elultimogrito

Knowledge is gained, analyzed and manipulated through design processes

6:08 AM May 4th from web

The post-disciplinary addresses the imposibility of understanding an ‘object’ from a sole point of view at any given time

1:59 PM May 4th from web

The post-disciplinary abandons architectures

6:37 PM Apr 29th from web

The post-disciplinary does not engage in cultural hierarchies, it is interested in the message regardless of the medium

8:56 AM Apr 27th from web

Design is not a discipline but a PROCESS which humans use to materialize thought

6:34 AM Apr 27th from web

POST-DISCIPLINARY_does not acknowledge the disciplinary divide and refuses to conform with academic or market led definitions

2:41 PM Apr 26th from web of these points of view. Therefore the challenge for us is to create ‘objects’ that disassociate from learned representations: representations that dictate certain ways of living, working and communication. We aim to bypass cultured filters, as the mother from Chuck Palahniuk’s Choke is able to do for a split second.

It Is Not The Monuments

I remember when I was a little boy, probably five or six, I used to stay quite often at my grandma Maria’s house. She lived in Duque de Sesto, a small street that runs parallel with the Calle Alcala in Madrid. I have quite clear memories of that time, I guess because there are memories that are not only shaped by the things you see but also by your own size. Most of these memories are very soon put against the new realities that your body is constantly creating when you are growing up. But if I look back I can easily visualise two very significant places for me at that time: one of them was the Retiro Park, I guess because it was the place I was taken to play, and the other was my grandparents’ house.

It was the end of the sixties in Madrid, so probably the equivalent to the fifties in many other European countries. I still remember clearly the day I saw for the first time those tricycles… “WOW!” I thought. I ran up to one of the kids riding them and stared till my grandmother caught up with me, grabbed me by the hand and pulled me away. There was a little piazza in the park where these huge tricycles could be rented for children to ride. They had the largest wheels ever at the back… They were amazing! I never got to ride on one of them, no matter how much I begged, so they stuck in my mind and I used to dream about them. Still today, as I am writing these lines, I can feel this longing and I picture them as I did in those days.

My grandparents’ house was number 27, it was a dark and old house. When you entered from the street you walked through a short hall and, after climbing up three steps, you were facing an old iron lift (all caged) up to the fifth floor of the building.

The stairs crawled around the lift. I remember I was quite scared of that lift so I always ran up the stairs and waited for my grandparents on the landing of the first floor, which is where they lived.

There were three flats on each floor. I can’t recall ever seeing any of their neighbours. When you got into their flat you immediately encountered my grandfather’s home office, he was a lawyer. His studio was my favourite room in the house. His desk was sitting at the end of the room facing the double door that opened into his space. It was a desk in black stained wood, very geometrical now that I think of it, quite modern in a way. I loved to sit at his desk when he was not around. The thing that attracted me most was the letter opener and the big Bakelite telephone that was on the left. On his desk he also had a collection of pipes although he preferred cigars (which over the years was always a successful present to buy him, thinking now makes me realise that probably the whole family were all slowly contributing to his death, so it goes). Looking from his desk, on the right wall of the room, was a fitted bookcase filled with law books. To its left hung, what was for me, the most intriguing object of the room: a portrait of Franco (the Spanish dictator).

It was intriguing because I just could not understand why my grandfather would have this portrait, and I knew it was Franco because it looked exactly like one of the postage stamps of the moment. It was puzzling because my grandfather was a republican and had been sentenced to death during the war. He was finally expelled from his hometown of Valencia to Madrid together with his family, which at the time were my grandmother and their first two sons Pepe, my uncle, and Roberto, my father. Even at the age of five I remember Franco as the bad guy. So I just couldn’t work this one out, why he had this portrait; for many years I tried to build the courage to ask but never really dared to do so, as I had the feeling it would not be a happy answer.

I’ll spare you the suffering of going through yet another of my memories, and stop here to clarify the big mysteries of my childhood.

The tricycle of the Retiro, that colossal object, subject so many times of my daydreaming… Years later when I unintentionally walked by the place where they used to rent them, I saw them again… They were just regular children’s size, neither as big nor as special as I remembered. What a letdown! Even to this day I would have preferred not to have seen them ever again, keeping my memory intact.

As for the other big mystery of my childhood, the portrait, I remember one day finally asking my granny. She was dusting in my grandfather’s studio, now or never… and then I found the courage to ask her: “Granny…” I started to mumble… “Tell me Robertin” (she used to call me Robertin, kind of Valencian way of shortening Roberto by making it even longer). “Why does granddad have a portrait of Franco hanging in the office?” My grandmother turned away from her chores for a second and looked at me in disbelief, to see me pointing at the ‘Franco’ portrait. “HA, HA, HA, HA…” I think actually it was the first time I had seen my gran really laugh. “That is not Franco… it is your Grandad!” I remember staring back at the orangey picture and it was true… It was my grandfather… As if by magic someone had suddenly changed the subject of the painting (I have to say that in my defence, it did bear a remarkable resemblance to one of the most common postage stamps of the time). My grandmother took a closer look and kept laughing, she left the room and headed down the corridor carrying her “HA HAs” with her (I think she also for the first time had appreciated the resemblance).

Surely we can all recall similar stories, especially when thinking of our childhood. We are made of memories; all we know are the memories of something we lived before, what we call experience ‘I presume’. Most times these memories are not even first hand, we have been told or we have read somewhere or they are ‘as seen on television’, and we call that culture: a shared collection of memories. And, of course, memories are not objective. Memory is a space that is negotiated, transformed and blocked in our heads through the constant juggling of ‘reality’.

When you try to ‘draw’ on memory you always pull along a learnt way of looking at things, but this memory is never entirely perfect: it has lost or gained along the way. This is a subject that interests us a great deal and it is reflected in our work.

As the exercise of trying to draw a map of the world from memory would easily reveal1, most of us would use the kind of accepted way of representing the world used in atlases and, as I am European, I would have the Atlantic Ocean at the centre of my page (as space is not a problem you wouldn’t cut out the most western parts of America or the most eastern ones of Asia) so I would draw to the right Europe and then Asia, under Europe would be Africa connected to Asia by the Middle East. Then to the right of Africa, the island of Madagascar and right under Asia we would start drawing the islands that lead to the big mass of Oceania. To the left I would draw North America connected to South America by Central America and to the right of it some island representing the Caribbean countries. On the top would be the Arctic and on the bottom the Antarctic. Then depending on how well travelled you are, how much attention you were paying in geography class when you were at school, you would be able to do this with more or less accuracy.

Island. 2008. Wood, glue and paint. Circle Ceiling Lamp. 2008. Wire mesh and tape.

We like this exercise because it becomes a dialogue between the information you remember, methods of representation and your ability to implement them. But also these become elements that you can play with, which help you deliberately to interpret the world in a different way. We have been working for a long time around the idea of memory and space, its representation and its materiality. Investigating how we could use our memories of space to create links with new ideas, so that a dialogue can be generated.

When our daughter Elba was three years old, we were playing hide and seek in our flat in Peckham, not a big place by any means (rather the contrary) so the opportunities to hide in adult terms were scarce. Elba was counting to ten (more or less) so even though she was not the fastest counter, the amount of time to find a hiding place was rather short. We were playing in the living room, Elba was counting just outside the room: “One, two, three…” I was sitting on the sofa “…five, six…” so I rapidly lay down “…eight, nine…” and pulled a blanket over myself “…TEN! Ready or not here I come”. From under the blanket I heard her come into the room, knowing I would be found at any moment. I heard her walking around the room for few seconds and then she said “Daddy, where are you? I can’t find you”. I had to contain my laughter. I remembered that we had been reading some books, which were still on the floor, so I told her “I am in the booook”, overdoing it a bit. I heard her picking up one of the books and anxiously turning the pages… After a minute or so she says again “Daddy! On which page are you? I can’t find you!”

It was both fantastic and revealing that she saw the space inside the book as a more plausible hiding place than the sofa, not realising that the massive thing under the blanket could be her father. She was able to see the potential of that space, she was able, without any need of intellectual exercise, to project herself inside the space of the book and experience it. I have to say I felt terribly jealous… I too wanted to know what it is to open a book and feel this other dimension as ‘real’. Maybe this is why we keep trying to reproduce this experience, to be able to see space without preconceptions, to see the potential of things rather than their limitations.

Blank Wilderness

What is the Blank Wilderness? It represents a mythical space where everything is potential; where there is no context. In reality it is the ‘space in the book’ but as blank space, where nothing (or everything) has been created. A space into which you project yourself in order to think differently about the world, or imagine alternative ones… Maybe it’s just a space of make-believe where we play at being ‘God’.

Blank Wilderness is, in one respect, the abstract beginning. We may think of ‘God’ floating around in nothingness (or what ever It had created before, which we don’t know about) thinking about what to do. “Now that we can do anything, what will we do?” says Bruce Mau. This space that has no context, where the only measure is Man against himself, offers no clues, no challenges, no problems… What would we design then? Would we be able to think a new world? Where would we start? Definitely a difficult question, maybe better left to the mice1. Perhaps it is all a big experiment.

But Blank Wilderness also represents an idea of a future; a future where Man has gone from the conquest of the world and the mystification of the object, to a moment of idealisation where objects become their idea, a moment that represents the existence of function and not form. If we could imagine, or even conduct a survey, the ideal outcomes would probably relate to the dematerialisation of objects or the materialisation of thought. If we imagine the ultimate mobile phone for example, inevitably this will be linked to the disappearance of the object. The supreme communication device would be some sort of telepathy (albeit technologically replicated) that would allow users to hold conversations, view and store audio-visual data within their own heads. Of course issues of privacy and loss of information would be solved, together with any other problems, through yet another device. In the same way we have fantasised about the idea of travelling just by snapping our fingers, or being “beamed up” by Scotty2 or being able to “jaunte”3. To have our clothes made, or get any food we desired by merely thinking about it. In our ‘old’ world we still needed the machine to act as an interface, but not ‘now’… We just have to want to sit, to be able to do so without the need for a chair object…

But the problem in this new world deprived of objects, deprived of myths, is that everything becomes natural and unquestionable, conservative even, and in a way meaningless… Or meaningful… Or 424.

Mico. 2006. Polyvalent Object. Rotation moulded plastic. Manufactured by Magis.