We started OK Do a little over a year ago to have a home for independent thinking and doing. Designers by background, we wanted to use our skills and methods in work that avoids traditional categories and disciplinary boundaries. The idea of stepping beyond the realm of design – to the borderlands of art and science – was the starting point of the Science Poems project, too. Natural science felt particularly fascinating for us as it deals with things physically present in our everyday lives yet often beyond our abilities to sense or conceptualise. Seeing design and art as good tools for asking questions and visualising the invisible, we set out to explore the field of natural science in a very subjective way, trying to understand it as well as find cross-disciplinary ways to talk about it.

A book and exhibition on the topic were launched in June 2010 at 0fr galerie in Paris, where we invited six designer and artist friends to present their ‘science poems’. Ranging from fashion exploring electromagnetic space to a musical composition derived from DNA base pairs, each exhibition piece dealt with a particular field of natural science: astronomy, biology, chemistry, earth sciences, physics or cross-disciplines. The book features presentations of the works in the exhibition, discussions with some of our favourite science poets, articles about subjects such as parallel universes or spiritual science as well as various other experimental science writings and images. Edited by us, it is designed by Åh, the London-based studio we have worked in close collaboration with since the beginning of our existence. Other contributors include friends with wild ideas about science.

Science Poems London presentation at Donlon Books / X Marks the Bökship.

After Paris, the Science Poems book travelled around the world together with small-scale displays. Coming from Napa Books in Helsinki and do you read me?! in Berlin, its last presentation was held in London at Donlon Books / X Marks the Bökship with a reading of ‘From Big Bang Machine (with love)’ science fiction short story by author Maria Candia. The story by the Helsinki-based novelist (also known as Megatron Braineater) presented the genesis of a man-made universe written for the book, while we served the guests a mixture of ammonium chloride, ethanol and water wearing chemist coats specially created for the drink lab by fashion designer K.I. Kinnunen. Made out of space blankets, the costumes reflected Kinnunen’s Science Poems exhibition piece, Faraday Suit, bridging techno-romanticism and retreat and exploring clothes as not only physical but also philosophical interfaces between the internal and external worlds.

Space blanket chemist coats by K.I. Kinnunen.

“Science Poems is a project that will never end.”

Science Poems is a project that will never end. Having taken part in the topical discourse around merging disciplines through artistic excursions to the field of natural science, playing with human perceptions of reality, in the future we would like to join our forces with scientists in practice. We will continue the discussion about science with a mathematician and a Waldorf psychologist at the Applied Freedom symposium and exhibition by the Stuttgart State Academy of Art and Design on 26 January, 2011. More information to follow.

Science Poems London presentation at Donlon Books / X Marks the Bökship.

Besides being a child’s work, play can be an adult’s way of life. It is a creative state of mind where one uses the ability to symbolise in order to create something unprecedented. The ability to play doesn’t only lead to artistic masterpieces, but also enhances one’s inner freedom by enabling a rich relationship with life.

A playful state of mind can be seen as a third reality between oneself and the outer world. When playing, one is neither in the real world nor experiencing their inner reality in the purest sense. You draw on the surrounding material environment, but make it yours by altering it for your own purposes.

Being both the third reality and an intermediate area of experience, play is also an illusion. It is simultaneously true and untrue. The play experience is like watching a Technicolor film, which also produces a mixture of realistic and unrealistic worlds – ecstatic disbelief combined with a wish that all you see could be true.

“Besides being a child’s work, play can be an adult’s way of life.”

Play can be escapism or a place to rest. It allows a break from reality that conflicts with inner wishes. In play, one can deal with complex things through an “as if” attitude.

Play is a potential space – it enhances a creative relationship to one’s surroundings. When playing, it becomes possible to free presentations from their referents and modify them, generating more flexible ways to see the world. For example, a child can use a wooden stick as a phone to call someone but also as a saw to cut imaginary trees.

The ability to use real-world objects in creating imaginary ones emerges during the first year of life. Later, the playful state of mind continues to prevail in artistic practices, cultural and religious acts, and in the attitude towards oneself and the others. At best, play is manifested in the freedom to be the potential you.

The mind is a complicated place with all its parts, states and processes. I will never be able to get in touch with it in a way that I would become fully aware of all that is happening in me. There are and will be hidden parts in my mind. Something remains untouched and beyond the consciousness.

The unconscious mind has its roots in the body and bodily sensations. It is the most primitive and fundamental part of me where the urges of my body dictate the development. It is about keeping and feeling myself alive through constantly competing desires to create and destroy, to love and hate. Those were my very first experiences when I was little and did not master the words yet.

Nowadays, the closest I can get to my unconscious mind is when I’m dreaming. The dream world is a timeless place where anything I can and can’t imagine is possible. There is neither daytime logic nor any rules. Dreams are based on emotions. While dreaming, I have experienced the strongest and purest feelings: hatred, despair, horror, embarrassment, longing, and passion.

“Art touches the unconscious mind, because it connects with my archaic feelings.”

Art touches the unconscious mind, because it connects with my archaic feelings. Through art and its link to the unconscious it is possible to get a profound feeling of togetherness, an integrated sense of self. It is a magical feeling – like I had discovered something new and got connected to something old at the same time. There is a sense of alienation and familiarity side by side.

The unconscious mind hints about its existence to me. I can sense it in the instances of intuition and glimpses of gut feeling. In dreams and artistic achievements I can see pieces of my unconscious thoughts although they are in a masked form. I am connected to the unconscious when my body produces speechless, emotionally charged experiences and a free-floating sense of being alive.

My attitude towards the veiled part of me is ambiguous. It would be interesting to know more about what I am made of. At the same time, it is also scary to get in touch with the stranger in my mind. It is like diving into muddy water, not knowing what lies beneath. I have an urge to hold my breath and struggle to the shore, but going with the flow fascinates me more. That is why I will continue these gentle attempts to get in touch with different parts in me. For all I can say by now is: hello me, whoever you are!

Emilia Suviala is a psychologist specialised in developmental and educational psychology. She is interested in human attachment and psychoanalytic thinking.

Teemu Suviala is the creative director and co-founder of design consultancy Kokoro & Moi. He started his career drawing comics for Pahkasika magazine.

Photos courtesy of Petri Henriksson.

Instead of presenting the Science Poems book from A to Z, we decided to do it through chemical substances and compounds from NH to OH in respect to NH4Cl + C2H5OH, the drink recipe of the evening.

NH4Cl + C2H5OH is a mix of Ammonium Chloride (NH4Cl), the building material of carbon black coloured Finnish candy called salmiakki [something most Finnish people remember making in their chemistry classes at school] and Hydroxyl-Carbon compound (C2H5OH) also known as alcohol.

Following this pattern, here’s a summary of the evening:

NH (Nitrogen + Hydrogen = Ammonium) stands for National Herbarium such as The Komarov Botanical Institute Herbarium in Russia, which hosts a collection of over seven million specimens of plants and fungi, many of them digitised in the institute’s virtual library from which Anna presented her selection.

Photo courtesy of Petri Henriksson.

Cl (Chloride) is for Celestial, or Céleste. Accordingly, Anni, in Paris at the moment, read mnemonics for remembering planet names on Skype. One of them went like this: Mon Vieux Tu M’as Jeté Sur Une Nouvelle Planète. However, as it was announced, the mnemonic was perhaps a little old-fashioned since Pluto was recently deemed not a planet at all. In 2006, The International Astronomical Union expelled it from the planetary club, calling it a dwarf planet not big enough to clear smaller bodies close to it.

Photo courtesy of Petri Henriksson.

C (Carbon) stands for Cargo cult science, a term coined by physicist Richard Feynman in the 1970s to negatively characterise research in the soft sciences (e.g. psychology and psychiatry) which he deemed pseudo-scientific. In addition to his science critique, Feynman is known for popularising the field of physics with accessible explanations. Inspired by his stories about a teeming nano-world for a 1983 BBC interview ‘Physics is Fun to Imagine’ as well as Yoko Ono’s proposal pieces for the artist’s book Grapefruit, Jenna presented her interpretations on Feynman’s thoughts as event scores to create an experience of science.

H (Hydrogen) is for Hollow sphere – particularly one composed entirely of carbon. We read about this sphere, buckminsterfullerene, from the glossary of the Science Poems book:

Buckminsterfullerene or buckyball (C60) is the smallest carbon molecule, fullerene, in which no two pentagons share an edge. It is also the most common in terms of natural occurrence, as it can often be found in soot. The structure of C60 is a truncated icosahedron, which resembles a soccer ball. The molecule was named by scientists after Richard Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983), an American architect, author and futurist. He developed numerous inventions, the best known of which is the geodesic dome shaped like a fullerene. The American sci-fi author Bruce Sterling (b. 1954) later coined the neologism buckyjunk, referring to future, difficult-to-recycle consumer waste made of buckminsterfullerenes.

OH (Oxygen + Hydrogen = Hydroxyl) stands for Laurie Anderson’s track ‘Let X=X’, starting from its third sentence, “Oh boy. Right again…”, marking the end of our presentation.

Photo courtesy of Petri Henriksson.

Finally, we made NH4Cl + C2H5OH and listened to Martti Kalliala’s ‘DNA Junk’ (download by right clicking), a base pair sequence of non-genomic DNA translated into notes through MIDI and played by a Roland TB-303 bass synthesiser.

Science Poem Manifesto in the Science Poems book. Photo courtesy of Paavo Lehtonen.

Science fiction is art.

Science fiction is science poetics.

Science fiction is more honest about our hell and heaven, the compassion and the monstrous failings of our species, than any other form of art. Science fiction is real counterculture. Science fiction has legs and arms, fire and brimstone, void and aether, bellows and pickaxe. It creates the world and then it walks among it, knowing it, loving it before it plunders the truth from difference.

We, the science poets, have the stars – inherited from your apathy – and the future; you, the rest, have our common past, and this slovenly Earth. Science fiction trammels the past, sows its bones into the soil. Science fiction looks into the abyss and sees life, builds life out of death.

Science fiction is not a canon of equivalence (Dick our Pynchon, Delany our Derrida, Butler, Tiptree, and Russ our de Beauvoir, Cixous, and Dworkin), but a canon of its own. The science poets have always known this. In our secret utopia where the kings and queens are those with stars in their teeth and dark chasms on their shoulders, the science poets honor one another. From their gates, the science poets will never turn you away, because cold pangs of fearful yearning for the alien live within us all.

No man is an island,
And no planet is in turn;
And that in six billion years,
We’ll stand and watch it burn.

Science fiction doesn’t tell the future, it builds it. Science fiction is a living tradition that informs the very world it critiques, inventing new myths, words, and realities just as we catch up to its old ones. Science fiction does not obey; it does not consume. It presents the path, so we can walk it without fear.

Science fiction is a tender, holographic tunnel reaching all the way back to us from the distant future, from beyond the stars, broadcasting comfort despite difference, hope among despair, and teaching us the importance of our moment in the face of the impassive monument of time.

Science poems are not abstract, they are not separate from the world: the future is a poem, for it doesn’t yet exist. And those things which don’t yet exist are like the breath on the tongue, a gesture yet to be made – they are sheer potentiality. They have the kinetics of real art.

As Stanislaw Lem wrote, science fiction “comes from a whorehouse but…wants to break into the palace where the most sublime thoughts of human history are stored.” Within the shadowy, grimacing frame of its own poetics, it does. Because the sublime thoughts of human history have always been projected outwards, to the vastness outside of our minds. Science fiction is a movement outwards, not inwards: “up, up, and away”.

Science fiction knows, like the science poets do, that the sky begins at our feet.

The science poets look at our sky and they see three moons, or a ringed planet in sultry sunset; they hear a voice whispering across the void, hear the malice in its tone, but still find how to forgive it. Science poets see a tentacle and know its embrace. Science fiction is the grief of tomorrow and the horror of today. Science poetry makes no illusions.

Some days the poets burn out,
They drink deep from the cup,
They look all around them,
And they think, “Beam me up!”

Claire L. Evans is an artist and writer living and working in Portland, Oregon. We love both her blog Universe and her band YACHT. The Science Poem Manifesto was written for the Science Poems book.

Johanna Laitanen: A Spectacle of Nature #02, 2005, C-Type Print.

As a kid, my favourite thing to do was to visit The Finnish Museum of Natural History in Helsinki with my big sister. And my favourite thing inside was a baby cow with two heads, four ears and four eyes. The Siamese twins, that were actually an oddity in a building for wild organisms, made me wonder: if they were boys or girls, what would their life have been like had they survived? What could they possibly think now, if anything? And above all, why did they have to stay in a box of glass? Were they still alive, I would have wanted to touch them.

I have a friend, Johanna Laitanen, who makes art about natural history museums. She photographs them to pose questions about how our culture observes, conceptualises and represents nature. My big sister bought a piece from Johanna last year, a photograph of, not the calves, but bears in a diorama of the same Helsinki museum. Looking at this “observation of the observation” of nature, as Johanna describes her work, makes me amused about the idea that living in a small town, surrounded by wild nature, as a child, the climax of my visit to the capital was to observe nature in glass displays.

Johanna Laitanen: A Spectacle of Nature #01, 2005, C-Type Print.

Johanna’s photography deals with the human desire to experience and examine nature through romanticised depictions. She explores how the scientific and taxonomic representations are, in fact, originally developed to meet mainly dramatic needs and aesthetic aspirations.  In the end, my awe of the museumised nature was not only based on the fact that you don’t meet a bear in the forest everyday, if ever, but also on the cultural ideas; the fiction it offered. “Today’s museum displays have roots in Wunderkammers [or cabinets of curiosities, collections of disparate objects, gathered by wealthy and at their height of popularity in the Renaissance] that were assembled with little or no care for scientific categorisation,” Johanna explains. “They were much more about story-telling through objects and about ideas related to pre-Darwinian spiritual natural history, where nature was understood in symbolic meanings.”

Scientists strive for objectivity, but is there such a thing? Johanna tells me about her artist friend who sculpts animal figures and whose biologist father is unable to understand this. “I think that they are both doing the same thing, trying to understand the relationship between humans and nature,” she says. “It’s sometimes forgotten that scientific presentations are never objective, but, as with any human creation, they always reflect the ideas and desires of their time.”

Johanna Laitanen: A Spectacle of Nature #03, 2005, C-Type Print.

A month ago, I visited a natural science shop, Deyrolle, in Paris. Carrying objects like old teaching apparatus as well as collections of preserved and mounted animals of all kinds, I was dazed by the simultaneous beauty and oddity of the shop. It would have been possible to buy a polar bear from Deyrolle. But looking at the gigantic, beaming creature on the shop floor with a hanging price tag, I felt scared. It made me miss the dioramas that present scientific objects, animals, as we often wish to see them: in a seemingly natural, yet magical setting, isolated by a glass pane.

In the BBC footage, Feynman wonders how some people find sience so easy, and others find it dull and difficult – like children, for instance. “In the case of science, I think one of the things that makes it very difficult is that it takes a lot of imagination,” he says. “It’s very hard to imagine all the crazy things that things really are like. Nothing’s really as it seems. [...] But I find myself trying to imagine all kinds of things all the time. And I get a kick out of it.”

Exploring our place in the cosmos, the following transcripts and performance instructions aim to create an experience of science.

Water drop piece

Richard Feynman: “You see a little drop of water, a tiny drop. [...] The atoms in it attract each other. They like to be next to each other. They want as many partners as they can get. Now, the guys that are on the surface of the drop have only partners on one side, so they’re trying to get in. You can imagine this team of people all moving very fast, all wanting to get as many partners as possible, and the guys at the edge are very unhappy and nervous, and they keep on pounding in. And that’s what makes the drop a tight ball instead of flat – surface tension.”

Take a mannerism from an atom in a drop of water.
Gather a group of people in the same room for an hour.
Remain surrounded by a person on each side of you at all times.

Rubber band piece

“Most elastic things like steel springs and so on are nothing but this electrical thing pulling the atoms a little bit apart when you bend something, and then they try to come back together again. But rubber bands work on a different principle. There are some long molecules like chains that are kind of kinky and knocked about in shape. When you pull open the rubber band, the chains get straighter but they are being bombarded on the side by other little atoms trying to shorten them by kinking them, so they’re trying to pull back. [...] I’ve always found it fascinating to think, that when rubber bands are sitting on an old package of papers for a long time, holding them together, it’s done by a perpetual pounding, pounding, pounding of the atoms against these chains, trying to kink them for a long time, trying to hold this thing together.”

Wear a rubber band on your waist.
Eat a sandwich.
Think about the atoms that are pounding on your stomach.

Mirror Piece

“You look in a mirror, and let’s say you part your hair on the right side, but the image has its hair parted on the left side. So, the image is left and right mixed up. It’s not top and bottom mixed up because the top of the head in the image is still up there at the top, and the bottom of the feet are on the bottom. But how does the mirror know how to get the left and right mixed up but not the up and down? [...] It takes a lot of fiddling to describe what a mirror does. If you wave this hand, the waving hand in the mirror is right opposite it. The hand in the East is the hand in the East and the hand in the West is the hand in the West, and the head that’s up is up and the feet that are down are down. Everything’s really alright. But what’s wrong is that if this is North, your nose is to the North of the back of your head but in the image, the nose remains to the south of the back of the head. So, what actually happens in the image is neither mixing up the left and the right, nor the top and the bottom, but the front and back have been reversed. The nose of the image is on the wrong side of the head. Now, when we think of the image, we think of it as another person. And if we think of the normal way that a person would get into that condition over there, we don’t think of the idea that the person has been squashed and pushed backwards forwards with his nose and his head, because that’s not what ordinarily happens to people.”

Mirror all photographs of yourself on Photoshop.
Destroy the originals.

Swimming Pool piece

“If I’m sitting next to a swimming pool and somebody dives in [...], I think of the waves that are formed in the water. When lots of people have dived in the pool, there’s a great choppiness of all these waves all over the water. And to think that it might be possible that in those waves there are clues to what’s happening in the pool. [...] Someone with sufficient cleverness could just sit by the pool and figure out who jumped in; where, and when, by the nature of the irregularities and the bumping of the waves. [...] When we’re looking at something, the light that comes out is waves – just like in the swimming pool. It’s just that it’s in three dimensions.”

Look at the waves in a swimming pool.
Imagine what caused them.
Reconstruct that movement.

Napa Gallery, Jani, Lotta and Martti.

Science Poems mini exhibition and Anni.

Books, Maija and Stella.

Paris photos and herbal drinks.

Jenna making drinks.

Benjamin and the party on the street.

Nene listening to DNA Junk by Martti Kalliala. On the left: Faraday Suit vest by K.I. Kinnunen. On the right: Higgs Boson by Anna Ahonen and Katariina Lamberg.

Kaira looking at Brain Forest by Nene Tsuboi.

Nene, a Science Poems artist and typographer for the Helsinki party.

Order Science Poems online through Napa webshop.

Astronomy
Anna Ahonen and Katariina Lamberg – Higgs Boson, 2010, Digital print

Anna Ahonen & Katariina Lamberg: Higgs Boson (2010), digital print, 80x120cm

Higgs boson is a hypothetical elementary particle predicted to exist by the Standard Model in particle physics. Experimental detection of the Higgs boson would help to explain the origin of mass in the universe. It is currently searched using the particle accelerators of CERN but it has yet to be observed in the physical world. If the Higgs boson cannot be found to exist, the current cosmological and physical models must be radically reassessed – and our conception of reality will change.

“The idea is to give attention to a phenomenon we find fascinating, to convey its mysticism to others,” Anna Ahonen and Katariina Lamberg explain. “Natural sciences encompass many intriguing and beautiful things that usually remain within books and the dedicatees. We, however, didn’t want to make a scientific or theoretical representation of a scientific thing, but rather use the facts as a starting point for a work of imagination.”

Anna Ahonen (b. 1981) and Katariina Lamberg (b. 1977) form a multidisciplinary design studio Ahonen & Lamberg founded in Paris, 2006. They are also co-founders and art directors of the Dossier Journal.

Biology
Nene Tsuboi – Brain Drawings, 2010, Ink and pencil on paper

Nene Tsuboi: Synapse (2010), ink on paper, 40 x 30 cm

The altogether six brain drawings – Brain Forest, Miracle of Brain, Dopaminergic, Neuron, Synapse and Dopamine – explore the scientific aspect of human feelings, experiences and perceptions. They were inspired by the love stories of a Japanese writer Shungicu Uchida that Nene Tsuboi has been working with.

“I wasn’t so much into science at school, but when I read an essay written by a Japanese brain scientist Ken Mogi some years ago, I became a big fan of brains,” Nene Tsuboi says. “I like the way he crosses over the borders of art, science, philosophy and religion in his books, radio shows and blogs. What intrigues me the most about brains is that we don’t know that much about them yet,” Nene Tsuboi says. “Everybody has one but they still haven’t been totally understood by anybody.”

Nene Tsuboi (b. 1976) is a Japanese graphic designer and artist living in Helsinki since 1999. She started her work as an illustrator with ANTEEKSI design collective in 2001, and later founded NOW architecture and design office with architect Tuomas Toivonen.

Chemistry
Martti Kalliala – DNA Junk, 2010, Audio

Martti Kalliala: DNA Junk (2010), audio 33 min.

DNA Junk is a base pair sequence of non-genomic DNA translated into notes through MIDI and played by a Roland TB-303 bass synthesiser. DNA – the storage for genetic information in all living things – consists of adenine, thymine, guanine, and cytosine (A, T, G, and C) molecules. The sequences of these four bases, A, T, G, and C, determine how you differ from other living things. So, for instance, the raw data needed to construct a particular human being is a 3 billion character long sequence of these four letters. If this is translated into notes as such, it produces a near infinite monophonic melody with seemingly little variation.

“It’s been known since the early 1980s that the construction of DNA and musical composition bear similarities in their repetition processes,” Martti Kalliala explains. “However, I thought it would be interesting to bring the concept into my ‘home’ domain of techno/house/electronic dance music, and make something that’s actually meaningful in this context – not only conceptually but musically too.”

Martti Kalliala (b. 1980) is an independent architect and musician who is currently touring the world with his electronic music project Renaissance Man. Having worked amongst others with the Office for Metropolitan Architecture and NOW, he is also editing a publication on twelve pragmatic utopias for Finland.

Earth Sciences
Miska Knapek – Windtracing, 2009, Real time digital visualisation

Miska Knapek: Windtracing (2009), a real time visualisation on a computer screen

The animation draws the story of the wind’s movement, taking place in Helsinki over one year. It narrates the hidden life of the wind with a pencil-thin grey line moving in the same direction and with proportionally similar velocity as the current of air. The larger line on the screen shows a close-up revealing the wind’s more intimate movements.

“There’s a slight existentialist moment in the process of working with real-time data – even if you make rules for how the data is going to be shown, you never know what you’re going to get,” Miska Knapek says. “You could say that I got into meteorology through seeing what the wind data does: how temperamental the wind can be, how different seasons affect it, and so on. The stereotypical idea of the wind is that it either blows or it doesn’t, and that it’s this static, lifeless thing that goes in one direction at a time. But when I got the Windtracing running, I saw a movement that reminded me of a dancer. I had to sit down for an hour or so to only watch it go.”

Miska Knapek (b. 1975) is a Danish interaction designer and artist living and working in Helsinki. Growing up by the sea, wind has always been a part of his life. Miska’s spatio-temporal work opens new windows to the world.

Physics
K.I. Kinnunen – Faraday Suit, 2010, Clothing of copper silk plain weave, silk metal organza, boiled metal wool, carbon net, etc.

K.I. Kinnunen: Faraday Suit (2010), copper silk mix (vest) and ESD protective cotton with carbon fibre jersey mix (multi-purpose garment). Photo courtesy of Justus Järnefelt.

Faraday Suit is a series of clothing bridging technoromanticism and retreat. Exploring the invisible electromagnetic environment it resonates with everyday life through pieces functioning as interfaces between the built electrosphere and our internal world.

“The design for the series came about through exploring electromagnetism, electromagnetic spaces and wearables in those spaces,” K.I. Kinnunen describes. “I also looked into conducting materials like carbon and metal fibres as well as intact and layered surfaces. I like to call the end result a wearable tale, or functional fiction in the spirit of Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby’s thinking (see OK Do’s interview with Dunne & Raby). This is because Faraday Suit plays with the idea of functional fashion design by inventing new motives of use through creating, for example, natural spaces with association to insulation from the electromagnetic environment.”

K.I. Kinnunen (b. 1984) is a fashion designer based in Helsinki. Having graduated as Master of Arts from the School of Art and Design at the Aalto University early this summer, Kinnunen spent last spring working with Haider Ackermann in Antwerp. At the moment, she is designing mini-collections for her portfolio as well as made-by-order pieces for private clients.

Cross-disciplines
Kaarle Hurtig and Simo Vassinen – Welcome to Parasite, 2010, Photography and text

Kaarle Hurtig & Simo Vassinen: Welcome to Parasite (2010), photography and text

by sherabbi, Nov 20, 2009 12:00AM (5 member comments)
Actually, the symptoms have progressively worsened: diarrhea/IBS, sharp pains on my left side. Nausea, UTI/Bladder Infections – chronic; these do not respond well to antibiotics (I was in Emergency in Brasilia a few days later with IV antibiotics). Weight gain, insomnia, Acid Reflux, dizziness, Respiratory Problems/Infections, DX with asthma in 2003, then COPD in 2006. I have NEVER smoked.
–
[Our] modern Marco Polos now bring back the moral spices of which our society feels an increasing need as it is conscious of sinking further into boredom, but that this time they take the form of photographs, books, and travellers’ tales. (…) The perfumes of the tropics and the pristine freshness of human beings have been corrupted by a busyness with dubious implications, which mortifies our desires and dooms us to acquire only contaminated memories. (C. Lévi-Strauss: Tristes Tropiques)
–
Welcome to Parasite investigates parasitology through anthropology and a metaphor of a paradise lost. “People travel across the seas in search of themselves, for realness and for belonging,” Kaarle Hurtig and Simo Vassinen say. “Every now and then, a parasite follows us home. There’s a microscopic worm that eats our insides, reminding us of false dreams and vanity, and leaving an emptiness that’s hard to shake off. But we would still rather stay inquisitive than stop. Claude Lévi-Strauss talked about the “sadness of the tropics” and the disenchanting side of exploration. Thor Heyerdahl’s eagerness was naive at times, and Paul Gauguin’s Tahiti was romanticised and corrupt. Our work is about this battle of curiousity, amazement and melancholy.”

Science Poems artists: Anna Ahonen & Katariina Lamberg (portrait by Spela Kasal), Nene Tsuboi (portrait by Hertta Kiiski), Martti Kalliala (portrait by Paavo Lehtonen), K.I.Kinnunen, Miska Knapek and Simo Vassinen & Kaarle Hurtig (portraits by H. Kiiski).

The full length interviews with the artists are included in the Science Poems book along with various other poetic writings and images about science by OK Do and friends. The book, designed by Åh, is available online at Napa Bookshop as well as at the 0fr bookshop, La Librairie du Palais de Tokyo, Librairie Flammarion at the Centre Pompidou and Yvon Lambert in Paris; AA Bookshop, Koenig Books at the Serpentine Gallery, Artwords Bookshop Hackney and b store in London; Kiasma (Mannerheiminaukio 2) and Napa Gallery (Eerikinkatu 18) in Helsinki; do you read me?! (Auguststrasse 28), Pro qm (Almstadtstrasse 48-50) and Motto (Skalitzer Str. 68) in Berlin as well as NEW ACCIDENT (233-1 Jyouhoku) in Komatsu, Ishikawa.

Portrait of Paola Antonelli.

How does curating design differ from curating art?

There are a lot of differences. My art colleagues tend to do more monographic shows that have a different approach than the thematic shows that I favour. The reason for the thematic focus might be that I have more to prove and explain. Design is currently not treated as an art in its own right and it has to fight for its own presence and relevance in culture. Another important difference is that art curators often have a lot of reverence for artists – what they say and do is considered almost a religion. Designers, on the other hand, are usually working for a client and used to being questioned and negotiated with. That makes the curating different.

Working at the intersection of design, art and science, we’d like to hear how you see the future relationship between the three.

At the time of the Design and the Elastic Mind exhibition we were not the first ones to make design and science meet but maybe the first ones to make a full-fledged show about it. The Royal College of Art and Wellcome Trust in London have been exploring the intersection for a long time and the interesting and beautiful thing about their approach is that nobody makes a distinction between art and design in this context. One of the things I learned when making Design and the Elastic Mind was that the disctinctions between design, art and science become insignificant when you try to come up with new ideas that haven’t been proven or that don’t have a functionality yet.

The role of art – as it is generally seen – is to question our beliefs and habits. When you want to do that with design you need to use the means of art, like many pieces in Design and the Elastic Mind did. However, at the same time, every single work in the show had a design intention and soul to it. It’s hard to say what’s the difference between art and design – and it certainly cannot be built on form. You rather have to go back to the intent of the artist or designer. An artist is free to choose whether to be responsible towards the society or not – where as designers, by definition, are always trying to make things better. Overall, I think that one of the main roles of MoMA and myself is to give people who are doing meaningful things a platform and a sense of validation.

“An artist is free to choose whether to be responsible towards the society or not – where as designers, by definition, are always trying to make things better.”

In our interview with Anthony Dunne, he said that art shouldn’t need to exist. His reason was that in an ideal, utopian world; everyday life would be so rich, meaningful and challenging that we wouldn’t need a separate category called art. “I kind of feel that art exists because design has failed,” he noted. What are your thoughts on this argument?

Haha, it’s a very extreme argument which I love and completely understand! It comes from the same militant spirit that I have here at MoMA – as representatives of design we have so much to prove. I’m very glad that Tony [Anthony Dunne] is taking this stance because we need to make more outrageous statements to make people think.

Like you write in Seed magazine, as the focus of design shifts from the production of finite goods to a practice of experimentation, ideas take precedence over products. How will this effect the role of designers?

I think this phenomenon expands the field of action for designers. Instead of being hired to manufacture products, designers might be hired to help the company think. I feel that Tony and Fiona [Dunne and Raby] are sometimes commissioned to be a thorn in the company’s side; to make them more aware of the consequences of their actions. I hope more designers will do that in the future, when people start understanding that design is not only about chairs and lamps. Designers can also work with politicians and policy-makers – many of them have the ability to be thinkers on a general level.

“I hope that more designers wiIl be hired by companies to be thorns in their sides; to make them think and be more responsible.”

We feel that the university didn’t exactly prepare us for what we’re doing now with OK Do. How do you think designers as general thinkers should be educated?

This is an interesting question because education is the most important moment for designers these days and the geography of design is completely defined by where the good design schools are and nothing else. Nowadays, many succesful design schools already lead a more holistic approach offering studies in subjects like anthropology, and sociology.

When I studied architecture in Politecnico di Milano I loved a course in technology by Professor Guido Nardi. On Tuesdays, he would talk with us about how steel, wood and other materials behave, but Fridays were dedicated to Jung, Heidegger and Adorno. In a way, there was a balance between cold and hot showers; between teachings in pure application of materials and pure abstraction of theory. I found this balance extremely important and would use the course as a model for schools today.

Nowadays, many design schools are actually focusing a lot on the theoretical side and there are so many academic design courses coming up, like design cricism, interaction design, transdisciplinary design, etc. This is great, but I also wonder if any of these students ever go to workshops and cut themselves while carving wood.

You have stated that design is a bridge between the abstraction of research and the tangible requirements of real life, and that designers stand between revolutions and everyday life. Could you mention examples of projects in which you feel design has functioned particularly well as a bridge?

There are many, of course. Designers can satisfy our human needs by making a technological innovation usable and exciting for us. The next exhibition I’m going to do at MoMA is about the communication between people and objects – it’s called Talk to Me. The first time I personally understood this concept was when I bought my first Macintosh. It was the first time I felt that I had a pet. And this is what designers really do: they make objects into something that is part of your life. In fact, nowadays one of the most important functions of objects is to enable people to access networks. That makes the interfaces of objects and the ways they interact even more important.

“Nowadays one of the most important functions of objects is to enable people to access networks.”

What kind of roles do functionality and aesthetics play in the process of translating scientific revolutions into approachable objects? What about in the end results?

Aesthetics is important as a means of communication but never by itself. There’s scientific research that says that handsome people get higher wages. It’s kind of unfair, but there is a role in our natural evolution played by beauty. On the other hand, we know very well that beauty is completely subjective and if you look at examples like Almodóvar’s movies or punk aesthetics, they might not be pretty in an obvious way, yet they are beautiful because of the personality inside.

Designers can help scientists master complexity and take advantage of new building blocks like nanotechnology for instance, but what about their ability to dream – do you think designers’ fantasies can and should get involved in scientific processes and, later, the reality?

Sometimes artists and designers and other creative professionals like science fiction writers or filmmakers inspire scientists big time and push them further, even if they don’t admit to it that much. I’m currently collaborating with a sci-fi director on a symposium about science fiction, architecture and design. We feel that almost everything that has been imagined by architects, designers and science-fiction writers in the past has actually been realised, and the question is: what could we imagine next?

What do you think is the designers’ role and responsibility in thinking about the (sometimes negative) consequences of scientific discoveries?

There’s a lot of morality in design. Sometimes moralism also, but often constructive criticism. Scientists are also very concerned with ethics and what their accomplishments are used for. I think that the more communication there is between designers and scientists, the more the ethical agendas will become a general practice that everybody takes on. Many scientists today are so different from the scientists we used to know in the past. They listen to music, they make mistakes and they think in terms of ethical responsibility.

“The more communication there is between designers and scientists, the more the ethical agendas will become a general practice that everybody takes on.”

The Design and the Elastic Mind exhibition was not concerned only with designers who have an interest in the latest scientific achievements, but also with scientists who are engaged in the act of design. Could you give us your favourite example of the latter kind of cases? And do you think it’s necessary to draw lines between professional designers and other people who practice design?

Certainly different people have different expertise and I would never put a designer in the lead of cancer research just as I wouldn’t let scientists design my mobile. It’s the communication between different fields and professionals that counts. One of my favourite works in the exhibition, ‘Colloidal Alphabet Soup’ was a new protein marker by two biologists from UCLA, Thomas Mason and Carlos Hernandez. Usually protein markers just feature different colours, but they also used the alphabet to mark the proteins in more detail. In the exhibition, they showed their work through a poster where an image of this colourful ‘alphabet soup’ was magnified. Next to their work, we exhibited a fictional piece, ‘Typosperma’ by designer Oded Ezer who had imagined that each spermatozoon of a man would have a letter attached to it with each ejaculation resulting in a new poem. The scientists were so happy to exhibit next to the designer, to not to be considered dull scientists but rather people who are creative too!

Science poems, literally speaking [haha]. So, you would say that design can produce culture, or experiences, around scientific discoveries?

Yes. A good example at Design and the Elastic Mind was a living coat called “Victimless Leather” by SymbioticA. It was made of living stem cells from mice and it had to be fed to be kept alive. It was constantly growing, finally to an extent at which I had to kill it by blocking the nutrient. I was so disturbed by having to do this and the act resulted in a big debate about killing the completely artificial yet living coat. This example demonstrates how art can take a stand in innovation and transform it into a project, it can really make you feel insecure about everything you thought we were steady and neutral about.

Victimless Leather - A Prototype of Stitch-less Jacket grown in a Technoscientific "Body", 2004. Image courtesy of the Tissue Culture & Art Project (Oron Catts & Ionat Zurr).

In our Science Poems exhibition, we have given designers and artists the brief to explore and interpret natural sciences. What do you think is the meaning and value of letting creative professionals interpret scientific questions, processes and results?

Do you have scientists checking out your work and making sure it’s exact?

The scientists will be more in the background, giving information and starting points, rather than actually getting involved in the art work which is based on interpretation and imagination.

What is important, I think, is to have scientists criticising the work in the end, to give their opinion about the direction the interpretation is taking. A beautiful example of an artist and a scientist collaborating this way is that of the artist Matthew Ritchie and physicist Paul Steinhard. I think it’s important to show people working together and not apart. But if the artists are free to do whatever they want, this should be explained clearly on the label.

To sum it up, could you name the 3 the most interesting or meaningful concepts or phenomena in which design/art and science meet?

1. Synthetic biology is important. The idea that you can make organisms out of composing bricks.
2. Nanotechnology – designers are paramount there.
3. Visualisation design – designers helping scientists to make sense of their data.