'Goo Lounge Chair' Wooden Chair with Ornamental Features, Schimmel & Schweikle

In the functional art piece 'Goo Lounge Chair', Schimmel and Schweikle were interested in the history of ornaments and how they were always added as a visual decorative element to an already fully functioning structure. The previously futile decorative ornaments gain structural importance and add to the actual functionality of the object.

The internal structure of the 'Goo Lounge Chair' is constructed using elements from an existing wooden chair. The chair structure is completely covered in a clay-like "wood goo" made from sawdust and wood glue. For Schimmel & Schweikle this wood goo, as a material, represents the predecessor of the 3D printing wood filament since it connects material qualities of “ordinary wood” and wood filament. The wood-goo shows wood as very mouldable and flexible. This idea is taken to the next step by the 3D filament which basically is wood fibre heated and then by the 3D printing technology shaped into the desired shape.
Schimmel & Schweikle show these steps of material manipulation in the Goo Lounge Chair as there is the rough goo running over the whole structure of the chair, which at points morph into the 3D printed ornaments. The Goo supports the ornaments and vice versa.

This unique piece was exhibited in Schimmel & Schweikle's solo show 'A tree full of splinters' in the Antwerp based Everyday Gallery.

Rooted in material theory, Schimmel and Schweikle’s new series of works examines wood and its relationship to human progress, taking a close look at how it’s historical, cultural and political narratives have shaped the way we think of a design for centuries. Exploring the space between 3D modelling and craft, they invite us to reconsider the hierarchies between the handmade and then digitally manipulated. Simulated wooden ornaments assume a contiguously relational form to the texture they are mimicking, indistinguishable from the original except for the thin lines that give away it's 3d printed manufacturing. Wooden shelving in the shape of a branch, so perfectly tree-like that it replicates itself; the branches organic bulges repeated as if it were a block print. The pieces make you wonder which form would qualify as ‘more real’, an algorithmic search engine might decide on the 3D printed branches, as the articulation of physical properties that are attributed to wood are so perfectly pronounced in this digitally produced form. Baudrillard predicted that the simulation will become more real than the real, yet in the work of Schimmel and Schweikle they remain equals, assisting each other in function and form.

The dynamic duo Janne Schimmel (Dutch) and Moreno Schweikle (German) met at the renowned Design Academy in Eindhoven, the Netherlands.