I was working as a bartender back in 1999 when a habitual client entered and proudly removed from her back pocket a wallet she’d created entirely from duct tape. I don’t know how she did it, but the item was a perfectly functioning billfold, complete with the full roster of slots, nooks, and crannies—she’d even devised multi-colored versions for family and friends. The project was noteworthy for its conversion of the utilitarian into, well, the utilitarian, but it was mild compared to the huge ambitions of For Use/Numen. The Viennese/Croatian design collective has made a name of late or their expansive, gossamer, spidering art/design installations constructed from duct tape’s stickier cousin, packing tape.

Packing Tape Art Installation. Designed by Use/Numen

Challenging the Conceptions of Public Space

The ongoing Packing Tape installations come with a roster of impressive statistics. To date, For Use/Numen has created five like installations, each different in character and locale. The tally includes two in Vienna, one in Belgrade, one in Berlin, and one in Frankfurt; venues vary from the modest confines of an attic to the expansive caverns of the gorgeous Odeon (a former Viennese stock exchange building). Let’s hope this last usage forecasts a more congenial use for such spaces. It’s certainly more beautiful and cost-effective than any of the business that goes on among the hollows of global money movers. And speaking of cost effectiveness, the accountings for these installations are modest: 530 rolls of transparent self-adhesive tape (and two working days) were all that was required for the eye candy of the Odeon installation.

The former feat came courtesy of an intriguing constraint. As explained by For Use’s Christoph Katzler, “The installation is based on an idea for a dance performance in which the form evolves from the movement of the dancers between the pillars… The dancers are stretching the tape while they move, so the resulting shape is a recording of the choreography.” The installation thus provides a multi-layered map of movement, while also proposing a new way to use vertical space. While that last might be stretching it a bit—unless we’re to evolve toward a more spider-like mode of locomotion—For Use has definitely given us something to think about (and gawk at). Let’s hope they take this show statewide soon—I’d love to see it within the gilded halls of the Hearst Castle, or the great room of the Biltmore mansion, or the lobby of Miami’s Delano…

Via FastCompany.