Clouds, Crochet and Plastic Fields

Plastic Futures 2 was a project exploring the intersections of bio-art and contemporary field-based design practices in the context of ‘speculative futures’. It was run over a five week period between 19 June and 26 July 2009, including a one week intensive workshop in Western Australia with SymbioticA (UWA) and based around a colony of thrombolites, bacterial ‘growing rocks’ found at Lake Clifton in the Yalgorup National Park. The project was aimed at generating a ‘future scenario’ the results of which were exhibited as part of the Melbourne State of Design Festival in 2009.

Among the material examined as part of the research for this project was the work of SymbioticA / The Tissue Culture and Art Project, a collision of science and art that explores new aesthetic territory and challenges ethical assumptions. We also examined the work of Design Interactions at the RCA where design is used as a medium to speculate about technology and biology. We looked at the film Barbarella, recast from a kitsche space opera to an allegory about change and adaptability. Also science fiction writing, especially the Vermilion Sands short stories written by J.G Ballard in the 1950s & 60s were mined for their surrealistic decadence.

“Vermilion Sands isn’t set in the future at all, but in a kind of visionary present – a description that fits the stories in this book and almost everything else I have written.” – J.G. Ballard

Referencing Slinkachu’s Little People in the City and informed by a reading of Will Self’s short story entitled Scale. This series of photographs evoke the common depiction of the world of the future as gigantic, and people tiny. When we imagine future scenarios and unknown, unfamiliar landscapes, time and space seem to extend to infinity and the human body is dwarfed by comparison. The photographs play with perception of spatial scale in order to create a sense of drama. Shifts in scale and the juxtaposition of the very small with the very large evoke change both in terms of social and technological as well as a a literal change of perspective.

We explored the concept of Analogue Computation through hyperbolic crochet, combining clouds of polyester ceiling insulation into “giant crochet” and the “little people” again to challenge the normal sense of scale and create drama.

“Until the nineteenth century, mathematicians knew about only two kinds of geometry: the Euclidean plane and the sphere. The discovery of hyperbolic space in the 1820’s and 1830’s marked a turning point in mathematics and initiated the formal study of non-Euclidean geometry. Almost two centuries later, Daina Taimina a mathematician at Cornell University made a physical model of the hyperbolic plane – a feat many mathematicians had believed was impossible – using crochet. With hook and yarn the properties of this unique space become manifest to our eyes and hands, enabling tactile exploration of a structure once thought impossible.” – The Institute for Figuring