Merle Flügge’s art is made to oppose our hyper-consumerist times and to reach for a more reciprocal relationship between objects and humans. The Supertoys Supertoys project speculates on a future where artificial intelligence designs domestic objects that may be digital as well as physical. Merle calls herself “an animist”. She pursued her master’s in Interior Architecture: Research + Design at the Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam, and received the Willem De Kooning research award in 2017 for her Supertoys project.

Her publication is a nice example of animism: it’s a sponge shaped like a book but it is not a book, or actually a book that wants to be a website, but did not succeed. “Somehow it’s caught in the middle. It’s still learning. Squeeze the book and see how the website reacts.” You can find the web-based publication here.

The physical object is packaged in a nice pink gripbag, so it can keep it’s fresh perfume. You’re almost tempted to squeeze it a bit and start cleaning something!

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