I have been asked to moderate what looks to be a fascinating conversation on June 13 on the relationship between design and choreography, with two practitioners who occupy this particular intersection in different ways.
Judith Seng is the Berlin-based designer behind the ACTING THINGS series, in which objects are produced by carefully planned bodily motions or social organisations, documenting the process of creation rather than manifesting a fixed form.
ACTING THINGS IV by Judith Seng
Daniel Arsham is an artist and architect living in New York City (though we share a childhood stint in Miami) who has collaborated with Merce Cunningham and Jonah Bokaer, among others, on performance and set design, often playing with social and architectural conventions to achieve new contexts for dance.
Set for Merce Cunningham EyeSpace by Daniel Arsham
Many thanks to Design Miami/Basel for inviting me—I think this will be a wonderful opportunity to discuss the way objects and users reinforce, alter, or invent new habits, motions, functions, and performances, both in daily life and in singular experiences.
I leave you with this landmark scene from Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times (1936), in which he explores the machine of the factory as an enormous apparatus of human and mechanical motion, with its complex consequences for our behaviour and self-awareness.