Anthony Dunne & Fiona Raby
«Design noir»
February 22 - May 10, 1998
CAFETERIA

Anthony Dunne, graduated in Industrial Design from the National College of Art and Design, Dublin, 1986 and from the Royal College of Art, London, 1988. He lived in Tokyo for two and half years, working in the Sony Design Centre on conceptual designs for TVs, Radios, Walkmans and props for a film by Wim Wenders, and later as a freelance designer on projects for NEC, Daiko Lighting, Kei'ichi Irie Architects and Toyo Ito Architects.
On returning to London, he taught at the Royal College of Art, Architectural Association and Bartlett School of Architecture.

Fiona Raby, graduated in Architecture (1985 and 1988), worked in Tokyo for two and half years, with Kei'ichi Irie Architects et Toyo Ito Architects on varied projects including conceptual studies and exhibitions fusing electronic technologies with architectural contexts. On returning to London, worked with Pierre d'Avoine Architects. Currently studio tutor in the Architecture Department at the Royal College of Art, London.

Anthony Dunne, an industrial designer, and Fiona Raby, an architect, have been collaborating on projects for the past five years. Their partnership explores the social, psychological and aesthetic dimensions of everyday life in relation to electronic technology through a mixture of commissions and academic works. They regard themselves as researchers, and design proposals as their medium, and their projects space between architecture, industrial design, research and fine art. Their practice is concerned with making visible the invisible dynamics of interaction with electronic technology, and drawing attention to how electronics shape and limit our psychological and social experience of everyday life.

In the Cafeteria at the MAGASIN, Dunne & Raby present a new installation/research.
« Design noir is an investigation into plausibility, values and fiction. It challenges the 'design-lite', disneyfication, and hollywoodisation of electronic product mediated popular culture. It provides a distancing technique to highlight the current situation, not amplifying or parodying current culture, but diving beneath the surface to expose new tendencies, rejecting imposed images of stability and meeting more complicated needs centering on contradictions, instability and risk which currently are not met through the culture of products supporting our everyday existence. Design noir deals with psychological narratives that sit somewhere between reality and fiction. »
D. & R.