Manifesto

Tools are often designated and defined by their technical functions, but another way is to see them as the embodiment of a set of rules, policies, and instructions, that determines how people interact with these apparatuses. These rules decide the possible, the desirable and the forbidden, the do’s and the don’ts; in all, they establish an artificial environment where users live, think and act, driven by the satisfaction of the said functions.

While some rules lay outside of the creator’s influence, such as the laws of physics, the social context or the political background, many policies are malleable, especially with the advent of the digital that reduced physical constraints, and opened up the freedom to rearrange and reorganize the world, in other words, to imagine and implement new laws.

If such policies can be devised at will, why not make the tool a medium of expression, a means to introduce and put forward a particular environment invented by its author? That environment would be communicated as one uses the tool, progressively integrating its underlying laws into one’s everyday life as uses repeat, so much so that the tool wouldn’t only convey the expression of a foreign outlook, but also one’s potential future.

Designers and engineers of tools shouldn’t obsess about the function and leave its effects as an afterthought. They should instead become policymakers, instigators of a subjective environment that changes people’s perspectives, they should become artists who use the intrinsic policies and laws of tools to express and drive new realities.

Korn Seang Edouard Song’s works present a different approach of tools, beyond the technical purpose, establishing them as media of artistic expression, to imagine, communicate and drive people towards new futures.