Lost in translation

For most of us, Pictionary is the height of our attempts to draw from verbal phrases and then translate those images back into words again. But an exhibition at new London space The Gopher Hole has explored how visual to verbal translation forms interesting outcomes from iconic designs.

Five iconic chairs, by designers such as Ron Arad, Charles and Ray Eames, Michael Thonet, Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe, were first translated into a textural description that described the physical attributes of the chairs as accurately as possible.

From these descriptions a group of people drew from the text without referring to an image of the original chair. These sketches were then turned into 3D models and manufactured using rapid prototyping. The final outcomes are beautifully surreal mistranslations of the original, some of which, like the Ron Arad translation above, are partly true to their iconic chair, and others, like the Le Corbusier LC2 below, are completely unrecognisable.

Versioned Chairs runs at The Gopher Hole,
350-354 Old Street, London EC1V until 13 February 2011.