Julijonas Urbonas: Designing and Orchestrating Technologies for Future Home or Objects for Arithmomaniacs
Title:
- Designing and Orchestrating Technologies for Future Home or Objects for Arithmomaniacs
Artist(s) and People Involved:
Exhibiting Artist(s):
Symposium:
Venue(s):
Medium:
- Five electronic objects, five anecdotic stories, one fictional failed research
Artist Statement:
The electronic design project presents an experimental narrative accompanied with five electronic design objects, aka ‘scientific probes’. Ordinary products – a rocking chair, a pair of shoes, a pair of boxing gloves, a doormat and a chest belt – are supplemented with electronic digital counters that count peculiar interactions with their users. For example, the chair counts its swings, whilst boxing gloves count the number of the punches they make. By ‘purifying’ the nature of the digital intervention to a simple counting act, the objects are transformed into interactive props that serve as both sarcastic tangible rhetoric and avant-garde products.
The project’s ambiguous nature is amplified even more by dressing the objects with a series of anecdotal stories of fictitious research. In this storyline, the ‘probes’ are used to collect statistical data of domestic psychological, social and physical dynamics and interactions in order to design a better domestic space. Research fails, alas! Though, happily, stimulating results are produced that prompt to rename the research Objects for Arithmomaniacs, crowning the comedy of the poetic failure.
Arithmomania is a mental disorder that may be seen as an expression of obsessive-compulsive illness. Sufferers from this disorder have a strong need to count their actions or objects in their surroundings.
