Subject: Viridian Note 00047: Viridian Imaginary Products Exhibition Key concepts: Viridian Imaginary Products Exhibition, Viridian Teakettle Contest Attention Conservation Notice: This proposed scheme is particularly ambitious and time-consuming. Entries in the Viridian "Fungal Typography" Contest: http://members.aol.com/stjude/ http://www.saunalahti.fi/~jtlin/viridian/ http://www.wenet.net/~scoville/Viridian/viridiantext.html http://www.erols.com/ljaurbach/ http://www.empathy.com/viridian/ http://www.spaceways.de/Viridian/Viridiantype.html http://www.stewarts.org/users/stewarts/viridian.html http://way.nu/greens/typography.html http://abe.burmeister.com/viridian2dot1.html http://rampages.onramp.net/~jzero/viridian/ http://www.msys.net/reid/main.html http://www.well.com/conf/mirrorshades/nancy.html http://www.netaxs.com/~morgana/fungus.html http://www.golden.net/~eli/viridian/ http://ucsub.Colorado.EDU/~smcginni/viridian/vfont.html The winner of the Viridian Fungal Typography Contest is: Hinne Burmeister (hinne@spaceways.de^^^^*) AKA: DJB, Django Blades, Denon Kleo, THE Sound! Inhabitant of Projekt Kochstrasse Member of Comite de Musique Deluxe (CMD) Co-founder of SPACEWAYS Management & Production On mature consideration, Hinne Burmeister's entry at: http://www.spaceways.de/Viridian/Viridiantype.html was judged "Most Fungal." Hinne Burmeister has been sent a well-deserved copy of the contest prize book, *Hot Designers Make Cool Fonts.* And now, for the details of our third Viridian design contest, which is our most ambitious yet. As we all know, the Viridian Design Movement does not in fact exist. The long torrent of rhetoric consuming your attention to date is a mere *beta pre-release* of a *possible* 21st century design movement. Real design movements ship. They create actual designed products. A real-world Viridian product design company would be a very fine thing. I even understand how one goes about founding and running such an enterprise. It has a lot to do with tedious minutiae such as "prototyping," "licensing," "sourcing," "pricing," "distribution," and "advertising," not to mention employee relations, taxes, incorporation, trademarks, patents, and return-on-investment. Running a commercial manufacturing firm is an attention-vampire of the first order. Becoming the CEO of a design firm is just not within the Pope-Emperor's realm of possible activity. However. Real designers also throw public exhibits where they gallantly show off their wares. Here we perceive some interesting Viridian potential. While we can't manufacture and sell commercial products, creating fake *mockups* of *imaginary Viridian products* might well be within our grasp. Sometime in the year 02000 (assuming we make our ideological deliverables on January 3), we might conceivably create and throw a public Viridian exhibit, a futurist conceptual-art parody of a real design show. This "Viridian Imaginary Products Exhibit" would be open to the public. It might be rather similar in spirit to the "Art of Star Wars" show, where everyone knows that the rayguns and blast-shields aren't real or functional, but they all go anyway, just because everything looks so cool. Finding a friendly gallerist and a suitable display space is not beyond our ability. This effort would be time-consuming; it would require funding, budgeting, coordination and a lot of organizational overhead; but not crushing amounts. Best of all, the project would be swiftly over with. The central challenge here is finding Viridian product designers, and, especially, some hands-on Viridian model- makers. People, in other words, who can dream this stuff up, and successfully fake it for us, so that physical Viridian objets d'conceptual art can be shipped to some central locale for public display. To manage this proposed event, we would have to assemble a core "Star Chamber" of inner-circle Viridian volunteers. This means investing large amounts of creative effort and attention. We would endeavour to supply some glory and prestige to volunteers. Your name would prominently pasted on the vitrine, you'd receive some groovy citation in the accompanying glossy catalog.... And, who knows, there might be weird and unpredictable spin-offs involved. For instance, perhaps the designer/builder team could sell the model afterwards for a hefty sum to some crazed sci-fi collector. There might be some modest sums of expense money involved in throwing this event, but I can almost guarantee you that the money would not make it worth your while. Is such an event in fact possible for us? Well, we'll never find out without experimenting. The third Viridian Contest is meant to winkle out public-spirited people who might have what it takes to put such an effort together. Hence, the Viridian Teakettle Contest. Teakettles are, of course, highly cliched designer objects. Everybody in the world has done the teakettle, the chair, and the CD-rack. I've heard it said by designers I respect that anyone who does another teakettle should be immediately shot. But! Teakettles have the advantage of being well understood and something of a level playing field in design work. This contest is not about designing a real teakettle. We don't need a teakettle that works. *None* of the Imaginary Viridian Products are going to work. What we want at this point in time is a website *picture* of a teakettle, a schematic diagram of sorts, a graphic guide for a teakettle model-maker. In this contest, we want you to *set-design* a fake teakettle. This 21st-century Viridian teakettle has to look *like no teakettle has ever looked before.* We don't want clip-art, a pastiche, or a cut-and-paste postmodern object. No. Our noble purpose here to publicly exhibit a *previously unimaginable Viridian design aesthetic.* Here is the design philosophy behind the teakettle; your character motivation, as it were. To quote our Viridian principles (see Note 00003): "Seek the Biomorphic and the Transorganic." "Datamine Nature." "The Biological Isn't Logical." Like the century-old designs of Art Nouveau, the Viridian Teakettle seeks aesthetic novelty through the exploitation and adaption of forms found in nature. We then must ask: what forms of nature have never before been used as design elements? And where in nature is there anything remotely like a teakettle? The answer to both questions is: abyssal vents. I refer to hot volcanic crevices at the bottom of the ocean, surrounded by previously unknown, chemosynthetic life forms. These unique and extremely weird biomes were not even discovered by the human race until 1979. I can absolutely guarantee you that Belle Epoque designers had never heard of these particular forms in nature. These are artistically unexploited natural forms. The unique creatures in abyssal vents exist in crushing pressure, in total darkness (except for the sinister glow of hot lava), and sure enough, just like teakettles, the vents sit there piping out boiling water through long stone spouts, in a cheerful, complex chemical stew. Life thrives there, devouring microbial sulfur, and bathing round-the-clock in clean geothermal energy. Here are a pair of websites where you can acquaint yourself with such inspirational abyssal anomalies as: clams full of hemoglobin, giant tubeworms that have no mouths or guts, dandelion jellyfish, "black smoker" volvanic vents, and big blind prawns. http://pubs.usgs.gov/publications/text/exploring.html http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/abyss/life/extremes.html One might further note that arcane sulfur-gobbling chemosynthesis is quite the inspiration for a high-tech 21st century "teakettle." In the future, crude, vegetal, semi-toxic tea leaves will be forced to undergo unheard-of osmotic, catalytic and filtration processes inside our chemically sophisticated, fully-monitored, 21st-century, teakettle brewing-chambers. Please don't worry about stark Modernist efficiency here. "The Biological Isn't Logical." Go wild. We want a show-stopper with this teakettle, an item of stunning astonishment. Push the technonatural envelope. Your only design constraint is that your design can't be a mere cyberspatial fantasy. We require a product design that can plausibly exist in 3 dimensions and fit inside a glass case. If this contest works out, we will follow it with a new and unprecedented Viridian Construction Contest, where we try to persuade people to *build a physical model* of your design. Now for the valuable winner's prize. It is: ART NOUVEAU by Gabriele Fahr-Becker. This Teutonically thorough and richly illustrated 425-page tome is the best single book I've ever seen on the Art Nouveau movement. It covers the whole Belle Epoque crowd and their fellow travellers: Charles Rennie Macintosh, Hector Guimard, Rene Lalique, Alfonse Mucha, Emile Galle', Louis Majorelle, Victor Horta, the rather little-known but seriously incredible Carlo Bugatti, Antoni Gaudi, Peter Behrens, Henry van de Velde, Akseli Gallen-Kallela, Louis Comfort Tiffany, Otto Wagner, etc etc... Plus a bibliography,a glossary, and set of brief artist's bios that pretty much beats the band. We're getting into deep hot water now, so this is our finest contest prize to date. Why, I can scarcely lift this great, whopping, expensive, glossy book, and better yet, it's out of print. Put your teakettle design up on the web where we can all see it and marvel. The creator of the most biomorphic, transorganic, visually unprecedented, geothermal-abyssal teakettle will take this book away. All other contest contributors will, as usual, receive a handsome star >*< for their log-in name. If you have no idea what these Art Nouveau guys were up to, or just how odd and refreshing artifacts can look when they take organic forms seriously, then I suggest running those above artists' names through a search engine. (Especially Gaudi and Guimard.) Or you can start here: http://www.ragnarokpress.com/scriptorium/ This contest embraces decay on March 6, 01999. I look forward to seeing your effort. Good luck! Bruce Sterling (bruces@well.com)