Notes on Mutation and the Pursuit of Horror (and sometimes the Grotesque)
How boring has perfection become? Evidence of this lies in the fact that our design obsessions are based on an appreciation for the perversity of mutant form, a taste learned from the movies and set to work on architecture.
It is produced in the act of design – in the focused sensation of pointing and clicking. Here that sensation is more like painting than engineering. Image-forms are the product of speed up and slow down, slice and blend, fuse and separate – repetitions of scenic rhythms learned from a lifetime of being awed by cinematic affect.
Micro-techniques for combing the thresholds of the horrific-becoming-beautiful and the beautiful-becoming-horrific (grotesque) have imprinted themselves as visual-temporal cues on my own design retina. Monstrosity is the new sex. Lust still rules the empire of desire, only now the desires are more elaborate – multiple, complex, intelligent, emotive. The importance of multiplicity has finally opened the door for mutation as a permanent state of the present.
We are becoming monsters – a species aroused by non-perfect images coming from perfect methodologies. Here is where the true transformation is happening. We are subverting the logic of perfection: what used to be about mastering the result of a non-perfect process is now about the production of monstrosity and the grotesque through the mathematical perfection of an evolutive mechanism. So why not be optimistic? In the end such is life, such is love…
Originally published in ICON magazine
Issue 404 | 2007
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