Abstract:

Art and design, both communicate ideas of personal, social, and cultural identity, expressing the concerns of the people and the spirit of the time. It is a mutually beneficial relationship, and throughout history art and design have influenced each other. From expression to experiment, both mediums facilitate human need. Whether on individual level or collective, if art responds more to visual and design to function, holistically they reflect the ambition of the age.

The paper will aim to investigate body as site, as space for exploration and exaggeration for art and design. This research will be surveyed through a studio project, The Appearance, conducted by an artist and a designer. The project requires design students to build appendages or extensions for their own bodies, focusing on a single body part to use as a concerned area, playing ground, to respond to, project or limit the functionality. This paper aims to review the project and its objectives from the prospect of artist-design collaboration. Questioning perceptions of human body to the standards of beauty, from culture of spectatorship to awareness of the self, the paper seeks to elaborate the permeability of public and private suggesting anthropomorphic anxiety and sensuality that engages an almost erotic kind of conversation between the body and space.

Through this research we are looking at human body & space as a phenomenon and a reality to check in with our existence physically and in our immediate environment. Further it suggests that the distance between art and design as creative processes might change according to intention, need, and cultural context. The angle of self-expression and individuality in art is often balanced by and overlaps with concerns of functionality and replicability in design. The body might play very different roles in the fields of art and design; the difference mainly lies from creating a dialogue ‘about the body’ to ‘for the body’. The Appearance walks the philosophical and technical line between the fields of art and design. The project comes from a performative and theatrical groundwork but results in a wide range of outcomes: products, haute couture garments and even prosthetics or supplements.

Investigating the intersection of public and private, the paper intends to look at our cultural perception of the self, and its effect on the privacy of bodies in public space. As the project progresses in the studio, the self is exposed to the outside through the visual exaggeration of the (body) extension. The modification of sensory perception and experience of the physical adjustment ultimately influences our understanding of the real.