94. Steam car

There are vehicles covered in gold, and there are vehicles with a light fiberglass body designed to set a land speed record. The second group is, in many ways, as extravagant a proposition as the first, at least from the point of view of the utility of the object; a test car is a selfish object, an end in itself, inaccessible and unintelligible to most. And, yet, it is formally stunning, each of its three-dimensional surfaces a triumphant result of formal evolution to pass the test of aerodynamics. In 1999, the British Steam Car Challenge was launched with the twofold aim of breaking the land speed record for steam powered vehicles as well as creating some excitement in the arena of alternate fuels. The car in the picture will attempt to break the 170 mph barrier in a few days in the Bonneville Salt Flats, Utah. It is 7.6 m. (30 ft.) long, 1.7 m. (5.6 ft.) wide and weights 3 tons, mostly due to the engine, since everything else is as light as it could be (a small sedan weights around 3,000 lb –1.36 tons; a Formula one car weights 1,300 lb. –0.6 tons). But beyond its metrics, it is a car that will be put in a museum once it has achieved its goal. And that opens up another discussion about the nature of objects, museums, the social value of design, the idea of beautiful form and its relation to function.

93. Golden Porsche

A Porsche plated with 20 kg. (44 lb.) of gold, in the streets of Moscow. The antonym of urban camouflage? It is a stretch already to justify its presence in a blog about objects; yet, a customized object is an object after all, and I am not interested in the base object (Porsche), but in the treatment of that base object for it to change its meaning in a particular society. Ostentation is as ever-present in objects as it is in social interaction. It is difficult to imagine a society that does not understand ostentation as a social principle capable of establishing implicit hierarchies. The vulgarity of this particular object is beyond the point, as is the nauseating fact that in the Russia of the nouveau riche, millions still go hungry. What matters to me, for the purposes of this blog, is that this object proves that ostentation may be multilayered: are there really degrees of ostentation? This car has two: ostentation # 1 is the fact that it is the most expensive Porsche in the market; ostentation # 2 is the fact that it is covered in gold. We could imagine that ostentation # 3 might be a system of rotating lights –like police cars- for people to notice the car more readily; ostentation # 4 could be a loudspeaker that would shout: “look at me, I am the wealthiest guy in this place, look at my car...” and so on. Disturbing.

92. Urban camouflage

Mimetic protection: hide behind a vending machine costume to blend into the urbanscape and remain unnoticed by criminals and dangerous pursuers roaming the streets. Japanese fashion designer Aya Tsukioka has created a skirt that unfolds into a vending machine. Is this object a mechanism of defense? Is it a sophisticated critique to oversaturated Japanese public space? Is it performance art? There is a charming naïveté in the direct simplicity of this object; it is clear to me, just by looking at the unfolding sequence of images, that a drawing of the same sequence would be significantly more effective at conveying the idea of the thing than the photographs of the prototype. Drawings are expected to communicate, not necessarily to explain how something really works. I believe that the idea of this object is much stronger than its presence, which manages to reduce it to something banal and superfluous. The prototype of the object works against the idea of the object because the idea is sophisticated and the prototype is hopelessly crude. My favorite comic character, Mortadelo, is a master of camouflage: he has the ability to instantly disguising himself as any animate or inanimate thing to avoid being caught or to escape a dangerous situation. Mortadelo is a funny character and his ability to camouflage was always meant to make the reader laugh. But there is nothing funny about walking the streets with a contraption designed to turn you into an urban sketch.