Troika: making technology blame itself
9 Mar 2007 Category: Events & Exhibitions, Features, Graphics
Jealous picture frames? Machines with feelings? Protests conducted from the comfort of an armchair? Absolutely! London-based art and design practice Troika have been playing with our perceptions of what technology, art and design can be for the past four years.
From their small studio in south London, Conny, Eva and Sebastien take design and make it art, they communicate through design and make art out of communication. Sounds confusing? That’s why PingMag took a trip to Troika to find out more.
Written by Matt Hussey
So how did Troika come about?
Sebastien: Very informally!
Eva: We all studied in the same year at the Royal College of Art, working together on projects that seemed to combine all our interests.
Sebastien: It was very organic. We didn’t just sit down and make Troika. Though I wanted to work more for myself, we were sharing a lot of opinion on the different works we were doing, so gradually we started to produce together.
Eva: All of the products we worked on had a real narrative from the three of us. We make pieces with a story, and we all bring our own aspects to make a complete idea. So it seemed quite natural to make it official!
SMS Guerilla Projector
…in a handy format!
What is the essence of Troika? Is there a clear trail of thought to what you’re trying to say?
Sebastien: I think overall we aim for subjective provocation. We like to challenge the conventions a little bit, and the way things are perceived. Also, we try to create what we feel has been lost from products; a subjectivity and a narrative, a concept that goes beyond fitting 10 000 songs in a box. Yes, that’s interesting, but it’s not challenging in that sense.
Do you think we’ve lost an emotion with technology? Has it become too functional?
Sebastien: Partly, yes. I’m not saying technology without emotion is a bad thing. It would be incredibly inefficient to make technology that way. It was there at one point, but now that has been lost.
I think with Troika we try to take the efficiency of what we have now, and combine it with that creativity and magic we had previously.
There seems to be a lot of recycling of traditional ideas of design in your work. For example, your SCHIZOPOROTICA piece takes a punched card music box from the 19th century and makes it contemporary. Why would you do that?
Sebastien: Technology’s always looking forward and never back. It thinks so linearly. We try to ask us Why is that? In art you look to the past and interpret it with your own modern subjectivity. But none of that happens in technology. People never think how things were made previously. Look at mobile phones. When they started out, you could’ve quite easily predicted where the advancements would be. It was all about becoming more efficient, more features, more, more, more. Which is great - in a way… But what does it mean in non-functional terms?
ripped card creating weird melodies
There are a lot of people who think that artists shouldn’t engage in commerce. Marketers say that it’s not possible and that they can’t monitor or measure it in terms of profit. But we think people need to be engaged in different ways, and not purely by what’s functional.
Eva: People have become so tired of mainstream channels and ways of reaching people. Especially in advertising, you can reach a certain group of people with a certain type of ad. But you will completely miss huge amounts of other people by doing that. They’ve developed their own filters so they don’t even acknowledge they’re being targeted.
Have corporations become too narrow minded with how they reach people?
Eva: Maybe in the past, but there are a lot of companies using subversion as a way of marketing now. Take MTV, for example. They’re a huge corporation and they gave us complete freedom to design their advertising campaign for the MTV Music Awards ceremony in Copenhagen.
MTV Europe Music Awards 2006
MTV Europe Music Awards 2006
Sebastien: We created a protest outside the town hall in the city telling people not to go the awards! We had badges, banners and posters saying that the awards were “fixed”. We also used our Tool For Armchair Activists as a focus point: we attached a mega phone to a lamppost, which you could send text messages to and it would read them out in a computerised language.
People used it for all sorts of things. One market stall was using to advertise their lovely sausages! Someone else was using it to chat people up!
It didn’t tell people directly to go the awards, it was more subversive and used a whole different technique. It showed that there is a shift towards creativity and subversion with technology and advertising.
Speaking of technology, a lot of your work, such as the TV Predator, has technology attacking itself. Could this be the future?
Sebastien: I love this piece! The picture frame’s jealous of the TV because the TV’s getting all the attention. So the picture frame attacks the TV by changing the channel, messing with the sound and turning it on when it’s switched off. It’s technology taking on more human traits. Technology is going to get greedy, it’s going to get jealous … all those negative traits that people have.
So would you predict that technology is becoming more human?
Sebastien: Exactly. You know, the whole “Terminator thing”! You’ll have a printer telling you that it’s not his fault that it hasn’t printed something. It’ll blame the computer instead but the computer will blame the cables… People have this obsession of being a God-like creator already and this is where we feel a lot of technology is going.
So with Troika, it seems like you are more into making machines asking themselves questions and therefore trying to understand technology more, rather than working on the general concept of creating technology making us “happy”?
Sebastien: That’s one element, yes. There seems to be too much focus on making things more efficient, more powerful, more of everything. We like to play around and make things fun but get people to actually think.
Thanks a lot for the technology talk! Troika are currently exhibiting at the Science Museum in London, and have a large and very secret installation hitting London in September. You have been warned…
16 Comments
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Great post on bringing Play and Fun to Tech!
Posted by: Bill Olen on March 10th, 2007 at 12:29 am
They are so cool!!!! very conceptual and having so much fun.
Posted by: Do on March 10th, 2007 at 1:24 am
Hammersmith is boring, so you shouldn’t be going there.
Posted by: Badger on March 10th, 2007 at 4:30 am
[...] PingMag | Troika: making technology blame itself Interview with the creators of, among other things, the SMS Guerilla Projector: “We try to create what we feel has been lost from products; a subjectivity and a narrative, a concept that goes beyond fitting 10,000 songs in a box.” (tags: tech consumer product sms-guerilla-projector public urban sms display SCHIZOPOROTICA punch-card music tool-for-armchair-activists design london) [...]
Posted by: Brian Kerr | links for 2007-03-10 on March 10th, 2007 at 2:42 pm
Interesting stuff.
Posted by: Hdr on March 11th, 2007 at 6:29 pm
Troika really impressive, their design full of emotion…amaze me.
Posted by: chris on March 11th, 2007 at 10:43 pm
I usually don’t like all the Pomo stuff but Troika seems rather nice. :)
Posted by: Maki on March 12th, 2007 at 2:21 am
Really interesting work, impressive.
Posted by: Sergio on March 12th, 2007 at 9:03 am
[...] Troika: making technology blame itself (PingMag Tokyo) (tags: design art troika rca London interaction_design) [...]
Posted by: plus six » links for 2007-03-21 on March 22nd, 2007 at 8:26 am
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Posted by: Felipov » Blog Archive » like it on April 26th, 2007 at 1:01 am
these technology can develop in are country?
Posted by: London Guide on July 1st, 2007 at 6:51 pm
Impressive. I like this article.
Posted by: Sportfahrwerke on August 30th, 2007 at 4:08 pm
Very cool stuff
Posted by: Japan News in English on November 24th, 2007 at 7:02 am
Amazing site. I like it. Keep going on
Posted by: Swimmingpool on June 19th, 2008 at 5:42 pm
Troika really impressive, their design full of emotion
Posted by: Halı Yıkama on August 30th, 2009 at 5:43 am