EYES ON CULTURE #030
10 January 2023
Gilded Gadgets
EYES ON: Gab Bois X Miansai’s Phone Collection
The time for gift giving may be over, but for those who didn’t ace it, Gab Bois and jewelry brand Miansai’s Phone Collection is definitely one to circle back on—to coo at if not to own. A creative known for her surreal photography, Gab Bois worked with the brand to create a line of rings, necklaces and bracelets from used cellphone components. Sim cards and iPhone cameras, set simply in gold and silver, take the place of gemstones.
WHY WE’RE WATCHING:
Gab Bois has seen great success from picturing objects used in ways that they should not be used. A top made from crisps, a heel from an old ipod, a phone from an oyster shell—the images are amusing in how they inject strangeness into the everyday. Objects pull off their disguises until they’re suddenly recognized as out of place.
The same goes for Phone Collection. The beauty of the phone elements used—the geometric patterning of the sim card and the deep onyx-like eye of the camera lens—means the tech-wear kind of gets away with its charade. It’s almost shocking how much these pieces would be at home in any jewelry department.
More surprising though than how easily tech’s sleek design elements can slip into a vocabulary of accessories is how cleanly its symbolic meanings can also translate onto jewelry‘s system of signs and symbols.
Buying this collection will make a statement. A signet ring with an iphone camera instead of a family crest gives off a message. It says something about how you view the world, how you view yourself in it and how you want others to view you.
Exorbitant Machinery
EYES ON: Survival Research Labs Machine Sex
“Machine Sex” was the very first performance by Survival Research Lab (SRL), a performance art group started in the 1970s in San Francisco by a man called Mark Pauline.
Pauline led SRL in creating large-scale machine performances that instead of using the human body as a site for art casted highly technical re-engineered machines. Striped of their initial intended uses, the technologies became engines of rabid entertainment. What could on occasion be mistaken for robot fights, the shows aimed to delight and shock, to bring some gusto and passion into the world of stale, purpose-driven technology.
WHY WE’RE WATCHING:
Often slightly horrifying outcomes came of SRL performances. Blood and guts were common consequences of the machines in action, having been altered from their productive useful designs and rebuilt for superfluous violence.
The point of the shows, though, was largely this excess. Primordial and sometimes plain revolting, SRL performances brought out a raw, human-side of machinery by creating a setting in which all that their power was good for was extreme, savage play.
The Good Art Habit
EYES ON: ArtTab
ArtTab is a Chrome extension that fills your screen with a new piece of digital art every time you open a new tab. And, if you’re anything like us, that’s happening a lot.
With its praises sung in publications like Outland, ArtTab is no “find”. It’s spotlighted here because those praises are worth echoing. A curated collection of browser-native artworks, ArtTab showcases the best of digital art in its ideal setting.
WHY WE’RE WATCHING:
It’s such a great way of keeping up the very important habit of actually looking.
If painting or other types of fine art have taught us anything, it’s that the more you look the more you learn to see. To enjoy art, to figure out what to take from it, to judge it, is a skill that needs to be practiced. Looking at art is hard—it takes effort and concentration. Eyes need to be trained.
ArtTab ambushes you with pieces of digital art. You don’t have to muster the energy to hone your looking skills. Instead, you are exposed to new pieces, in their correct contexts, many times a day, and so the hard work gets done more easily.
Excellent