Chapter 6. Installation as a form
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Chapter 6. Installation as a form
To be understood, I have to shape my idea into form using the approach of the chosen method. Considering that for design fiction two things are the most important – a design artifact and a world which it is built around – the perfect form for my art project Planet B is an installation. The term installation art usually means a three-dimensional, large-scale, and mixed-media construction. This art form emerged from the ‘environment’, another artistic genre created by Allan Kaprow in 1958, which represents largescale artworks transforming an interior space.47 One of the features of an installation, as well as an environment, is to intensify the experience of the audience by making the work walk-in, walk-through, but not walk-by. The possibility to interact with the environment helps the viewer to sink into the new reality and sense it deeper than through another art-form. What also makes the genre of installation art special is that, unlike a series of artworks, it creates a strong unified experience. Pieces of it are inseparable and tell one single story to the audience, that is why they should be perceived together. One of the inspiration sources for my project were total installations of Ilya Kabakov, a Soviet-American conceptual artist, such as Not Everyone Will Be Taken Into the Future and The Man Who Flew Into Space From His Apartment. The author insisted that “the main actor in the total installation, the main center toward which everything is addressed, for which everything is intended, is the viewer.” 47 Here I see a similarity to design fiction. A fictional world in which the diegetic prototype or design artifact exists, has to be explored like
