In their first joint solo exhibition, artists Cécile B. Evans and Yuri Pattison revisit the designer couple Ray and Charles Eames’ legendary collaboration with the computer company IBM.
The artists designed an IBM pavilion for the 1964 New York World’s Fair, in the form of an exhibition including the production of a new film work along with graphics, signs, and spaces for a new way of living with computers. The Eames’ questioned what social life looks like when influenced by new technologies, and the connection between Man and Machine. The film ‘Think’, broadcast on 22 screens, became the centerpiece of the pavilion presentation. It proposed digital solutions for both everyday situations and complex design challenges; ranging from sitting arrangements for an evening meal to urban planning.
This ambitious project has been reconsidered by Cécile B. Evans and Yuri Pattison. For their exhibition at Helga Maria Klosterfelde Edition they have redesigned three plexiglass chairs from the Eames Office as a contemporary reworking. Similarly to the 1960’s pavilion, here chairs become living sculptures, as films and graphics interrupt their surfaces. The question, Evans and Pattison ask, is the same as the question the Eames’ asked over half a century ago: how do we, you and I, want to live in the future?
