Katrin Baumgarten

Riverside Gallery

Sunday 22 January – Sunday 19 February 2012

“The revolting object exerts a certain ‘macabre attraction’ over the subject, leading to a peculiar absorption in the object and lending a magnetism to this aversion.” Kolonai, Aurel

The power of disgust affects us in every aspect of our life. Disgust shocks, entertains, and sears itself into memory. By introducing the aesthetics of disgust as a tool for design, one can intensify the user and object relationship through creating paradoxal emotions, going beyond practicality and functionality.

These eccentric light switches explore disgust and its possible transitions in the technological age. The exhibit consists of multiple designs of an everyday object, each based on a different approach to
disgust, and to examine the provoked reactions. Every time a switch is pressed, a virtual light-bulb on a screen is lighting up as a feedback for the test-person. Through its simplicity and its everyday occurrence, the interaction with a switch has been marginalised into subconscious behaviour. But what if your interaction has consequences.

One of the switches has hairs that become erect when a finger approaches. Another secretes goo, one is made of fingernails and another of chewing gum. The most playful creation refuses to be
switched at all and hides when a finger approaches. The switches are monitored by an Arduino circuit board which records which was pressed, when and for how long.

One of the purposes of the work is to show that people are indeed both repelled and fascinated by the disgusting transformation of the switches.

Katrin Baumgarten holds an MA from the Royal College of Art and an MSc from Imperial College London. Her projects revolve around human-technology interaction and explore future possibilities within technology and art. She loves to see the magic that appears when an inanimate object suddenly starts to move and respond to external stimuli in ways normally attributed to humans. Katrin is freelancing for interactive design consultancies at the moment, as well as developing her own practice.

http://katrinbaumgarten.de/