Cycles

Matter becomes forms become objects become commodities become matters of exchange circulating across borders, through diverse socio-cultural and geopolitical contexts, through multiple hands, tactile interactions and bodily movements that perform an unauthored ideology of production and exchange. What is this ideology and how is it in service of the many participants who unwittingly engage in it?

Matter becomes forms become objects become commodities become matters of exchange circulating across borders, through diverse socio-cultural and geopolitical contexts, through multiple hands, tactile interactions and bodily movements that perform an unauthored ideology of production and exchange. What is this ideology and how is it in service of the many participants who unwittingly engage in it?

Cycles uses design research to infiltrate the multinational lifecycle of electronic commodities in order to recenter the human through tangible design interventions. This multi-episodic endeavour focuses on the smartphone, Manufacturing being its first iteration. The ubiquitous modern device is a global product, puzzled together of physical components, sourced and assembled through a global supply network comprising multiple cultural sensitivities and political agendas.

Through a process-based design research approach, Cycles amasses a multifaceted geopolitical, sociocultural and personal data archive that is materialised through cross-disciplinary multi-sensorial collaborations, workshops and exhibitions.

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2019
Grantee: Kiki Mager

Mager received the Grant Programme for Talent Development by the Creative Industries Fund NL and was invited researcher and participant for the exhibition GEO–DESIGN: Alibaba. From Here To Your Home at Van Abbemuseum in 2018. In 2017 Mager participated at the Checkpoints & Chokepoints ArtEZ Master pilot programme in Arnhem, presented as Global Graduate speaker at the Design Indaba festival (Cape Town, ZA) and was a collaborative grant holder with designer Gabriel A. Maher of the IASPIS international residency programme (Stockholm, SE). In 2016 Mager received a BA Cum Laude from the Man & Wellbeing department at the Design Academy Eindhoven and spoke at the symposium Intersectional Perspectives on Design, Politics and Power in Malmö (SE), hosted by the Decolonising Design collective, with whome Mager co-published the article 5000times – Mechanism behind the design of smart high-tech devices.