Streamlines of Desire: Performative Techniques , Endless Deviation, Beauty and Open Play in the Evan Douglas Studio

Expressive sentience is a quality that Evan Douglis has observed that the contemporary lifestyle product market offers the consumer, “…a heterogeneous collection of portable, exotic hardware permitting the individual an extraordinary degree of personal autonomy, mobility and control over the alienation of travel. Alluringly soft and hard, crisp or curved, glossy or grained, slippery or matte, convex or concave, these streamlined, ergonomically precise vehicles of oneiric desire represent the infinite range of topological blends available in the postmodern surface.” The postmodern surface is equally a product of desire and of an accumulative intelligence. Each ergonomically or aerodynamically designed generation of prostheses—typified by the car body and the cellular phone as much as by the personal sex toy and the artificial muscle—learns from the last, its contours defined through trial and error. One suspects that much of Douglis’ teaching aims to open up these streamlines of desire to a persuasive architectural investigation that replaces marketing with cultural perception, accumulation with critique, and trial and error with the poetry of the accident. Regulating these lines of desire through performative analogue and digital techniques, the Douglis Studio has entered previously unobtainable arenas of abstraction.

Volume Editors
Marilys R. Nepomechie & Robert Gonzalez

ISBN
0-935502-54-8