Tanner Teale (is Hello.)

A Working Thesis Statement (12 April 2012)

Design is being redefined, for me personally and throughout the community. More provocative and critical design work is being made outside of the traditional role that places design at the service of business. I intend to use design, similar to art, as a language that allows makers to interact with, comment on and critique the everyday world rather than decorate it.

How can a design practice exist in a space traditionally reserved for art? How can art theory be brought into design? Art and design are seemingly binary disciplines, but I think the conversations happening in decimals between 1 and 0 are the most interesting. My work has always lived in the void separating the two. In my application to the Grad Media Design program I wrote, “I want to be considered an artist to designers, and a designer to artists…” Since then, I have discovered new facets of each discipline and have seen the space between them narrow and overlap. Now, I consider myself a maker simultaneously engaged in multiple conversations, through making, with both communities.

The work of Daniel Eatock and Yuri Suzuki walk a fine line between these disciplines. Dunne & Raby and Martí Guixé are designers who show in exhibitions, while artists Miranda July, Wood & Harrison, Sophie Calle and Yoko Ono use design thinking in their process and application. Philip van Allen’s Productive Interaction and Nicolas Bourriaud’sRelational Aesthetics have shown me an art and design perspective on making work where the user is an active participant in the outcome and meaning of the piece. As Conceptual artist Lawrence Weiner puts it, “What’s sat upon the table, sits upon the table…that stone on the table can be used to crack your bones or it could be used to build a house, it’s still the same stone on the same table.” This statement by Weiner, in addition to van Allen’s essay, represent how I want to inject meaning into my work: as an instigator of discovery presented to the user. These texts and practices have shown me that a single space for my work does not exist, but that a practice can occupy multiple spaces across and between disciplines. It has also inspired me to take classes in the Grad Art department over the summer to gain a wider perspective on critical making and theory.

How can the affordances of the physical world influence digital systems and vice versa? Physical computing interests me because it brings together two worlds that are governed by different laws, each with its own set of affordances. I want to use physical and digital materials to create interactions that highlight and reveal the properties of each world.

I recently explored these affordances in Hair Dryer & Balloon: a series of interaction experiments that investigate physical and digital inputs and outputs. Using the physical properties of helium and air displacement and the digital capabilities of code and sensors, the nine iterations reveal subtleties about our daily existence in a hybrid physical-digital world.

How can the everyday be used to communicate, reveal, provoke, question and subvert itself and our relationship with it? People have expectations of everyday things; objects, materials, systems, tools, interactions, language, etc. I want to challenge people’s “narrow assumptions, preconceptions and givens” (Dunne & Raby) to reveal their relationship with the everyday using it as my medium.

Two projects that have been informed by this idea are Drive and Everyday Conversation. Drive reconfigures the everyday act of driving home using a logic set inspired by the principles of code. There are three rules: 1) Drive home. 2) Every right turn must be followed by a left turn. 3) Every left turn must be followed by a right turn.This forces the driver to become aware of their normal route revealing the systematic and habitual nature embedded in our daily activities. Everyday Conversation is a project where I use fans to explore the relationship between everyday objects and our relationship with them. When the four fans are alone, they talk and gesture to each other using the language of fans, air displacement and sound. When a human enters their presence, they stop talking, pause and sense the environment. If they feel safe, they will slowly begin talking, but if they sense motion, they will go silent. The fans’ animistic qualities are meant to lead the viewer to question their relationship to everyday objects. Similar to Hans Haacke’s attitude towards snow in Statement (1969), I am using fans as fans, but altering the context around them to give the viewer a new perspective on an everyday object.

Art and design, digital vs. physical, the unexpected everyday: are these binaries, or are they comprised of the infinite decimals between 1 and 0? A blurring of definitions feels inevitable when making work informed by two disciplines that aims to defamiliarize the hybrid physical-digital everyday. I look to inhabit and celebrate the array of possibilities between these blurry relationships and explore them as a maker, not an artist or designer.

// Writing advisor: Thea Petchler

(Ecologies of Animate Systems)