Designblog

De Daily Whatever was founded in 2006, as a free and independent newspaper. The newspaper was being produced ‘on the spot’ during the Dutch Design Week in Eindhoven. The main motivation for starting up the newspaper was to inform the public on design topics and to stimulate the local design climate by bringing exciting theory and hereby provoking debate which in return can stimulate innovation.

De Daily Whatever 2009 was edited and printed from room 9 at the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven. This years editors: Eric de Haas, Hugo Naber and Lucas van Hapert, www.dedailywhatever.nl

online editors: Hexaplex.

How science looks at the universe today...

Sinds het ontstaan van ons mensen hebben wij de behoefte om een verklaring te vinden voor alles dat om ons heen gebeurd; voor waar wij en de wereld vandaan komen en waarom in deze hoedanigheid.
Deze drang om alles te ordenen en enige controle te krijgen over de choatische levendige wereld heeft geleidt tot vele romantische verhalen.

Vaak zijn de personages in deze verhalen almachtige goden en godinnen wiens vetes, liefde, verdriet, frustraties en eigenlijk menselijkheid bepalen hoe het er aan toe gaat in de wereld. Al gelang de situatie maakt dit de mensheid onderdanig, devotisch, woedend, machteloos of doodsbang. Vast staat dat de relatie met deze oppermacht zij het zeus, god of het universum ontzettend diep gaat en als van levensbelang voelt.
Vaak wordt deze manier van omgaan met ons bestaan toegeschreven aan onwetendheid. De onwetendheid maakte echter plaats voor veel wetenschappelijk verkregen kennis wat de meeste verhalen onaannemelijk maakt. Misschien hebben de mensen ook nooit echt gelooft dat bijvoorbeel de wereld voorbeweegt op de rug van een schildpad, als is dit een gevaarlijk statement, maar zagen zij vooral  het gote belang van het vertellen van verhalen. Verhalen die spelen met de vragen van het leven en de behoefte om te weten hoe alles in elkaar zit te verzadigen.
De komende beschrijving van hoe de wereld is ontstaan is een samenstelling van verhalen van volken van over de hele wereld. Heilige verhalen die mede door de wetenschap en globalisering voor vele te niet gedaan zijn; mythes. Mij is duidelijke geworden dat veel mythes het idee van hoe de wereld is ontstaan bij het juiste eind hadden volgens hedendaagse standaard. Zo word er bij voorbeeld  gepraat over een olievlek, een massa latente energie en over een chaos. Dit symboliseerde denk ik precies hetzelfde als dat wat vooraf ging aan de nu gangbare theorie over de oerknal.

read_more_on_myths

Jan Jansen, the shoe designer in Amsterdam.

He is still working on his collection of shoes even he is 68 years old.

He has so much passion for his works.

First Question to start my research was;
“What are you going to use to make your own research for Jan Jansen?“.

Then I turn to use Video and it was not too hard to think. The idea was, taking interviews from Jan Jansen himself, Workers from his store and customers and make them together.

Here is my ‘Interview’

Ted Noten thinks these days the function of jewelry is quite not necessary in the western culture. In his opinion we have forgotten what it means. He asks himself the question; What is jewelry? And; Why do we keep it?”
He wants to make jewelry people can afford, and that’s a funny thing because his way of working is to pack things into acrylic material, so he actiully makes a distance between object and public.
And the fact that he don’t want to make art for the elite people. But – if you make jewelry that goes into the art field, it’s only the elite who can buy it.

That’s also my question; What’s the use of this ‘useless jewelry’?

  research on_Ted_Noten

The work of Lucy Sarneel interested me. Her work is precise and careful. She translates historic time to our own time. She also shows ideas which are derived from her personal daily life experiences.
A really interesting work of Lucy Sarneel is called ‘Stoelringen’, (Chair Rings), made in 1992. This work represents different types of personalities. To each personality, she connects a different chair. She is thus showing a personality as a chair, in a ring format.
This work caught my attention, because it shows a different interest of the artist if you compare it to her other works. In the ‘Stoelringen’ work, she focused on the relation between material and personalities instead of time and personal feelings, as in most of her works.
The small size of the jewellery remembers me of traditional games, particularly the chess game.
As a response to this work, I decided to make a chair for each personality on the chess game. Each chair, its size and shape, is related to the social difference and position of the chess piece.

Lucy Sarneel

The ‘drukknoop’ in the work of Jan Taminiau and San Ming exhibited in the Zuiderzee Museum has lost any function. They were used as decoration on folkloric costumes, inspired on traditional farmer weddings.
Did this typical and especially simple buttons suddenly got another meaning, by using them as Taminiau did?
Which way to look at a button, such a simple everyday object? Buttons are not as simple as you think. Don’t take the object for granted, as once they were beautiful miniature works of art. The aim of my research is to explain a little bit of this big history and show some beautiful examples of handmade buttons.

art_and_buttons

Conditional Painting is truly happening in the van Abbemuseum Eindhoven! They call it the Vitruvian Paint Machine.

As part of  “Take on me (Take me on)” /Dutch Design Week 17 to 25 Oct 2009, Luna Maurer and Edo Paulus executed a mural painting on pre determined conditions based on the proportions of the body and visitor interaction.

The act of designing is based on rules they say. So Luna and Edo, together with Roel Wouters and Jonathan Puckey, created a manifesto of explicit rules for design.

Visiting their lecture, as part of the “Take on me (Take me on)” event, they made it clear that setting strict conditions does disconnect you from subjective standards and creates awareness in the process. A beautiful time based movie of their “machines” made this crystal clear.

download this research essay: by Jules Esteves: “Conditional Drawing, Conditional Painting” questioning the practice of Conditional Design.

Beautiful or ugly? Smiling or crying? Or maybe thoughtful? Or just silly?…

Lying on the table or looking for something behind it? Or maybe resting in this absurd way? Or perhaps the person is even dead…

You can guess but you don’t know for sure, because the indication of these emotions, feelings, moods and characteristic features, which can immediately tell you the whole story at once, is missing. The face is missing.

Annaleen Louwes, the Dutch photographer, turns people’s faces away from us. She is taking a photograph of a dancer stiffened in one of the passes, a patient from the mental hospital, a duo of theatre makers, or this photo of a young woman in a traditional Dutch costume leaning across the table. A photo made for an exhibition related to the subject of Dutch Folklore.

She raises all these questions and leaves us with no answer.

Annaleen_Louwes

In 2008 the dutch design duo Viktor&Rolf held an exhibition at the Barbican Art Gallery in London. They represented their 15 years in the fashion industry with dolls dressed in their most famous creations. These dolls were presented in a spectacular five meters wide and nine feet high doll house (designed by the Dutch architect Siebe Tettero) along with a video presenting 55 other life sized dolls, as well as a montage of their most famous fashion shows to date. Among the fashion shows mentioned was- their 1999 show entitled ‘Babuskha’. Although this, on one level, seems just a fun concept, it had deeper connotations and it was addressing a deeper set of issues -a thin model, beginning only in a light slip was progressively covered in more and more dresses (designed by the duo) until only her face was visible– all making use of dolls as their central theme, or fairytales as the duo themselves put it.

Why have Viktor and Rolf incorporated the use of dolls so frequently into their fashion and what is the significance of a doll?

Dolls_Viktor&Rolf

Inspired by the subject Johanna Illerhag decided to make a set of her own dolls

enjoy also Alexander Calder’s “Circus” 1927

Gustaf Klimt caused alot of commotion in his time (±1895-1910) by breaking taboes of the current politcal artculture. Although Klimt’s work is know as groundbreaking he used alot of existing elements to which he responded by giving them a different interpretation and thus giving populair themes his own posture. Taking elements of all sorts of areas which are liked and combining those together make the definition of what we nowadays call popart.

Zooming in and taking an image or a situation it’s surrounding away makes it into an statement instead of an narration. This objectifying/ distilling let to an more architectural form in which the most known feature of Klimt is visible namely the decorative side.

Which characteristics did Gustaf Klimt use to open the barrier between art and decorative expression?

Gustav_Klimt

> Fred Goodhope < photograph by Dana Lixenberg

Shismaref is a community settled on an isle close to the Alaskan west coast. The people who live there will be the first victims of the global climate change. Slowly but surely there homeland will disappear in the sea. I do wonder what will happen when these people, with their traditions and folklore, end up in the middle of the mainland American society. There are no concrete plans yet for a re-settlement. In the meantime these inhabitants of Shismaref are forced to survive in refugee centers, which brings about interesting contrasts.
Should there be a search for an isolated site making it possible for their traditions to survive, or should these people lurn how to live in a society as we know it? Questions which I find hard to answere.

I find it really interesting to visit an exhibition were artists are working. It gives you a look into the thoughts of these artists. You can see the process.

“Published Workspaces”, I called them in my research.

Published Workspaces make people think, they activate the people’s creative minds. And I think that is a good thing.

In these Workspaces you are often involved in the work process, sometimes you can even help the artist.

In my research I am wondering about the intention of these Published Workspaces, and if they achieve their goals.

Published_Workspaces

The Dutch duo fashion designers Niels Klavers and Astrid van Engelen, founders of Klavers van Engelen, have been known for transforming really abstract and conceptual ideas or inspirations into practical, perfectly wearable and at the same time glamorous garments on the runway. What most of the people do not know of, however, is that their side projects in collaboration with different artists or museums are also as inspiring and pleasant to simply just watch, if not more exciting.

When being asked to participate in an exhibition, K.v.E always transformed their runway clothes into a bigger installation involving movement, which in a way emphasizes the relationship between the audience and clothes and also between the clothes and (their) existing environment as Niels Klavers mentions in one of his interviews with DazedDigital.com

“…we want people to actively interact with our garments while looking at them. We want people to be able to see every part of the clothes and grasp the idea or the concept we had in mind in the atmosphere that surrounds the exhibited designs.”  -Niels Klavers

This research therefore tries to explore the even more experimental aspects of K.v.E’s work in terms of how fashion can be bended and mixed with other media and ways of communication and representation (i.e. the performance “Show Me Your Second Face.”)

Klaver_van_Engelen

What is the connection between Experimental Jetset, Johannes Schwartz and Herman Verkerk?
Besides the fact that they are all based in Amsterdam, that they can speak Dutch, they all like to create beautiful and witty designs or images, they like to question their practice, they like to experiment and they actually teamed up together several times, another crucial connection appeared recently: the three of them are going to participate to a collective interview project…

After discovering more about their work, it became obvious that there was something interesting to investigate about their collaboration. What make several people or entities meet and work together? Are they alike or on the contrary, are they so different that they complement each other…?

For that reason, we interviewed them using the same process:

>> AN INTERVIEW IN A SUITCASE
We visited Johannes Schwartz, Experimental Jetset and Herman Verkerk, carrying with us this suitcase. Inside the suitcase, many different objects. Each interviewee was invited to open the suitcase, to browse through it and to freely react to the objects they found in it.

The results were surprising, exciting and very interesting. But when it comes to decide what brought the three of them together and where they meet… you are left free to listen to the interviews and to make up your own mind!

Experimental Jetset, Johannes Schwartz or Herman Verkerk