Riding Ghosts
Seeing isn’t believing but believing is seeing… even if you have been looking through your mind’s eye. We can all think up the image of the Loch Ness monster (Nessie) with its whale like body and small head, or picture a Yeti roaming Himalayan mountains with a body covered in reddish-brown hair. As humans we have a natural ability to reason the unreasonable and make sense of the obscure, Nessie and Yeti have never been found but they still live in Scotland and the Himalayas.
Emma Singleton, journalist.
From a in-depth research and developed admiration for the illogical beauty of these animals,
“Riding Ghosts” poetically works to harness their control. Through the data gathered by the cryptozoologists and help from a statistician, two bespoke saddles are presented. These technical objects highlight our ability to theorise the invisible, and therefore domesticate it. »
By materialising 'irrational' data into an object of domestication, the chimeras come to life: the saddles are beautiful, credible, technical, the curves align with the measurements established by the researchers. Suddenly, the existence of these ghostly creatures is no longer to be proven, because true or false, they have given shape to a physical reality where we have succeeded in dominating the unseen.
“Riding Ghosts” can be seen as a design reaction to the anguish of a modern world in need of great discoveries and thrills ; it plays with levels of plausibility and allows the audience to confront their own beliefs and create discussion, and even polemics : does something have to true to be valuable ?
Riding Ghosts
- 2019Published in :
Damn Magazine
Book In-search/Re-search
Exhibited at :
TAC Dutch Design Week 2019 Eindhoven
