Surface Service by Soft Baroque

The design duo Soft Baroque blur the boundaries between acceptable furniture typologies and conceptual representative objects. Trained in furniture and visual communication, they explore objecthood and the perception of materiality in the age of digital image cultures. Their project Surface Service sees the sensory manipulation of interior design objects like benches and shelves, and the automated value inscription embedded in everyday objects. The surfaces of materials, like exotic wood and granite, are scanned and digitally printed onto silk textiles. Analysing the idea of a digital veneer, these objects negotiate what happens when materiality travels from the physical to electric signals and pulses, and back again. As objects, they defy any obvious compartmentalisation in art or design, and humorously explores the critical hierachies that exists between functionalist and aesthetic objects. The project lends itself to trending discourses of object oriented ontology and speculative realism, with out abandoning our perverted sense of consumer logic.