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string.

Christiane Burklein / www.livegreenblog.com

Numen/For Use is a design collective who works ranges from scenography to

industrial and spatial design through to conceptual art. Their new project, String:
an inhabitable social sculpture, is now installed in Vienna.
Three industrial designers Sven Jonke, Christoph Katzler and Nikola Radeljkovi
formed Numen/For Use and since 1999 they have taken their work beyond the
boundaries of industrial design in its strictest sense.
Their artistic and conceptual research leads to works like String, which is now
liveable in Vienna. Liveable because the designers themselves call String a selfbearing habitable social structure.

Numen/For Use

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Its a large, inflatable geometric object, with thin parallel ropes tied at the sides; with
the laws of physics, when the volume is inflated these ropes become taut and form
a grid pattern, a bit like a jungle gym. And anyone venturing inside the volume.

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becomes part of the three-dimensional installation. The pictures clearly show how
this installation works, you can see people caught in what the creators of String
call Dadaistic poses, theyre in unnatural positions, and you get the idea of the
immensity and the lack of space, at the same, all measured by the grid of threads.
For years now, Numen/For Use has been delivering installations that are an
invitation to explore the space, where visitors and their interaction are an
important piece in the puzzle to find their place.
We really like the idea of how these ropes untangle, almost like being inside a
3D architectural model, where the idea of play and movement is like a fourth
dimension, the dimension of fun and games.