Published March 4 (link)
'Revolutions,' Paola Antonelli writes in her introduction to 'Design and the Elastic Mind', her just-opened exhibition at New York's Museum of Modern Art, 'are not easy on us.' It's a hell of a way to start a design show. That might be because it's a hell of a show.
'Design and the Elastic Mind', on view through May 12 in the museum's sixth-floor galleries, takes on ideas of the future, and how design works - and will work - with it. The over 200 objects, drawings, ideas, speculations, nanotechnologies, photographs, concepts, possibilities, environments, arguments, polemics, drawings, renderings, models and more on view here, combine to create a vision of the future that isn't apocalyptic, or even post-apocalyptic, but instead that exemplifies the range we cross-disciplinarily express these days; the work is everything from quietly hopeful to overtly celebratory, from politically argumentative to aesthetically stunning.
Antonelli, working with her right-hand curatorial assistant Patricia Juncosa Vecchierini, has divided the show into three parts - Nano Scale, Human Scale, Large Scale – and then again into smaller subsections - like Personal Environments, Design for Debate, Design for One and Many.
The divisions are useful, but the show is best experienced over many trips, and with a completely open mind. One empty morning finds a visitor playing with the artist Jonathan Harris' sweetly sad-yet-hopeful project, 'I Want You to Want Me,' an interactive piece that collects quotes and pictures from 15 dating sites and invites you to take a look at America's desires. It's touching, and tragic, and a lot about design, and art, and how those two mitigate loneliness, create connection, and influence our lives.
That sets one tone but then, to pick things up, just down the gallery sits a programmed Corian table by Moritz Waldemeyer that loops an endless Pong game, and then, across the forced-perspective hallway, in the 'Nano' room looms a massive wall model of a fractal sequencing developed by the architects Chris Lasch and Ben Aranda, which looks like origami gone urban, in the future.
In the back again there's Laura Kurgan and the Spatial Information Design Lab's Architecture and Justice from the Million Dollar Blocks project, in which the artist/architect and her collaborators traced the state's incarceration expenditure to specific Brooklyn neighbourhoods, and right next to that there's a screened nook that shows New City, a Star Wars-style city imagined by Peter Frankfurt, Imaginary Forces, Greg Lynn, Alex McDowell, and Matter Art and Science. While they argue that the faceted shapes of the screens are somehow conceptually rigorous, standing in it just makes you feel like a kid at the windows of a super-cool spaceship.
And then there's a smaller piece, just one of many which dot the walls and should not be ignored, in this case Barrett Lyon and the Opte Project's Mapping the Internet, a rendering tucked away in the back that answers the question we have all, at some time or another, asked: 'Where is the Internet, and what does it
look like?'
Antonelli's vision of the future looks good; we're sticking around for it
