Projection 1 – Progress

Line of Enquiry:

The homogenisation of interior spaces has led to plants being packaged and sold as furniture. How can we use graphic design to explore the plasticity of nature?

Project proposal:

The politics behind homogenised objects like houseplants sits at the intersection of capitalism, colonial history, class signalling, labour, and aesthetics. At first glance a monstera or fiddle-leaf fig looks neutral “just décor” but its sameness across homes, cafés, offices, and Instagram feeds is deeply political.

Bibliography:

Nick Sousanis’s Unflattening has the look of a graphic novel, but it’s actually a group of interrelated philosophical essays presented in comic book form. This stunning work of art presents a gauntlet of brain-teasers that challenge our assumptions about the nature of human perception and understanding. Sousanis’s central message––that we should learn to see from multiple perspectives at once instead to searching for the “correct” outlook––is an important one, despite not being particularly novel. The written text is somewhat vague and highly repetitive, but Sousanis more than compensates for this weakness with visual creativity. The artwork in this book is brilliantly conceived and exquisitely rendered.

Sousanis defines “unflattening” as “a simultaneous engagement of multiple vantage points from which to engender new ways of seeing” (32). Drawing from the works of scientists, philosophers and artists, Sousanis creates a journey through three-deminsional space rendered on two-dimensional surfaces. He explores the ironic tension between the expansion of scientific knowledge and the intellectual barriers that arise between different areas of study, and also demonstrates a keen understanding how relationality affects meaning:

Meaning is…conveyed not only by what’s depicted, but through structure: the size, shape, placement, and relationship of components––what they’re next to and what they’re not, matters. (Orientation too.) (66)

Sousanis’s perspective is deeply indebted to American philosopher John Dewey, who he cites more than once, as well as to Mark Johnson and George Lakoff, two inheritors of Dewey’s tradition. Having studied Dewey under Johnson’s guidance during my undergraduate education, I was delighted to see these names woven into such an unusual and boundary-breaking treatise. Sousanis has taken their philosophies to heart and put them to excellent use.

Annotated Bibliography:

1. Airspaces: 

Chayka, K., 2016. Welcome to AirSpace: How Silicon Valley helps spread the same sterile aesthetic across the world. The Verge, 3 August. Available at: https://www.theverge.com/2016/8/3/12325104/airbnb-aesthetic-global-minimalism-startup-gentrification

“The sameness has a way of compounding.”

According to Chayka (2016), platforms like Airbnb contribute to the spread of a sterile, globally homogeneous interior aesthetic. My enquiry about homogenisation in corporate illustration ties to this concept as I started dissecting smaller elements from these illustrations. These illustrations were flat in 2d dimensions and also in terms of “flattening” the culture. The essay talks about how globalisation brings the world closer and flattens / smoothens the differences. Chayka’s essay offers a perspective to look at individual elements in interior spaces similar to how I try to look at homogenised objects in corporate illustrations. He also says that this sameness has a way of compounding and the same applies to these objects that get replicated as they are and distributed all around the world. A plant once only found in the African forest can now be easily found in a corporate office in London. Does this mean that the value of forest has gone down due it’s replication? 

2. Sousanis, N., 2015. Unflattening. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 

Sousanis drawings offer a new way of interacting with text and images which is integral to the medium it resides in. This non linear composition of text and illustration makes one question the linearity in other forms and expands one’s way of thinking. His argument that this kind of flattened thinking restricts our ability to understand the world ties in with the visual experiments that I am doing of printing nature onto plastic. One way of looking at plants (perhaps a more flatter one) is that they are beautiful and good for our mental health. The visual experiments offer a perspective that makes us think about the plasticity, objective beauty and packaged mass-produced nature of these houseplants. Sousani’s approach to using illustration to highlight the flattening is something I am attempting to do with my illustrations.

3. Yeung, T. (n.d.) TGT. Available at: https://trevoryeung.net/project/tgt

In his mixed-media works, carefully staged plants function as aesthetic pretexts which delicately and ironically address notions of artificiality and the processes of human relations. Yeung’s artwork series directly relates to the topic I am exploring about houseplants being mass-produced and sold for aesthetic purposes as decoration. This project highlights and displays nature confines in manmade objects like fish in a tank. It reveals the control humans have on nature. 

At the core, Notes on Decomposition frames decorative / collectible objects as material traces of abstract power structures. This operates in the same territory as me representing plants as a symbol of aspirational domestic identity. Where their project maps neoliberal fantasy through auction objects, yours maps neoliberal fantasy through domestic décor. These objects act as evidence of history and similarly help me think about homogenised plant pots as evidence of globalised production networks, performative wellness culture,  “manageable” versions of life and flattening of interior aesthetics. The project holds tension with mine as it studies elite objects whereas I look at everyday, ignored and ordinary objects.

4. Otl Aicher (1922–1991) was a German graphic designer who created the iconic, comprehensive visual identity for the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich.

Clements, R., n.d. Rose Clements Photography. Available at: https://www.roseclementsphoto.com/

“Like squishy, tactile pixels”: Rosie Clements prints her photographs on bubble wrap. This reference is more for the tactile nature of my project.

Superstudio, Cristiano Toraldo di Francia, Gian Piero Frassinelli, Alessandro Magris, Roberto Magris, Adolfo Natalini

The Continuous Monument: On the River, project (Perspective)

1969

A Field Guide to Curiosity: A Mark Dion Project

Quote : 

1. “Globalisation takes place only in capital and data,” the literary theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has written. “Everything else is damage control.”

5. cultural theorists such as the Spanish sociologist Manuel Castells were already describing how globalisation breeds sameness and monotony, and charting the declining importance of physical geography.
6. notion that the world was more interconnected and therefore felt smaller than ever before. The major culprit for this idea’s popularity was the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman and his 2005 book The World Is Flat. His argument felt like common sense: flatness meant that people, goods, and ideas flowed across physical space faster and more easily than ever.
7. in 1992, the French philosopher Marc Augé wrote a book titled Non-Places, which studied the sensory experiences of highways, airports and hotels: zones that had become reliably similar the world over.
8. So-called “Instagram museums” arose, making photo-taking the whole point of the experience

Everything looks familiar. Everything spanning from ikea furniture to indoor plants are making interior spaces more and more alike. The homogenisation of interior spaces has led to plants being perfected and packaged to be sold as aesthetic furniture. Have you ever wondered how a plant that grows in the jungles of Africa reaches corporate interior office spaces in London? 

Nature is stripped of ecological context and reduced to a controllable, aesthetic unit. This reflects a capitalist logic: what cannot be controlled, replicated, and sold has no value.

I have been going to Columbia Flower Market every weekend since I moved to London. I asked some of the plant sellers where the plants came from and how they got their names. I found out that:

• Mass-produced in global nurseries. Bioengineered to look most aesthetic (indoor pot proportions)
• Engineered to survive low light, neglect, and transport, less water, easy care
• This brings with it a new range of environmental concerns – Water usage, plastic usage, international transportation, fertiliser and pesticide use, and not least, the extraction of peat for use as a growing medium. 

Yet, the public image of houseplants remains largely intact. 

I wanted to visually illustrate the plant but in its packaged condition. I started exploring materials of packaging (Keyline drawings of boxes, plastic wraps, tools like excel) and printed plant illustrations on bubblewrap.

The plasticity of the bubblewrap packaging creates a striking visual contrast with something as soft and alive as plants. 

Interrogation of the consumption of these houseplants made me realise how limited access we have as humans to green spaces. Humans are increasingly living in isolated apartments in big cities away from nature and hence try to package nature within small perfect pots to live within confined spaces. Nature is far from stationary. It is living, it moves, it grows, and the growth animation on the plastic communicates that.

I replaced a real plant pot with these prints and created a real life Monstera plant (most common houseplant) painting on bubble wrap.