Mads Høbye

Gjestekunstner - Artist in Residence

IxD

The Danish artist, Associate Professor and interaction design researcher, Mads Høbye, was our virtual guest artist at S12 during the month of December. As yet another consequence of the Covid situation, he was prevented from coming to Norway, but managed never the less to complete a very exciting stay here via a series of streamed dialogues and work sessions with our workshop master Timothy Belliveau. The goal was, and is to use art as a method to combine the innovative and creative with the technical, programmed and functional. The image series below shows a selection of aesthetically interesting and technically playful objects that soon will be connected to devices and software that make noice, light up, perform tasks, and that makes the world around us more exciting.

Mads Høbye will return to S12 to further develop his project during autumn/winter of 21.

Høbye is employed by the University of Roskilde as an Associate Professor, in addition to being affiliated with the research group Exocollective and a collaborative member of the artistic group Illutron.

His field of work, academic research and art is in so-called interaction design, often referred to as IxD, which is a discipline focusing on the relationship between man and machine, and where the primary task is to design, or influence the behavior of our machines and products in our interaction.  The subject area as an academic discipline is emerging among new developments in computer technology and an explosive growth in the use of interactive tools.

As a researcher, lecturer and artist, Høbye is particularly concerned with the creative repurposing of electronic components. The technology he researches, teaches and integrates in his art, originates from commercial uses. Silicon Valley, and similar centers with all their luminous talents produce consumer goods but are often miles away from the energy, impatience, curiosity, and demand that artists use when seeking new answers and better tools.

As an artist, Mads Hobye embraces the possibilities technology provides to create, and comprehends similarly that art is constantly looking for new technology to find its relevant language. Through his body of work, he asks himself some rather bold questions, which he seeks to reflect on during his stay here in Bergen. One of these is how we can use artificial intelligence to teach our machines how to behave so that we do not have to program them ourselves. Mads also asks how we can seamlessly bridge the physical world (sensors, motors etc.) with the processing powers of modern computers.

His residency at S12 therefore consist of bringing his knowledge and personal creativity into our workshop where he will enter into a dialogue with glass both as a medium and tool, with the help of our studio staff. In this company, and through this process, he aims to create unique technological artworks that can expand our possibilities, and our understanding of each other.

Supplementary thoughts on a toaster

The subject matter of interaction design has, as we can understand, very specific roots in pragmatic and factual conditions such as classical industrial design. In this field, practitioners throughout all generations have faced key dilemmas such as whether the product’s design, shape, visible and tactile qualities should expose or reveal the actual technical process, or rather integrate the machine into another framework and conception, such as the interior of our homes.

Eddison’s (or alternatively Tesla’s) light bulb was unquestionably unique. It found its form however primarily as a functional necessity. Still the illuminated glass bulb on its metal base, has become an almost all-encompassing concept, and a visual symbol for everything we believe is ‘enlightened’, in all of the word’s possible connotations.

Particularly interesting and relevant to this context is also the German artist, architect and industrial designer Peter Behrens (1868 – 1940) and his toaster. Behren’s work became widely known through his work for the German company AEG, Allgemeine Elektricitäts-Gesellschaft. According to the period’s radical break with the past, industry and technology assumed the focal point, leading the way towards a brighter future. German industrial design positioned itself as an aesthetic reference for progress and modern man. Behren’s famous toaster was designed between 1928 and 29. In this he manages to create a form which, through the technology’s own aesthetic criteria, also conveys its capacity. It relays to us that it actually toasts bread (but will not make coffee, etc.). And as the shape of the light bulb became a semantic sign of its function, Behren’s toaster also became not just a mechanical thing that toasts bread, but the very toaster. Through the designer’s work an inter-activity arose, in a dialogue and in a clear understanding between the user and the product itself.

Behrens himself is quoted to have said:

“Design is not about decorating functional forms – it is about creating forms that accord with the character of the object and that show new technologies to advantage.”

It is thus a goal for the designer through the design to show the advantage in the technology.

UX and UI and the interactive:

This newer type of user experience, often called UX today, constitutes a central part of Mads Høbye’s terrain together with the equivalent term UI, which refers to a ‘user interface’. This is where the interactive aspect, or the interacting actually occurs. A UI designer will be concerned with the concrete and physical meeting between the user and the technology. Do we click the mouse, touch the screen or talk to Siri? 

How does the physical product, such as the veil-thin screens on our cordless mobile phones, convey our desires and confusing demands to the technology behind it? The fact that we call this an actual interaction also implies that we relate to the technology as a sophisticated capacity, and not (exclusively) as a limited toaster. The term ‘artificial intelligence’ is often associated with scary robots, incredible science fiction, and not least alienating electronic computing.

 UX, UI and not least IxD studies rather demonstrates how the design, names and profiles we give our new inventions and tools help to enable us to further develop our own intelligence and groundbreaking creativity in a constant dialogue with ourselves, on both sides of interface.

Dates:  Desember 2020 - VĂĽr/Spring 2021
Mads Høbye | S12 Galleri og Verksted