Streamlines of Otherness

Streamlines of Otherness is a research on 'unmaking' and non-utilitarian approaches, encompassing several projects.

Continuing on my research developed for my DDes thesis at Harvard GSD, and in particular with expanding the project Streamline, I have been inspired by looking more closely at aspects of counter-functionality, nonsense making, non linear processes of fabrications, etc..

All possible metaphors for offering other ways to look at the world, seeing nature, animals, materials, minerals, humans in a non-utilitarian approach and not for their (usually short-term) productivity and profitability. This approach invites to reconsider what is labelled "weed" ('parasite' in French) and to embrace the otherness for what it is. In one of the pictures here, a weird carrot grown in my garden represents the redefinition of beauty.

The specificity of digital fabrication (as explored in the original project Streamline) is important in that equation: the act of using it in ways that are not predetermined and in real time is an opportunity to provoke the weird and the odd. In a larger socio-economic system that extracts resources without care and commodifies them, that is driven by optimisation (often for sound reasons), we can question this hierarchical and dichotomous vision of what is useful and what is not useful.

I include here the "new" version of the artwork Twipology which was used by mice for nesting during one Winter storage. Traces of their passage, notably with urine, are visible all over the piece. Instead of discarding it altogether, I felt compelled to reevaluate what I consider proper or improper, especially in a possible case of future exhibition. I decided that mice didn't damage the work but simply transformed it, in something weird, other and that I would have now the opportunity to welcome it: Twip x Mice.