Doing furniture conversations

Abstract

The project outlines the notion of 'conversation' as developed by Gilles Deleuze as a design methodology. The methodology is trialled in the field of furniture with two conversations; firstly with New Zealand furniture maker Humphry Ikin and then with performance artists Marina Abramović and Ulay. The conversation manifests as drawings, models, materials experiments and text. In 'doing' conversation successfully the project posits itself as a powerful design methodology. The project grows from out of these conversations as a new conversation. This conversation turns towards Heidegger and is between the works themselves and the 'place' on which they 'dwell'. The conversation asserts that there must be a new ethics of subject-object relations in this 'place' if we are ever to 'dwell'. This ethics manifests in our relations to matter and the manner in which matter is 'held' and in turn, how matter holds us as 'dwellers'. However this is not a simple rapprochement between subject and objects since the conditions of conversation assert themselves to further distort what 'dwelling' in this 'place' means. The project asserts that 'dwelling' in this place has the character of a strange autopsy. In this autopsy both subject as settler and object as land are complicit in failure whereby the subject is seduced by the very failure which it should stand over and the object entices an overripe attention towards its own failure.