idothingsotherthanknit: Committee

Lost Twin Ornaments

"To accompany the opening of their new building and digital facilities, Metropolitan Works in London, commissioned new work from nine design companies and artists. Each contributor was offered free reign with the new facilities. In response Committee produced The Lost Twin Ornaments, a series of experimental sculptures that question the burgeoning aesthetic produced by digital technologies.

Ever since the early days of modernism, artists, designers and architects have asked the world to have faith in the act of abstract form making. The post-modern experience in many ways disrupted that faith but despite this fact, we are now witnessing a new wave of pure abstract form-making as recent advances in digital technologies allow artists, designers and architects to create complex new shapes that were previously un-constructible or even inconceivable without the aid of a computer. The question is are we in awe of these spectacular new shapes and find them beautiful in themselves, or are we simply in awe of the powers that created them and their futuristic nature?

Committee set out to explore this theme to better understand just what these technologies offer us and what part the designer plays in producing such works.
Lacking a vision for making an abstract form of their own, Committee needed a device to guide the process. They therefore used, as a starting point, incongruous pairs of mundane items and proposed that a CAD form be produced to link the two. In the first place these items simply provided two interesting surfaces between which a shape could be generated but they also offered a strong aesthetic juxtaposition with the new form because of their quotidian nature. Once scanned and mapped into a 3D image, Committee applied their relative I.T. ineptitude to produce arbitrary guide lines between the two objects that would dictate the way the new form would morph between them.

It was important to the project that Committee had limited CAD skills at this point, as it revealed the power of the computer programme to make such dramatic shapes in unskilled hands. In this case the role of designer was diminished to arbiter and selector of a number of examples, rather than the author or sculptor of a form from scratch. The amazing production technologies, then allowed a form, far too complicated to be produced from a drawing, to be realised in an astoundingly short space of time.

The results were in many ways confusing; each ornament seems to balance precariously between being beautiful and grotesque. Either way, the ornaments are visually compelling, yet aside from the calculating powers of computers they are derived from simple, arbitrary objects and minimal human intervention. In fact the process had more or less 'grown' the ornaments, much as nature works, using an underlying irrational system, that humans find difficult to emulate, influenced by various random environmental factors. In other words they are to some degree artless objects."