Project Information
Name of the project: Kinky Furniture
Architects: The Bittertang Farm
Location: Chicago and Bainbridge Island, WA
Year (project): 2018
Furniture is as important in determining mood and spatial experience of a room as the architecture itself. Recently we produced a series of Instagram ready images designed around a specific piece of furniture and designed the ambiance and narrative around it. They are created with the intention of believability, not only in render style, but also so that someone could imagine these strange pieces going in their own home, a home which perhaps isn’t as cutting edge as most photoshoots of furniture convey. The attached images weren’t designed as a collection as is typically encountered in the furniture world but it is a collection of stories and spaces, where furniture is a character with multiple supporting characters that fill out the story or make reference to characters absent from the scene. In a way, the images can be read in a similar fashion to a renaissance painting where every element symbolizes or contributes to the overall narrative of the image.
Ten years ago, Bittertang’s interest in the production of affective images began with Britney’s Room. This was at a time when Instagram and Facebook were going through puberty and Apple had just launch the iPhone 2. Bittertang was in its baby stage, a phase where our render and photo manipulation skills were lacking. It was also a time when cute pet stuff started to gain traction on all over the internet. These cultural and social media shifts allowed us to imagine the agency that form has on its surrounding. We realized that the formal qualities of an object can take on so much more meaning when its social, physical, or digital context is considered. The carefulness with which an object is designed and crafted can often take on another life and quality when it is surrounded by other things.
