Tape on Floor 4 | Programme | Flux/S - Drafts Establishing Future

 

More and more, our lives are being determined by media and technology, which generate a constantly changing, data-driven society. In answer to this, Edo Paulus, Luna Maurer, Jonathan Puckey and Roel Wouters launched their design and art manifesto, Conditional Design, in 2008. The four participating artists do not oppose the digitization of modern society, but rather, they incorporate the new forms of human interaction and social contexts caused by it into an analogue form of art production. In their installations and performances they create participating art that gives a precise insight into the complexity, mutual influencing and constant flow of our modern times. With each new project they subject themselves and/or the audience to a set of fixed basic rules that leave room for intuitive interventions. The flow of small but far-reaching decision moments not only evokes new patterns and opens up alternative layers of meaning, but also reveals shortcomings and limitations. The often graphically oriented projects are perhaps most reminiscent of visual, sometimes enigmatic, architectural drawings that show the subtle correlation between objective criteria and subjective intentions.

 

Conditional Design rather provides in the possibility of formation - and sometimes detonation - as a process, than in form in the classical sense of the word. The collective working method lays bare dissonance in logic, emphasizes the incomprehensible, and exposes the value of the difference. Tape on Floor 4 is a variation on Conditional Design Tuesdays, the artists' weekly meeting, during which they produce processual posters. For each poster to be drawn, a new, often very basic set of rules is defined. For Flux/S, they abandon pen and drawing table, and resort to tape machines of the kind that are used to mark the boundaries on sports fields to subject the well-nigh endless 1200 square metres on the fourth floor of the SBP building to human metrics. The lines on a sports field make the laws of the game applicable in an objective manner. However, within the markings at Flux/S, the match is changeable, a process in progress, the eventually resulting grid of which will tell us more about the history of the game than about the hot-favourite winner.

 

Conditional Design is a group of artists consisting of Edo Paulus, Luna Maurer, Jonathan Puckey and Roel Wouters. The group departs from “the idea that you should not design things yourself, but should allow them to be designed”. The artists deploy “fluent forces” from nature, humanity or society to generate and communicate aesthetic experiences. Luna Maurer studied at the Rietveld Academie, subsequently obtaining her master’s degree at the Sandberg Institute. There she met Roel Wouters, who had studied at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague. They now lecture together at the Rietveld Academie. Edo Paulus studied at the Utrecht School of the Arts. Together with Luna, he developed the website sandberg.nl and Placement/Displacement. Jonathan Puckey studied graphic design at the Rietveld Academie, graduating in 2006, and has since been working together with Luna Maurer on projects based on the idea of ‘human programming’. Conditional Design’s working method has previously been on show at, for example, the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, LABoral (Spain) and the Van Abbemuseum (Eindhoven, the Netherlands).

 

conditionaldesign.org

poly-luna.com

jonathanpuckey.com

xelor.nl