Designing machines can also mean using a mechanical language to underline certain aspects of things through an immediate, intuitive impact. This is the case of Raw Color, another duo (both Dutch this time) that applies common technological mechanisms to stage the concept of chromatic dynamism. Simple fans or document shredders can become devices in a performance that explores new paths of color perception through colored rain or chromatic marks in centrifugal motion.
The work of the Japanese sound designer Yuri Suzuki also involves mechanisms and gears, investigating new timbres starting with mechanical processes. His Breakfast Machine seems like a creation worthy of the most imaginative inventors, and his projects often make use of low-tech or obsolete machinery (old computers and video games, very out-of-date digital supports). He conserves the voice and sound of machines in a 2.0 version of objectual animism, the acoustic memory of the victims of technological obsolescence, while also generating a different sonic interaction with the world of machines. His speculation actually has nothing nostalgic or reactionary about it. In world that imposes constant upgrades of technology, it becomes very interesting to establish contact between mechanical realities that are close in time, yet distant in purpose.
For example, the Chilean studio gt2P (great things to people) investigates the meaning of the passage from analog to digital, in an almost disorienting overturning of roles. They have built a rudimentary handmade ‘machine’ to make parametric forms without the help of a computer. A graduated wooden guide marks abscissae and ordinates to make a curvature that will also depend on the density and weight of the raw material utilized. The results are works of crockery whose complex and jagged curves can easily rival those created with the most advanced CAD systems.
Once again, the point is to govern the machine, instead of being governed by it. Disciplines, intelligence and the senses are so open and variable that no technology imposed by the market can ever fully restrain them. All the research projects described above prove that there is no need to look too far beyond what is around us or inside us, in order to find new paths. To discover that in the end the most amazing technological machinery has been with us all our lives: the body.