Désolé! Cette partie est uniquement disponible en anglais.

OK!

Dunne & Raby. Not Here, Not Now,

In a Z33 commissioned ‘Not Here, Not Now,’ Dunne & Raby present different interfaces for an alternative world. The interfaces belong to the digitarian world; one of the kingdoms of the United Micro Kingdoms project, characterized by neoliberalism and digital technology.

Dunne & Raby, Not Here Not Now, 2014. Z33 Commission. Future Fictions – Perspectives on World-building, Z33 House for contemporary art, 5 October 2014–4 January 2015. © Kristof Vrancken / Z33.
Dunne & Raby, Not Here Not Now, 2014. Z33 Commission. Future Fictions – Perspectives on World-building, Z33 House for contemporary art, 5 October 2014–4 January 2015. © Kristof Vrancken / Z33.

 

The titles of the large prints hint at the function and purpose of these interfaces in that given society. The interfaces act as portals to the digitarian world: the work as such is not so much about the interfaces themselves, nor about the actions one performs with them, but rather about the society of which they are an integral part, the world they evoke and the values and mores that make that world go round.

The United Micro Kingdoms (UmK) is divided into four super-shires inhabited by Digitarians, Bioliberals, Anarcho-evolutionists and Communo-nuclearists. Each county is an experimental zone, free to develop its own form of governance, economy and lifestyle. Digitarians depend on digital technology and all its implicit totalitarianism — tagging, metrics, total surveillance, tracking, data logging and 100% transparency. Their society is organised entirely by market forces; citizen and consumer are the same. For them, nature is there to be used up as necessary. They are governed by technocrats, or algorithms — no one is entirely sure, or even cares — as long as everything runs smoothly and people are presented with choices, even if illusionary.

Dunne & Raby are interested in how design languages used to visually represent futures can sometimes reduce and limit their potential to engage the viewer’s imagination by locating the values contained in these alternative future scenarios within very specific contemporary cultural frameworks. The images of Not Here, Not Now therefore experiment with estrangement, ambiguity and openness. They explore how different layers of realism are conceptualized, crafted, presented and perceived.

Dunne & Raby, Not Here Not Now, 2014. Z33 Commission. Future Fictions – Perspectives on World-building, Z33 House for contemporary art, 5 October 2014–4 January 2015. © Kristof Vrancken / Z33.
Dunne & Raby, Not Here Not Now, 2014. Z33 Commission. Future Fictions – Perspectives on World-building, Z33 House for contemporary art, 5 October 2014–4 January 2015. © Kristof Vrancken / Z33.
Dunne & Raby, Not Here Not Now, 2014. Z33 Commission. Future Fictions – Perspectives on World-building, Z33 House for contemporary art, 5 October 2014–4 January 2015. © Kristof Vrancken / Z33.
Dunne & Raby, Not Here Not Now, 2014. Z33 Commission. Future Fictions – Perspectives on World-building, Z33 House for contemporary art, 5 October 2014–4 January 2015. © Kristof Vrancken / Z33.
Interview

Interview Fiona Raby: Not Here, Not Now.
Duration 00:06:20, in English.

 

Gepubliceerd op

07.10.2014

Bio

In 1994, Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby founded their design studio Dunne & Raby.
They are more or less what we could call the godfathers of critical design; a practice that they’ve continuously developed in their own work and in the Design Interactions course at the Royal College of Art, London. They recently published a book about speculative design titled Speculative Everything. Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming.
Their work has been exhibited and published internationally and is in the permanent collections of amongst others MoMA, NY, the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, Frac Ile-de-France and Fnac (Fond national d’art contemporain), as well as several private collections.
In 2007 Dunne & Raby were invited by Z33 for the exhibition ‘Designing Critical Design’. In this exhibition they presented their collection Technological Dreams Series No.1: Robot as part of critical attitudes towards mainstream productions.
www.dunneandraby.co.uk