Collaging stickers: Revealing objects' relational interiority

Mochammad Mirza Yusuf Harahap, School of Design, The University of Edinburgh, United KingdomFollow

Abstract

This paper proposes a methodological approach to learning about an object's interiority, embracing two schools of thought that largely revolve around the study of objects: one that concerns the object's substance, and the other that concerns the object's relationality. In particular, the study sees an opportunity to reveal object's relationality through a deep understanding of the object's substance. In achieving the objective, the presented study found a resonating notion in the concept of interiority, which is understood as an inward-outward dialectic. Thinking of object with interiority posits a process of disassembling object's substance for building inward awareness. This study further attempt to consider how the disassembled object's substance relates to one another and, potentially, to another object. For this purpose, the study examined stickers found in Edinburgh's urban spaces. Here, the stickers are disassembled and deconstructed using collage. Collage's position as an artistic system of order—informed by its techniques—is seen as potent for dismantling the stickers' substance while simultaneously projecting their potential to relate to their surroundings. From the creation of the collages—named in this paper as Substance Drawings—the study found that the investigated urban stickers connect objects in the physical and digital worlds. Collaging stickers' substance puts this study as not only contributing in the thinking about what stickers do but also in the broader use of drawing as a method to explore object and its vast intricacy being exist in the space and time we live in.

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Author Biography

Mochammad Mirza Yusuf Harahap
Mirza is currently pursuing his PhD in Design by Practice at the Edinburgh College of Art, researching urban interiorities as networks and flows of object-relations, using drawing as his main method. Mirza is a lecturer in the Department of Architecture at Universitas Indonesia. His teaching and research practice revolves around reflection-in-action in the creative and design process, inquiring into contemporary forms of interiorisation in various settings, from domestic to urban spaces. He is fascinated by objects' agency and relationality, often using them as a framework for structuring his thinking, particularly on situational interiorisation. He also explores drawing, viewing it as both a process (a verb) and a product (a noun).