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| The Snowcrash office (2001) with two Chip loungers. Photo: Åke E:son Lindman. |
Snowcrash is quite a wonderful, very compressed story of innovation and ideas, concentrating on the future, combined with technology – but the centre was always the human being.
– Ilkka Suppanen
From the Radio Days of the desktop computer – two businessmen engaged in a very serious conversation: “Says here … ‘The internet is the future of business.’ We have to be on the internet.” The younger guy stops typing on his Think Pad (this is an IBM commercial after all), considers the value of the message for two exceedingly long TV seconds, then forwards the simple question “Why?” First guy eyes through his papers again: “It doesn’t say.”
Where were you in 1997 when such concerns circulated and many people (as a matter of fact) worried about becoming mere passengers on this novelty called the “information superhighway” which made them question their own place in the world, with and within this expendable new technology. Hence the big little “Why?”
But look, there’s another side of the story furthered by a group of freaks and geeks who came from the land of the ice and snow (and the thousand lakes). These young architects, designers and creators rose from the mire of Finland’s deep depression in the early 1990s to espouse the technology of the near future with eager anticipation, viable ideas and straightforward solutions. Their beliefs even seemed to have some ground in the shape-of-things-to-come optimism of the 1960s and its Pop furnishings which aligned with flamboyance, openness to new forms and materials, and a built-in readiness for moving through space. (As Nicholas Negroponte suggested in Being Digital in 1995, “Digital living will include less and less dependence upon being in a specific place at a specific time, and the transmission of place itself will start to become possible.”)
And though they took their name from a 1992 sci-fi novel by Neal Stephenson, Snowcrash’s philosophy was rather to be found in compassionate sources such as Lewis Mumford’s essay (whether they had read it or not) “Technics and the Future” from 1954: “Let Man Take Command. Instead of continuing to mechanise and regiment man, we must undertake just the opposite operation, we must humanise the machine, restoring lifelike attributes, the attributes of selectivity, balance, wholeness, autonomy and freedom, in every department where work must be done. To follow that course, in all its ramifications and implications, will be to lay down the foundations for a new age: not the ultimate Age of the Machine, as pictured by the cockeyed writers of science fiction, but the first real Age of Man.”
The first Snowcrash show at the thirty-sixth edition of the Salone del Mobile in Milan in 1997 was a dreamlike success. (And how passé wasn’t Reyner Banham’s old future forecast that technology “would probably bring furniture to an end, or at least render it invisible”?) In this appointed world of furniture design and such, these silver-shirted “young nobodies” (as they would look back on their youthful selves a couple of decades later) were the band of prodigies to bring in the alien stuff that people knew by instinct that they had been waiting for: the Snowcrash pieces were designed to let humans take command and play around with technology, allow us to relax and feel good in its presence or company, and the beauty of these objects was of course evident too.
And here is a first-hand account by the British design critic and curator Jane Withers who “wandered into what looked like a campsite for nomadic cybernauts” in the Galleria Facsimile that spring: “There was a flotilla of silver Airbag cushions and a forest of softly glowing lights that seemed to breathe and gently sigh like exhausted moons. There were curvy snowboard loungers like acid-coloured bananas and an angular ‘workstation’ that looked like a hybrid between Easy Rider [1969] and some kind of gynaecological equipment, but turned out to be a recliner for computer geeks straddling the World Wide Web (as it was known back then) as if it were a Harley Davidson.”
Her introduction to Gustaf Kjellin’s Snowcrash 1997–2003 is (roughly speaking) as good as this pretty unimaginative book gets. The only kind of journalism involved in Kjellin’s publication is the loads of interviews that he has piled up in the text as nameless talking heads, with note numbers to be decoded in the margin which will provide you with the who’s who. Although the reading is messy, it does offer a good deal of very useful quotes from the Snowcrash bunch (and some rubbish generic praise from the business – the editor of the book is one of the cofounders of Snowcrash, Ilkka Suppanen). Considering the sorry state of the copy editing, one can only imagine the poor quality of the manuscript. The joy of this book however is the exhibition Snowcrash at Nationalmuseum in Stockholm, curated by the same Gustaf Kjellin.
The silly captions on the museum labels aside (they do not even seem to have been written by an adult), Snowcrash – the exhibition – is actually something to revel in. “What you see in this exhibition is a twenty-five-year-old projection of the future. And it was done with a great deal of excitement because the future was unknown. Today we are forced to make new projections but nobody really wants to do it because it feels uncomfortable, knowing how the future actually looks like. And that is what is so beautiful about museums because you can take these trips back and forth in time,” says Kjellin.
“Even though this is a company that possibly was one of the first on the internet, it’s surprising that there was nothing to find about them on the internet today. So we had to start digging. It was more like an archeological excavation and nobody that we spoke with really had the whole picture of the company.”
Nine-tenths of these not-so-long-ago-pieces that Snowcrash ever produced is on show at Nationalmuseum. The first encounter with these fastidiously thought-out designer items, fashioned for an age that made it more fun to compute, clearly demonstrates how Snowcrash’s cerebrations and celebrations of the whole “cyberspace” culture was a world going forward from space-age designer Neal Small’s avowal in Life magazine in 1968 that “Furniture doesn’t have to be dark and gloomy, like a whale that fall asleep in your living room.”
The author/curator possesses two Snowcrash originals himself: the aforementioned “acid-coloured banana” lounger Chip (1996), a pressed-plywood rocker sheathed in polyurethane, and it is the sole article from Snowcrash that arrived in a range of zingy colours. The sculptural Chip – which made its user look up at the sky and wonder at our place in the digital universe – took a lot from Olivier Mourgue’s similarly floored and anthropomorphically-shaped Bouloum chair (1968) which has the same kind of “legs” but a wider body and a “head”. Chip is stirring about in the 1960s (when the future was looking so bright), it is like a tongue that wants to lick Eero Aarnio’s candylike Pastilli (1967), just as much as it dwells in its own distinctive “now” with a keen signal that the best is yet to come.
His other Snowcrash piece of choice is Arik Levy’s Infinite Light (1999), a sixty-minute-long endlessness of an unchanging lightbulb shining on a TV or computer screen, which is just as contemplative or vexing as watching Andy Warhol’s fixed eight-hour film of the Empire State Building, Empire (1964), which resembles the top of a rocket ready to launch. When Levy presented his piece in the late 90s it was stored on a VHS tape. Way, way into the dismal future that is today, Kjellin keeps it on a tiny flash drive.
On a video link from Milan, where he teaches at the country’s foremost technical university, Politecnico, Ilkka Suppanen talks about the death-or-glory beginnings of Snowcrash by the mid-1990s: “Finland had just overcome the worst financial crisis since the Second World War. The Finnish currency at the time, markka, had lost half of its value and the unemployment figures were up to twenty per cent. And we were the young designers of this period, coming out of the school when there was no actual work. We tried to do something with our means. There was financial struggle but we tried to do something different.”
It is a pleasure to listen to Ilkka Suppanen. He speaks with undistorted wonder. “Snowcrash was founded twenty-five years ago, and now you have to imagine me in my late twenties, sitting in a bar in Milan with three of my friends. And as Finnish boys we would be drinking, but we would also be talking about design. And we were looking into things at the Salone del Mobile because we recognised the importance of this place. But we felt that there could be a possibility that if we bring our own stuff here, it could be interesting. And that bar talk led to the foundation of Snowcrash. We started developing a concept for an exhibition which we would bring to Milan one year later, in 1997, to Galleria Facsimile.”
“And quite early, we realised that our difficult names – Timo Salli, Ilkka Suppanen, Teppo Asikainen and Ilkka Terho – would not be recognised or remembered, and we realised that we were going to need a name for the exhibition. We wanted to use the title from Neal Stephenson’s science-fiction novel as a name because it is cool and Nordic, and because in the book snow crash is a drug which comes through the screen at the moment when the computer crashes. At that time, we thought that this was an interesting phenomenon – the moment when you turn from digital to analogue, the real world, and we realised that a lot of our products were dealing with both: how you sit when you are in the digital world, how you look at the screen, et cetera. So, our aim was somehow to be part of the two worlds and really look at how the physical world would change our lives, the way we behave, in a world in which we foresaw a future much more digital.”
In 1989 a group of student architects and designers, who would eventually consolidate into Snowcrash, took over a disused Nokia factory in downtown Helsinki to band together before the start of the new decade and what everyone sensed would erupt in a grave economic crisis. Their pre-Snowcrash days were determined by the possibilities of a future considerably braver than the sanitised push-button tomorrow of the 1960s.
Suppanen developed his itinerate-friendly Nomad Chair during his move-around days in Amsterdam in the early 90s, and it went into production in 1994 (followed by the Flying Carpet sofa offshoot in 1997). The idea must have derived from George Nelson’s Catenay chair (1963), with a flexible undercarriage of spring steel mounted on the same kinds of bars. But Suppanen’s solution was a balancing act of thick felt for the seating, a bit of Joseph Beuys-y repose and comfort for the digital age, and it was easy to dismantle as a carry-on piece on a flight or a move to the next flat.
A Snowcrash design principle was that also the office could be of the roaming kind. One of Snowcrash’s most famous pieces, however, is the stationary Netsurfer (1995) by Teppo Asikainen and Ilkka Terho, which indeed looks like a cross between a chopper and a gynaecological chair, a development perhaps from Alien-Bowie’s turquoise lounger in front of his wall of television sets in The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976). (Neither the book nor the exhibition poses the essential question what gamers would make of this strange piece today.) Netsurfer is from the days when most computers were ugly office-grey cans around cathode-ray tubes, and this can was put on a “pedestal” of steel – while its human user got a sure-fire lounger throne in black leather to lie down on, get the motor runnin’, head out on the highway and explode into space.
At the Salone del Mobile in 1996, the quartet with the difficult names got a twenty-square-metre cubbyhole at the far end of the Milan Furniture Fair, but still left a mark with the Netsurfer, Chip (which grew out of that seat), and the animate floor lamp Glowblow (1996), designed by Vesa Hinkola, Rane Vaskivuori and Markus Nevalainen after an idea to try to reproduce the fascinating shadows seen in comic drawings. In the Snowcrash book, Nevalainen talks about how they “tried to create a silhouette with a bag of some sorts”:
“But blowing air inside a bag was nothing new and to gain enough air from the heat produced by a lightbulb would take ages, so we borrowed a fan from one of our computers. We sewed different shapes from a textile used for parachutes, which is lightweight but still strong enough to contain the air, giving the appropriate opacity to diffuse the light source. The lamp really had this extra feature because it took on a new shape every time it deflated, like it was alive.”
For the famous Snowcrash inauguration in April 1997, Ilkka Suppanen recounts (with that marvel in his voice) how he wanted to control the LEDs in his Frozen Feather pendant lamp, which was introduced that year, by a mobile phone. “And you have to understand, this was twenty-five years ago and nobody was doing these things. It was so difficult to achieve that basically, in reality, you had to send a text message to Finland and then the lamp in Milan got the message and it turned blue. We had the ideas and the visions but the technology was not there.”
A great thing about this look-back-in-wonder exhibition at Nationalmuseum is a video from Snowcrash’s victorious time at the Galleria Facsimile – when the curator of the Stockholm show was only sixteen years old. Gustaf Kjellin has also wisely added the Snowcrash soundtrack and the moving digital fresco of (very 1990s) hexagonal ice crystals floating through space, along with one of the silver shirts that the Finns from the future were dressed in. “We had the exhibition and for us it was overwhelming,” Suppanen elucidates. “[Architect and industrial designer] Achille Castiglioni told us that this was the best exhibition of the year.”
One of the new designs at the 1997 show in Milan – which made the Snowcrash fax machine in Helsinki go bonkers as soon as the orders started to pour in – was Airbag (1996) by Suppanen and Pasi Kolhonen. Buckled up with its heavy parachute polyester straps, Airbag was a truly contemporary take on the beanbag chairs (as well as the inflatable furniture, which ironically hardly ever left the traditional shapes) of the 1960s. This clever easy chair, wrapped up in the techiest tent fabrics and gorged with lightweight polystyrene pellets, could in a really swift manner be turned into a mattress for The Bedroom at the End of the Universe. What emanated from Airbag was some of the mid-decade unfussiness that Helmut Lang completely mastered in fashion, together with some playful survival-mode aesthetics pushed by the prevailing “Y2K scare”.
Nationalmuseum director Susanna Pettersson (born in Helsinki in the 1960s) talks about the latter part of the 90s when Finland and Sweden were leaders in the development of dot-com technology and wireless communication: “Some of us remember that getting rid of the landline phones and typewriters encouraged all of us, and this was a time when ideas were born. The mentality was: pack your bag and go! And I met some of the Snowcrash members at various places in Helsinki and we talked about dreams, and of course we were all very proud of the first mobile phones and computers that we had, but first and foremost we were really curious about the future. Snowcrash certainly had the finger on the pulse maybe more than any of us could have foreseen.”
Savour these rare words of acknowledgement for (white) male creativity and achievement. When Nationalmuseum reopened in 2018 it was not just the grand old building that had been remodelled but history itself, now deracinated by the beau monde of pompous celibates who in this Feminist meltdown went straight to the vile art of unlearning, indoctrination and suppression.
When Aldous Huxley revisited his Brave New World (1932) in 1958, he noted that “If the first half of the 20th century was the era of the technical engineers, the second half may well be the era of the social engineers – and the 21st century, I suppose, will be the era of World Controllers, the scientific caste system and Brave New World.”
Anyone with human neurons knows that a museum is meant to be a place of curiosity, amusement and deep thought and learning. Nationalmuseum, which is owned by the Swedish people, was once a vehicle for centuries of accumulated cultural history. In today’s it’s-no-game Sweden, this institution has been hijacked and picked apart by fast-lane mountebanks who are in no position to educate others.
“It is usually futile to try to talk facts and analysis to people who are enjoying a sense of moral superiority in their ignorance,” argues the great Thomas Sowell. “One of the painful signs of years of dumbed-down education is how many people are unable to make a coherent argument. They can vent their emotions, question other people’s motives, make bold assertions, repeat slogans – anything except reason.”
From Snowcrash to snowflakes and back again. Ilkka Suppanen describes how Snowcrash hit the ground running when another famous trade name came to see them at the Galleria Facsimile: Ragne Bogholt – “a person who together with Robert Weil founded a company called Proventus Design, whose aim was to develop and collect design companies with long traditions. They started to collaborate with us and by October 1998 the Snowcrash company was founded, based in Stockholm. There were many exciting turns of events at the time, and Snowcrash hired the most interesting people. Every time I returned to Stockholm from Helsinki to do some design director work, there was a new person in the office, there was a new desk in there or a new machine. It was the period of dot com, of start-up companies, and the idea was to combine these spirits together with design. It became a wonderful kind of melting pot, a laboratory of ideas with designers we invited.”
“We were developing with [Swedish architect and designer] Ulrika Mårtensson a textile which has a quality of acoustic absorbent. And today, really today – this year the textile manufacturers are producing what we did back then when no one was interested in them,” says Suppanen with a lot of delight and not a hint of resentment in his voice. “We were developing a plant garden, which means that we were trying to grow plants at home with only running water. This is a technology developed by NASA in the 1960s in a quest to trying to get plants growing on Mars.”
The 1960s were in several ways a point of departure for Snowcrash. Look for instance at Richard Schultz’s timeless Dining Chair (1966) with its sophisticated aluminium frame and the mesh seating; Poul Kjærholm’s handsome PK25 chair (manufactured in 1965) in matte chrome-plated steel, entwined in the most beautiful fashion with a (yes!) flagline; Warren Platner’s Platner Stool (1966) and its thin tubular steel column, or why not Joe Colombo’s compact units, imaginably for a young David Bowie who sang about space but who would hardly dare to board an airplane? But Snowcrash brought something else to the table.
Another interior architect, Ulrika Ljungberg, who produced the company’s last show at the Salone del mobile in April 2002, describes these special energies in Kjellin’s Snowcrash 1997–2003 book: “The playful, conceptual approach to design that I had learned in Italy, with genuine ideas that went beyond mere aesthetics, was something I also saw in the Snowcrash products. And everything we did until the end with the collection and events, aimed at creating a joyous and communal spirit between people.” That year’s director at Proventus Design, Andreas Murray, told The New York Times that though Milan was nice “the consumer electronics show in Las Vegas would be a better place for our next exhibition”.
The largest building in the world (which is three times bigger than the next) was completed in 1967 north of Seattle to facilitate the construction of the Boeing 747. It is rumoured (and what a great rumour it is) that clouds are being formed inside this massiveness. In 1970, Martyn and Roger Dean designed their Retreat Pod, a plastic womb or cocoon that was all about hippie-Earth. A black one is seen in Kubrick’s Clockwork Orange (1971) – you opened a hatch, inside were hundreds of orange lights, and off you went. Monica Förster’s inflatable Cloud (2002) was one of the very last Snowcrash designs, an inhabitable cumulus (and an allusive digital-Heaven) that was made as a piece that could be carried on your shoulder to the next appointment, at home, at work, at play.
From the time when Ragne Bogholt made his call to the Snowcrash members in Helsinki in 1997 and Timo Salli answered the phone and demanded a foolish sum of money – that was more like an art installation than a workable transaction – till the closure of the Snowcrash office and showroom at Textilgatan in Stockholm in January 2003, Robert Weil had spent one hundred million Swedish crowns (€10m) on these, and the word affectionately belongs to Jane Withers, “disruptors”.
“The old industry and industrialists looked at this event with great scepticism, and this stood in stark contrast to new parties who ran fast and only saw possibilities with this technology,” Weil comments in the book. “We wanted Snowcrash to be young, live its own life, and have a drive to experiment. Therefore, we gave total freedom for the creative process, so we later could merge that with our knowledge about production and distribution and turn it into an industrial company that could compete with the major international design brands.”
The world was a bit too stagnant for Snowcrash – take a look in Paola Antonelli’s boring Workspheres catalogue for her exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2001 and you will get the picture – and likewise is this pedestrian presentation of the Stockholm exhibition where their designs are crammed together without much thought and consideration.
In his “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” from the beginning of 1996, American activist-poet John Perry Barlow defined that “We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.”
At Nationalmuseum, in this world that is today, we have the lies, hate, idiocy and dictated perceptions of the big delusional Victim Class that doesn’t know a shit about suffering and struggle. Their captions in here go all the way back to celebrate the Brave New World authoritarianism of the Social Democrats and the thought reforms and grand-scale eugenics that originated the “Swedish model” in the early 1930s.
This is all wrong. The new totalitarians should be back in school. On the other side of the ocean.
