Visual communication in 0.4 seconds
“Beautiful as the chance encounter, on an operating table, of a sewing machine and an umbrella.”
Comte de Lautreamont, Songs of Maldoror (1869)
For the Surrealists, the work of Lautreamont was an inspiration and this line, taken from one of his poems, captures the essence of surrealist thinking – their search for the marvelous – the surreal - the eureka moment?
140 years after the chance encounter, between Alfred Nobel, nitroglycerine and silica (the basis of dynamite), a controlled explosion is detonated in secluded woodland in Stockholm. At the detonator stand the Swedish design team Front. In that moment of spark and ignition, the form of ‘Design in 0.4 Seconds’ is created - a soft lounge chair made from the mould of the explosion.
Front’s explosive interpretation of creativity is an element of the Front rationale of creative thinking: “Every product has a moment in which it is ‘made’. Usually, though, this is implicit. We are interested in capturing – as if to freeze-frame – that very moment of making and make it explicit.” Front’s real interest here is how its form is a product of randomness - a product of chance?
The paradox is that while the form of the chair is different each time, you always know – by design – that you will get a chair (unlike René Magritte’s famous pipe!). Front’s experiments capture the tension between creativity and thinking – the rational and irrational. It is this tension between the two worlds of inspiration and materialism that seduced the Surrealists - who remain, as ever, relevant today. But how can their work be re-evaluated in relation to visual communication, not least for its endeavors to capture the creative impulse?
The grid for instance, so often the basis of graphic design, would have been the cheese wire around the throat of inspiration in surrealist thinking. André Breton wrote in his Surrealist Manifesto of 1924, “We are still living under the reign of logic… But in this day and age logical methods are applicable only to solving problems of secondary interest.”
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Every idea has its moment of inspiration, the moment in which it takes shape, but that taking of shape isn’t literal like Front’s lounge chair design. Andre Breton said that ‘‘beauty should be convulsive’’ – ideas and objects can be transformed into something else through representation. The Surrealists had many rationales for excavating such inspiration – capturing the moment that bridges thinking with the beautiful, the sublime. One that is relevant here is the explosante fixe, literally a fixed explosion: a camera can capture what the eye cannot see – creating a new reality out of the fabric of our day-to-day world. So, a photograph by Man Ray captures a whirling dancer whose seductive figure, at the split second of shutter release, is transformed into a sensuous lily.
…and strange objects come together in a poem, or elsewhere, and spark the imagination - like an explosion in a moment of quiet repose…
In these ‘illogical’ methods, can we find new ways to make solving the problems of visual communication of primary interest?
Limited Language 2006
Monika Parrinder and Colin Davies
The Beat Generation were also looking at ways to jolt inspiration into life: From drug taking to the ‘cut-up’ method of writing. What would be interesting to look into would be how digital technology makes many of these avant-garde practices part of the day to day creation of visual work. Many of the practices that once hot wired our creative impulse are common and everyday in our visually mediated world - this is why the role of touch and sound are coming to the fore (as seen in the comments on this site). How we bring these senses into our day to day practices is something both commercial practice and education need to address - interactivity is more than screen based interaction. We need to realise this otherwise we end up with a world that is out of balance - screen over touch!
/jenny wright 08/10/2006