizing systems and structures characterized by a bottom-up rather than top-down methodology. In Rules of Six, architects Benjamin Aranda and Chris Lasch apply algorithms informed by six-sided symmetries common in molecular formations to create organically-based, scalable structures. A large model specifically commissioned for the exhibition shows a sprawling, viral-like architectural landscape of hexagonal formations. It reminds one of the experimental housing project Habitat 67 that Moshe Safdie designed 40 years earlier, but while Rules of Six is essentially an experiment in self-generating form, Safdie’s apartment complex was primarily motivated by socially-minded ideals.
           Under the rubric of ‘Organic Design’, and a more immediately tangible application of a similar bottom-up approach, is the Bone Chair (Figure 1) by Joris Laarman. Using three-dimensional software originally developed for automotive chassis components, the chair was organically grown based on the generative processes of bones, creating structures optimized for their strength and efficiency. Though aesthetically innovative, whether a chair with its relatively simple structural requirements should need such an optimized form seems questionable. It invites the viewer to consider the words of design critic Hugh Aldersey-Williams when he says “using science for inspiration is all well and good, but caution is necessary if larger claims are made for it.”
           By contrast, the decidedly low-tech product Standby, one in a series called the Climatised Objects Project by Toby Hadden and David Cameron, demonstrates how technology at all levels can benefit from good, economical ideas. A project initiated to raise awareness about issues of climate change, Standyby is designed to remind us of our daily energy consumption. Reversing our expectations of what an extension cord should be and where it should be placed, Standyby takes the shape of a bright red rubber strip that conspicuously snakes through the middle of a living room or office space, seeking rather than shying away from attention, and thus raising awareness of the themes it symbolizes.
           Perhaps the opposite of a product like Standby is Bubble Screen, a series of water tanks that release oil bubbles at precise intervals to create dot-matrix letterforms. Though the technology is undoubtedly impressive, one fears it being reduced to a simple gimmick, eagerly adopted by a Las Vegas casino or Miami night club. To be fair, if all technological innovation were exclusively purpose-driven at the outset, many popular inventions would never have seen the light of day and one might run the risk of becoming, in Antonelli’s words, “blindsided by progress”. In her introduction to the catalog Antonelli cites numerous examples of famous ill fated predictions such as when “Ferdinand Foch, Marshal of France in the early part of the twentieth century, stated in 1911 that airplaines were interesting toys of no use for the military”, or, when “Darrl F. Zanuck forecast in 1946 the demise of television.” As in all fields progress is often the result of a careful balance between free experimentation and goal-oriented research.
           Royal College of Art graduate and professor Noam Toran investigates what he describes as “anomalies in contemporary and speculative human behavior”. Designed to relieve loneliness, Accessories for Lonely Men is a series of eight products that recreate what Toran calls our companion’s “generic traces”. Each product simulates an action such as the tugging of a bed sheet, the blowing of hot air on a user’s back, or the twirling of chest hair. Toran explores these ideas further by acting them out in a film entitled Object for Lonely Man, in which a ‘lonely man’ imagines himself as Jean-Paul Belmondo, the protagonist of Jean Luc Godard’s Breathless. With the aid of a custom designed set of props that mirror those of the original film, he mimics Belmondo’s actions as the narrative unfolds. The intense, somewhat creepy fetishization of these anomalous acts brings to mind the work of David Kronenberg or David Lynch.
           Toran’s project is situated in a section of the show entitled ‘Design for Debate’, one of nine such categories, and one which, in my view, would have made a fitting subtitle for the exhibition. Together with ‘Design for One and Many’ it is one of the few such categories that aren't entirely descriptive (e.g. Nano Design, Interaction Design, 3-D printing, etc.) and offers the possibility for highly diverse projects to intermingle.
           The show concludes with a dazzling array of data visualizations and futuristic animations that clearly captured the public’s imagination. Visitors respond to New City, an ambiguous and amorphous film about the topology of the earth “mapped onto a virtual manifold”, by lying on the floor and immersing themselves in the cave-like structure featuring 12 simultaneous projections onto 12 separate screens. Across the room a cosmic-like rendering by Barrett Lyon purports to map the internet. Elsewhere, information designers Lisa Strausfeld and James Nick Sears have programmed an applet entitled Rewiring the Spy, where keywords related to terrorists or terrorist events are connected in a web-like structure, links becoming more visible and animated according to the frequency of connections.
           The exhibition exudes an ebullient, near triumphant tone, and without wanting to dampen the mood too much, it seems incumbent upon us to remember to reflect on the ways new technologies are fundamentally changing our lives. Why is it I often wonder, that ‘progress’ is always synonymous with technological advances? Can progress not be made when we qualify or even refuse new technologies? The media theorist Neil Postman taught us that “technological change always results in winners and losers” and advocated that we learn the history and social effects of technology so that we should “use technology rather than be used by it.” In ‘Applied Curiosity’ – one of six excellent essays in the exhibition catalog – design critic and historian Hugh Aldersey-Williams stresses the need not to over-prioritize the sciences when facing new design challenges: “it is important to be clear that inspiration stemming from science has no special status over and above inspiration from the usual sources in history or in other arts.”
           Design and the Elastic Mind is undoubtedly a thought-provoking and timely exhibition, but to view it is only to skim the surface of what lies ahead. In the months prior to the opening of the exhibition Antonelli, together with Adam Bly of Seed magazine, co-organized a series of salons bringing together a diverse group of thinkers and practitioners from the fields of science, design and architecture. Intended to foster dialog and collaboration, these salons were responsible for conceiving this exhibition, and Antonelli attributes much of the credibility the exhibition subsequently received within the science community, to them.
           Ultimately the real value is in the analysis and the debates that ensue, and in the hopes of making ‘real progress’ I suggest we heed Eliasson’s advice and, with an open and elastic mind, take our time.

P.Antonelli (ed.) (2008) Design and the Elastic Mind, p.14. New York: The Museum of Modern Art
Ibid, p.17.
Ibid, p.14.
Ibid, p.17.
Ibid, p.18.
Festo AG & Co. KG. (2008) ‘Air Ray.’ festo.com. Retrieved June 2008 from http://www.festo.com/INetDomino/coorp_sites/en/c79c5d07d5805095c12572b9006f04f5.htm

Aldersey-Williams, H. (2008) ‘Applied Curiosity’, in P.Antonelli (ed.) Design and the Elastic Mind, p.54. New York: The Museum of Modern Art
P.Antonelli (ed.) (2008) Design and the Elastic Mind, p.14. New York: The Museum of Modern Art
Ibid.
Ibid, p.34.
Ibid.
Ibid, p.175.
Postman, N. (1990) ‘Informing Ourselves to Death.’ frostbytes.com. Retrieved June 2008 from http://www.frostbytes.com/~jimf/informing.html
Postman, N. (1996) ‘Neil Postman Answers Your Questions.’ pbs.org. Retrieved June 2008 from http://www.pbs.org/newshour/forum/january96/postman_1-17.html
Aldersey-Williams, H. (2008) ‘Applied Curiosity’, in P.Antonelli (ed.) Design and the Elastic Mind, p.54. New York: The Museum of Modern Art