[NetBehaviour] The Function of Dysfunction.

[marc garrett]

The Function of Dysfunction.

By Dore Bowen

Can artists refigure the world by altering the way users engage with 
equipment? Clearly, the functional objects we users engage with on a 
daily basis have social values imbedded within their design. Cutlery, 
for instance, presumes a certain distance and civility between a diner 
and her meal; handkerchiefs rest on the assumption that bodily fluids 
are unsightly and are best disposed of in a decorative fashion; picnic 
benches encourage a communal sort of outdoor gathering and privilege the 
family-unit. Toothpicks, coin-pouches, bucket seats, light switches, 
mailboxes, all have a social function. . . and the list goes on. It 
stands to reason that if an artist alters equipment, this also shifts 
the way users relate with the object, and thus the shared social values 
that inform its design. What would a picnic bench that affords a certain 
amount of control on the part of each individual-allowing each 
participant to isolate and convene as desired-do to the nuclear family 
and its dynamics, or to family law? Unfortunately, this proposition is 
more complicated than it seems. For to design such equipment already 
presumes the social values that inform conception, design, and 
production to be otherwise. In other words, unless the notion of the 
family unit as a self-organizing entity already exists, and unless 
social convention-and by extension the economic and political structures 
within which the bourgeois family is an essential element-shifts, the 
picnic table I described would not be designed, produced, sold, or used.

Certain works produced by Fluxus artists working in the 1960s and 1970s 
get around this design paradox by uncoupling and reorganizing 
equipmental structures. This uncoupling produces a "missing link" which, 
in turn, makes the equipment open-ended or, in certain cases, 
dysfunctional. The user must therefore imagine the larger system, which 
the object is a part of in order to complete the work. Employing 
twentieth-century philosopher Martin Heidegger's theory of equipment in 
Being and Time, I find that in visualizing the missing link the viewer 
must also consider the practice of equipment, its functional assignment, 
the encounters it makes possible, and the social activities it 
participates in.

http://switch.sjsu.edu/mambo/switch23/the_function_of_disfunction_3.html