Memory Foam

Superhouse and Friedman Benda present Memory Foam, a virtual exhibition of new work by OrtaMiklos, the design duo of Leo Orta and Victor Miklos Andersen.
Memory Foam includes the first ever design video game as an interactive way to experience OrtaMiklos’s work.

Scroll to explore the stunning imagery, play the video game and read a text by writer Alice Bucknell.

In 1965, as the pop rebels of New York’s avant-garde art scene busied themselves with silk-screen soup cans and staging “happenings” around Manhattan, a 20-year-old Ohio boy was thinking about chairs. One of the most significant conceptual artworks of the 20th century, Joseph Kosuth’s nonchalantly named One and Three Chairs ruptured the increasingly shaky relationship of object, image, and text. A half-century later, following the advent of the internet, the proliferation of digital technologies, and a global pandemic that foregrounds our mediated experience of the world through both, the French-Danish creative duo OrtaMiklos (Leo Orta and Victor Miklos Andersen) has returned to the humble piece of furniture. In Memory Foam, OrtaMiklos debuts a new series of chairs with Friedman Benda within an innovative virtual exhibition hosted by Superhouse that takes the form of an immersive game environment. 

The pandemic forced Andersen to return to his childhood home for the first time in over a decade. As the days crawled by in this quiet, remote village - each virtually indistinguishable from the next - time had this strange way of dilating; identities became disassociated, and old memories bubbled up to the surface. The set of fourteen chairs made during this uncanny time embody the artifice of memory - as a candy-colored construction, both vivid and unnatural - as well as being an homage to the friends and family members who helped out along the way. Splotches of fluorescent powder coating, tacky rubber, and bulbous foam give each chair a unique identity and tactile feel, while their wriggling, spaghetti-like steel legs recall the psychedelic exuberance of Windows’ iconic 3D pipes screensaver. Suspended between an organic and industrial affect, blurring digital aesthetics and physical presence, the chairs, OrtaMiklos reason, ought to inhabit their own world - a kind of playable virtual memory palace. Teaming up with artist and game designer Guillaume Roux, that’s exactly what the duo did. 

Built in the game engine Unreal Engine 4, the game - collaboratively augured by OrtaMiklos and Roux, with experimental sound design from Antonio Davanzo and scriptwriting by Kristian Arnoldi - is an amalgamation of digital and physical realities. Its undulating landscape unfurls like a classic RPG - merging the atmospheric giddiness of 90s-era Pokémon with the hi-fidelity graphics and total sensory immersion of Fortnite - where players assume the identity of OrtaMiklos’s chairs and complete a series of quests. 

(A roleplaying game, abbreviated as RPG, is a game in which players assume the roles of characters in a fictional setting. In a video game context players typically advance through a story quest, and often many side quests, for which their characters gain experience and abilities.)

Kicking off with a simulated nature level, chair-morphic players zoom across a Superstudio-like gridded landscape coated in supersaturated wriggling plants and 3D lamps sculpted in VR by Roux. From there, they can ascend a 3D mountainscape with color bands like China’s Danxia landforms, develop superpowers by ingesting psychoactive plants, opt-in for a mini game involving a cave hermit, and eventually, arrive at a spaceship-like dinner party at one of OrtaMiklos’s table sets.

Crucial to the ethos of the game is its collaborative development and democratic potential - built by five artists in under three months and playable from anywhere, it broadens both access and audience, bleeding beyond art and design circuits into gamer subcultures. Plans for an architectural IRL debut that blurs the public-private divide and features projected livestreams on the streetscapes of NYC, Copenhagen, and Paris are well underway. This hugely ambitious, cross-disciplinary project is typical of OrtaMiklos’s exploratory practice; the video game-as-exhibition format - the first of its kind in the design world - is “an exciting opportunity to kick the ball in the wrong direction” - something the young designers hope to expand on in the years ahead.

Chair Design
OrtaMiklos

Artistic Direction
OrtaMiklos and Guillaume Roux

Video Game Development
Guillaume Roux

3D Modeling
Octave Rimbert-Rivière

Sound Design
Antonio Davanzo

Sound Composition
Amorobot

Script
Kristian Arnoldi

Typography
Jules Durand