Singapore Design Festival 2007

Synopsis:

A GROOVISIONS first: Uniquely Singapore's experiences

In the 1960s, Pop Art made its debut in the world. Best remembered for Andy Warhol's styling after mass production, mass proliferation and reproduction, Pop Art made icons of Campbell soup labels and Coca Cola, side by side with famous faces such as Elizabeth Taylor and Marilyn Monroe. It was a reflective dimension of both real life and fantasy; the beautiful, the absurd, the familiar, the unusual and the unique combination of those things that excite us, provoke us and inspire us. Similarly, as observers of life, GROOVISIONS make design a consolidation of what we remember, what we like and who we are. Their grounds for experience give us an intense pleasure that is always sensitive to a kind of vogue turning the next corner: something old, something new, something borrowed, something almost always, totally cool.

"Good design," Hiroshi Ito, a founder of GROOVISIONS, articulates, "is in a sense, always evolving." There is no accounting for what constitutes good design, simply because the best design often emerges as a complex rendering that relies on the designer, the user, the socio-cultural context and the environment. All these elements are time-specific factors that are changeable and varied as life itself. Through time, our habits and lifestyle change, as such, what good design innovates and creates through form and function, becomes inextricably tied to those changes.

The good news is that this is what makes GROOVISIONS ready to surprise their viewers every step of the way. Their aesthetic in 2 dimensions is not carried into 3 dimensional forms. Their creative enterprise for exhibition projects is about making installations specific to relationships in space: between people, products, ideas and experiences. In the same way they are able to derive timeless elements that become seductively popular in their two dimensional album sleeves, posters, artwork and products, their space creation in site specific installations ensures the same. Everyone who has seen the GROOVISIONS' chappie understands the influential possibilities of both the chappie's flat reproductions and the mannequin style chappie. They may look homogenously alike, but each version plays a role and provides its own unique sensory experience. We look at one chappie, and never get tired of seeing another. And another. And yet another again.