Ecstatic surface designers are progressive designers challenging the graphic design field. They are specialized on the seductive nature of surfaces. They are 'scanning' the contemporary visual culture, and 'printing' an excessive surface in return. They state graphic design as an area of exploration. They are ambitious, self-initiated creators of autonomous loud visible manifestations. Ecstatic surface designers are generators of commentary in the margins of visual culture.
Ecstatic surface design is an undetermined new tendency. It generates hyper detailed, aestheticized, extravagant, surfacesby scanning the contemporary visual culture. Ecstatic surface designers are specialized in the seductive nature of surfacesand in the increasing power of representation. In their work, they reveal an understanding of the world as a mass of easily manipulated surfaces. The current conditions of existence should be stated as oneof their main drives, as well as the hyper fractured and the accelerating temporality of the information society.
Ecstatic surface designers are obsessed with paradoxes, ironies, resistances and appropriations. These concepts are turned into radical decorated and hyper detailed surfaces encapsulating the beauty and horror of the contemporary, exposing the immense complexity of the world.
An affluent, comfortable and over-designed society canbe mistaken with an idealized studio set from which the unpleasantness has been suppressed. Ecstatic surface designers intervene in this polished mainstream visual language with a deep suspicion, and seek to investigate the latent violence behind these idealized designed surfaces.
Ecstatic surface designers, consuming and creating on the same surface, are embodying the changing links between production and consumption which can be stated as the new common ground for designers and users.
The hyper decorated work of the ecstatic surface designerscan be seen as the visualization of the state of mind of the contemporary crowd composed of opportunism, narcissism, desire for autonomy and creation, the inability to focus, the neurosis, paranoia and fear, the craving for intensity, fun and distraction. (0)
Ecstatic surface design is a new tendency in The Netherlands, the country which is known to be a supportive environmentfor innovative ideas, yet still having a deeply set Dutch characteristic of restraint and rationality. The folk saying "Steek je hoofd niet boven het maaiveld uit" (don't stickout your head above the mowing field) exemplifies this moderation. Ecstatic surface designers are not basing their practice on the continuum of this dutch sociopolitical environment embodied in the modest sanction design.
Dutch people are familiar with pragmatism, discipline, organization, thrift, straightforwardness, sobriety, clarity, moral-integrity, modesty, social-resonsability, efficiency, etc... Modernism and Dutch Design possesses these traits as well and they are clearly seen in the legacy of the Dutch Art / design's leading timeless international representatives, e.g.Piet Mondriaan, Theo van Doesburg, Gerrit Rietveld and Piet Zwart.
While most of Europe accepted Art Nouveau as the last international-spread art movement that influenced architecture, craft and fine arts, the Dutch rejected Art Nouveau as frivolous. Dutch artists considered themselves pragmatic and realistic. Thus, they rather turned themselves towards conventional realism that later evolved into abstraction. (1)
Extravagance would be the last adjective to describe Dutch manners. That is one of the main reasons why modernist style being the best fit for dutch visual grammar. Ecstatic surface designers are going in a foreign direction what the Dutch are used to get from visual diction composers. They corral, move, manage and heighten information. They mélange elements from different cultures, minorities and subcultures using codes developed by camp, pop, kitsch and terror. This reveals a cultural friction depicted in the outcome of their work. Consequently, they develop their own diverse visual colloquial language around their extravagant and sensuous surfaces.
Ecstatic surface designers don't privilege the informationbut the information overload.
In the beginning of the 21st century, in the core of the merciless commercialization of culture. In the time where designers, working for big creative agencies, are risking to become digital labourers executing orders. When the meaning and substance of design is often replaced by corporate culture. In the contemporary of an efficiency obsessed society where graphic designers can be purchased at the lowest possible price. In the time where emancipation of the graphic designer is needed.
Those who are not part of a franchise creative company and who open-up their own graphic design studio are as well confronted with complex infrastructures of design management. During assignments, they might spend most of their time dealing with managers, creative directors, communications managers, internal communication specialists and marketing specialists who accommodate the client with the design process. The overall design concept is already decided by a 'manager of something' before the designer takes the assignment. This process is gradually turning the graphic designers into the proletariat of the creative industry: laborers who are sitting behind there computer screens, silently clicking their mouse, carrying out the commands of the target-group-pleasing clients.
Even though our neoliberal efficiency obsessed society is putting a weight on the graphic design cosmos, there are still ambitious autonomous designers who are driven to make critical reflections on society.
There is a substantial difference between an autonomous designer and a designer working as a silent query laborfor the creative industry. Social-designers, design researchers, self-initiating visual authors, independent publishers/designers, designers experimenting with technology and design think-tanks are important to create critical work as a refelction on our society.
Ecstatic surface designers are among these dedicated workers who aim to make an ideogram shift in the conception of graphic design. They are creating a new stage in design where their reaction on the social contemporary can be reached and understood by a bigger number of audience.
Is it a reaction towards the commercialization and reduced autonomy of the graphic designer? Is it a rejection of the standardization and democratization of design and it's software, making the 'hand-crafted' originality vanish? Is ita request for a new 'raison d'être' for qualified conceptual & craftsman designers? Is it a criticism on the current corporate influences of the neoliberal economics and politics? Is it a retaliation to the rise and the commercialization of the creative industry? Is it a strategy to overcome dominant marketing specialists, design managers and communication experts? Is it a commentary on the dominant rigid Western modernistic 'outfit'? Is this return to decorative traditions a statement about the relationship between Western and non-Western cultures?
The lack of the human touch in the democratized, commercialized and standardized design is being criticized. Ecstatic surface designers are drawing the attention back tothe place of the human interaction in the production process with their devotion to hyper details, displaying delight in expert craftsmanship.
Since the prominent tools of design, the computer and its software have been homogenized among designers and democratized among nonprofessionals, it is nowadays almost impossible for graphic designers to regain the central role, which was largely based on its mastery of tools and services unavailable to users, that they once could claim. This forces designers to rethink their practice.
The current art and design world, lead by discourse-heavy rationalism, is focused on politically engaged discursive practice and considers beauty as a notion explaining nothing, solving nothing and teaching us nothing. It is hard to defendan art/design work by basing a discourse on aesthetic passion, beauty and decoration.
Unfortunately, this time-honored notion finds it's existencein the realm of the opposition of form and content, of surface and depth. In the visual and philosophical richness of ecstatic surface design, there is no such thing as the opposition ofform and content, of surface and depth. It's makers consider decoration as a method to create links between the exterior and the interior, between the parts and the whole.
Ecstatic surface designers don't consider beauty and decoration as something meaningless; rather as a meaningful, progressive and critical search for utopian alternatives for the future. They regard decoration as a means by which the inherent essential qualities of a subject are revealed. (2) Decoration is a functional and autonomous facet in their designs, existing as stylistic elements and as a subject matter at the same time.
Ecstatic surface designers reject the dominant established values of pragmatic modernism. The rational, white-spaceand industry-oriented conventions of modernistic design has become one style among many possible styles. In the essay Ornament and Crime, written by Adolf Loos in 1908, decoration is considered as mass-produced, mass-consumed trash. Nevertheless, now it seems that time turned less is more into 'mass-produced / mass-consumed trash'.
Modernism, substituting the design of the corpse to the design of the soul, has expired. Today, we are all subjected to an aesthetic evaluation. One is required to take aesthetic responsibility for his/her appearance, for his/her self-design.
It is not truthful to continue the modernistic myth about zero-design. In our media-controlled world, even the political sphere is intensely aestheticized. Politicians and celebrities are presented to the contemporary audience as designed surfaces.
Ecstatic surface designers explore the over designed and aestheticized world. This is revealed in the artificial form of their work, as well as in it's devotion to precision and it's entirely constructed condition. Even though their surfaces differ in content, they all share the same appearance, at once seductive and grotesque, expressing an intensely aestheticized reality.
By scanning and representing cultural temporalities and structures. By exposing the great complexity of our society.By not privileging the information but the overload of information, the info-glut. By featuring complex symbolism, allegories and similes in their surfaces. By restoring the dignity of ornament and decoration without the crippling weight of nostalgia. By contradicting the white-spaced and industry-oriented conventions of the 'modern' design. By favoring exaggerated decorations, by adding colossal visual gestures,by making unexpected combinations with energetic, tension and intense visual gestures. By drawing attention back tothe place of human interaction in the production process, displaying delight in expert craftsmanship by mastering their tools rather than becoming their slave. This is a reaction against the monotonous software styles that had developed out of our common democratized design tools. By declining to accept the loss of skills, experiment, diversity and creativity caused by the efficiency obsessed neoliberal economics.By daring to talk about beauty which is often considered as superfluous. By consuming and creating on the same surface. By launching every year an autonomous ecstatic surface collection.
Ecstatic surface designers are extending the boundaries of graphic design by initiating a new modus operandi which isin a constant research of experiment on the fulfillment of the surfaces.
Every year, they will be launching an ecstatic surface collection that they consider as an area of visual exploration reflecting the synthesized state of the present-day. This new method of operating in graphic design can be conceived asthe haute couture of graphic design.
The term 'haute couture' is used as a metaphor taken from the fashion world which immeditately creates a distinction between the 'haute' and the unspoken 'conventional'. Here the term 'haute couture' designates the creation of exclusive surfaces which are often hard for the spectator to digest in the first glance. These surfaces are done with extreme attention to detail and finish, often using time-consuming techniques. Ecstatic surface designers entitle the work they do besides their haute couture collections as prêt-à-afficher; an umbrella-term for work following graphic design's conventional procedure of the clientinquiry- solution process.
The 'haute couture collections' are loudly visible manifestations addressed directly to the public. Every year in September new surface collections will be launched by ecstatic surface designers. The charismatic, 'one-off' ecstatic surfaces, can be considered as an enhancement of the prestige of the (design) house. The 'haute couture collections' are in contrast with large-scale trends in the field of design. The collections canbe seen as an escape from reality providing numerous worlds and scenarios, which are established with a colloquial visual language. This is one of the consequences of ecstatic surface designers refusing to accept a flawed world.
For ecstatic surface designers, their 'haute couture' collections functions as a wellspring for their commissioned design work. They work for clients who are appealed and affiliated with their ecstatic surface collections. The clients' design quests result in 'prêt-à-porter', rather a prêt-à-afficher surface design, while still being a hyper detailed and loudly visible comment towards visual culture. The prêt-à-afficher designs are highly inflamed by the 'haute couture' collection of the most recent season, synthesized with the clients' desire for a handsome unique identity. Ecstatic surface designers are considered by their clients as their equals. They share the same ambition for innovation in their own field, crossing each other in a shared search for depth and meaning. Ecstatic surface designers are no obedient laborers. They reject the neoliberal notion of purchasing design at the lowest possible price.
The surfaces forming a 'haute couture collection' can be classified as ecstatic collages. Collage is an act of gathering, reconstructing and cultivating the growth of meaning. This is a way for ecstatic surface designers to appropriate and re-arrange the already existing world. They are trans-positioning, melting and changing conventional proportions in their surfaces. (3) They steal from common media to re-group and to re-situate scales and balances into constellations that would be un-maneuverable and unthinkable in real life, using the filterof their personal lens of the present.
Ecstatic surface design, enclosing ecstatic haute couture collections as well as ecstatic prêt-à-afficher work, is a research on the aesthetics of: visual capitalism, homogenized cultures, love and terror, exploding realities, fanatical identities, eternally renewed desires for lifestyle and identity, disorders of the Western world, taste cultures, worlds melting bit by bit, relations of power, globalization flows, time-space compressions, politics of consumerism, mass-cultural excesses, urban legends, politics of pleasure, celebrities as issue bodies, aesthetic thrills, depressions & recessions, counter glamour, international trends, street stylistic sensibilities, things and flings, esoteric styles, digital dispersions, collective constructions, do-goodings, freedom fighters, fashion maniacs, moral panics, deterritorizations and re-territorizations, po mo vernaculars, theories of everything, cyberian street scenes, ghetto-dwellers, copycats, x-rated cybersex, zapping zero consciousness, postmodern fairs, digital paradises, the endof history and the heat of the info-glut.
Pinar&Viola (Pınar Demirdag & Viola Renate) Amsterdam, June 2010
Nina Folkersma, Susan Sontag, Oscar Wilde, Emile Zile, Franz von Bayros, Tanadori Yokoo, Takashi Murakami, Superflat, Keniichi Tanaami, the Kawaii culture, Kirstine Roepstorff, Emanuel Kant, Rob Schröder, Daniel van de Velden, Anke van Loon, Annelys de Vet, Harmen Liemburg, Barbra Visser, Sandberg Instituut Amsterdam and Diners Club International.