KLUWEN

Where Philosophy meets Design

Play Video

Matter of Transformation

Traditionally, vending was often a process where you brought or chose a material and the craftsman would lend his knowledge. You trusted his craftsmanship in honing the material indeterminancies to an end product. In the contemporary, vending is becoming more and more an exchange in the knowledge of a thing, rather than what that thing is or can do; you pay for the truth of the logo on a shirt, not the actual shirt. In the near future we see this even more in NFT’s, or digital fashion.

Kluwen is an inquriy into this messiness of that reality, where knowledge of a thing and being of a that are co-consitutive. The machine does so by blending the digital making and physical making together, in a social and local environment. At the hand of algorithmic affordances materializes in the environment through the shirts that are made; As we constrain or change our actions depending on what the algorithm will afford us in the future, that same precarious future is determining the now and is so setting up the conditions for its own continuation. This creates an intermingling of past, present and future where the making of the shirts is constantly getting ahead of itself, and people and machine are together creating their own niche.

Dewey, Oyama & Van Dijk

We were tasked with designing a vending machine on the principles of openendedness . Is it possible to create a vending machine that is not simply an input-output system? This was by far the most difficult part of the process as this is the definition of a vending machine. One puts in something of value to them, to get something else of “equal” value back. However, this is why we started discussing the equal value issue. We saw the distorted comparison of value as anything one gets out of a vending machine is always more expensive than getting it for example out of a supermarket. This means there is a level of desire that needs to be satisfied at that point in time which raises the value of the product.