Twin (Technology/Art Induced) Architectural Daydreams

On a sunny September afternoon, I found myself fighting through crowds of metropolitan art-goers, hipster-technologists and pro-longed-adolescent-adults, grazing amusedly in a tall, open, window-less room at the MOMA’s Talk to Me exhibition, amidst an assortment of flat screen monitors, tastefully-colored infographics, blinking LEDs and beeping.1 Halfway through my procession through this spec-tacle, I circled back to the room center and found myself curiously face-to-face with a seemingly unremarkable floor lamp, except for an unusual spongy beige section on the lamp-neck. A parody on the classic British Anglepoise Lamp, this piece humorously titled Stran-gle Poise Lamp, was designed to be strangled to death. To turn off the lamp, one must wrap their hands around the spongy beige neck and squeeze out its metaphorical life, slowly dimming the light until both object and human are literally in the dark. Designed by James Chambers, the Strangle Poise Lamp is part of a line of aggression-absorbing products intended to provide safe ways to live out fanta-sies planted into our minds by violent films.