NEW FURNITURE
Rietveld Academy
“New Furniture” is an intervention within the library of the Gerrit Rietveld Academy, consisting of three glassblown casts of a human, female lap, positioned on the floor and on the library’s props, the glassblown cast of a face and a text.
Furniture presupposes a clean break between self and object, the corporeal and its technical supports. In the posthuman, this binary is dismantled in favor of a thinking of the self as an assemblage, always in a state of becoming, entangled with environments, infrastructure, tools, technology and information. As supporting structure and gendered site of care, the lap is approached here as a primal, relational architecture, a temporary assemblage resulting out of a momentary stance of holding, turning into a technical medium. Through glass, the medium of contemporary interfaces and a stand-in for transparency, casts of human laps materialize as assemblages where body, object and environment become entangled : the body becomes the furniture and the furniture becomes the body, collapsing the boundary between flesh, glass and infrastructure.
From a modern vision of transparency as the apex of rationality, articulated clearly and democratically once and for all, to technocapitalist regimes where transparency becomes a tracking tool for informational and commercial purposes, the glass laps become speculative relics reflecting back to the ghostly remains of the female labor underlying contemporary technologies as well as the function of holding, here stripped bare in a state of permanent exposure.
The stream-of-consciousness text accompanying the exhibition, printed on transparent plastic foil, understands the body and the self as an ‘infopattern’, a tangential process of breaking, leaking, falling and splashing – desiring their own objectification, refusing a linear progression and looking for a cut – or a line of flight – from a constant state of monitoring. The found drawings on the wall become parts of the assemblage, as echos of the waveforms that appear in the text, and so do selected books from the librarys’ catalogue, as props for the glass devices : M. Perniolas “The Sex Appeal of the Inorganic”, D. Haraways “Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields: Metaphors of Organicism in Twentieth-Century Developmental Biology” and the reader “Reading / Feeling” by the art organization If I cant dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution, on which rests a glassblown cast of a face, functioning as a bookend.
NEW FURNITURE
Rietveld Academy
“New Furniture” is an intervention within the library of the Gerrit Rietveld Academy, consisting of three glassblown casts of a human, female lap, positioned on the floor and on the library’s props, the glassblown cast of a face and a text.
Furniture presupposes a clean break between self and object, the corporeal and its technical supports. In the posthuman, this binary is dismantled in favor of a thinking of the self as an assemblage, always in a state of becoming, entangled with environments, infrastructure, tools, technology and information. As supporting structure and gendered site of care, the lap is approached here as a primal, relational architecture, a temporary assemblage resulting out of a momentary stance of holding, turning into a technical medium. Through glass, the medium of contemporary interfaces and a stand-in for transparency, casts of human laps materialize as assemblages where body, object and environment become entangled : the body becomes the furniture and the furniture becomes the body, collapsing the boundary between flesh, glass and infrastructure.
From a modern vision of transparency as the apex of rationality, articulated clearly and democratically once and for all, to technocapitalist regimes where transparency becomes a tracking tool for informational and commercial purposes, the glass laps become speculative relics reflecting back to the ghostly remains of the female labor underlying contemporary technologies as well as the function of holding, here stripped bare in a state of permanent exposure.
The stream-of-consciousness text accompanying the exhibition, printed on transparent plastic foil, understands the body and the self as an ‘infopattern’, a tangential process of breaking, leaking, falling and splashing – desiring their own objectification, refusing a linear progression and looking for a cut – or a line of flight – from a constant state of monitoring. The found drawings on the wall become parts of the assemblage, as echos of the waveforms that appear in the text, and so do selected books from the librarys’ catalogue, as props for the glass devices : M. Perniolas “The Sex Appeal of the Inorganic”, D. Haraways “Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields: Metaphors of Organicism in Twentieth-Century Developmental Biology” and the reader “Reading / Feeling” by the art organization If I cant dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution, on which rests a glassblown cast of a face, functioning as a bookend.