John James Marshall thesis.pdf - OpenAIR @ RGU - Robert Gordon ...

products with the branding of well-known companies on them and he published
them on his website. The hijacked brands became aware of this when they were
inundated with orders for these virtual products. Fiction became reality when
Ora Ito was subsequently hired for genuine, high profile design jobs. These are
new models of practice that yield a greater integration between art and design
disciplines either by approach or output.
Although Alex Coles has since backed away from the term ‘DesignArt’ (because
the term has been ‘hijacked by glossy lifestyle magazines’) the continuum of
activity 130 indicated by this term can be understood as an expanded cultural
field representing a conjunction of ‘product design’ and ‘not product design’.
‘Designart’ could indicate ‘contingent’, ‘dialogistic’ or genuinely ‘hybrid’ models
of practice (see section 2.9.7) that generates a new sense of disciplinary
boundary shifting that draws on the critical discourse of intersecting
disciplinary domains. An example of this would be Erwin Driessens and Maria
Verstappen’s ‘Breed’ that was developed as a response to the continual demand
for novelty art by art institutions and journals. This is a computer programme
that uses an algorithm to generate forms (digital sculpture). This software
responds to previous states in the growth of an object through a process of
mutation and selection based on splitting a single cube into eight new cubic
units that exist in a binary state (either empty or full). In their turn, these full
units are split into eight new units and so on. These practitioners consider this
work is about the creation of the algorithm rather than the resulting generative
objects (which are produced in Nylon by the SLS® process). Oliver Vogt and
Hermann Weizenegger’s ‘Sinterchair®’ also made by the SLS® process and
computer-generated from input from the consumer could also be located in this
category. Lionel T. Dean’s ‘Tuber9’ pendant LED lamp (the prototype of which
is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York) can
likewise fit here.
Another example of the conjunction of ‘product design’ and ‘not product design’
is the ‘Device Art’ project. This is a concept for re-examining the relationships
between art, science and technology developed by Machiko Kusahara. Device
130 In terms of ‘DesignArt’ being used as a reciprocal term to produce a new speculative type of work somewhere inbetween
art and design.
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