Friday, 17 June 2005 | Levent OZLER
Blobjects & Beyond: The New Fluidity in Design
Beginning Sunday, March 6th the San Jose Museum of Art's first floor galleries will brim with curvaceous, boldly designed products and prototypes as the museum opens its first-ever exhibition devoted to industrial design. The exhibition, Blobjects & Beyond: The New Fluidity in Design is a ground-breaking interdisciplinary look at the objects that fill our lives, chosen from a rich range of product, furniture, graphic, media and architectural work from across the globe.
Driven by the escalating power (and decreasing cost) of hardware and software advances in prototyping and manufacturing abilities, as well as new materials technologies, blobjects (a contraction of "blobby objects") have become feasible at every scale from the tiny techno-blobject to skyscraper blobitecture. Beginning in 1990 and running through the present, the exhibition includes both familiar faces such as the iMac computer and the Nike Triax watch as well as entirely new visions for what our present or near-future could be. Part of this foray into the future involves a collection of work that goes "beyond" the upbeat, friendly blobject toward a design language reflective of the darker post-9/11 mood.
Blobjects & Beyond: The New Fluidity in Design gathers its energy from the premise that blobjects have become the defining products of the new millennium-the best examples of what is considered cool-looking and compellingly curvaceous. But blobjects are more than just a style-they tell a story about our society's rising visual literacy and the particular need for familiar anthropomorphic and emotional connections with the products that define our lives.
Steven Skov Holt and Mara Holt Skov
Guest Curators
Blobjects & Beyond: The New Fluidity in Design, published by Chronicle Books and designed by San Jose-based graphic designer Gregory Hom, accompanies the exhibition and will be on sale in the Museum Store.
http://www.sjmusart.org/blobjects/
|
