The Physical and Pop Inventions of Yuri Suzuki

Designer, DJ, product designer, sound artist... London/Stockholm-based creator Yuri Suzuki is man of many titles. After a stint at Maywa Denki in Japan, Suzuki went on to hone his product design at RCA in London before arriving where he is today working at a Stockholm design company while doing his own projects as an artist on the side.

When you look at Suzuki's website you see the words "Physical, Sound Art, and Design". Sound art and design are straightforward enough, but you don't often see "physical" used as a label in this situation. Once you see a few of his creations Suzuki's reasoning becomes quite apparent, however.
Suzuki's work is currently divided into 3 categories: Transparent Box, Re-Designing Soundscape, and Physical Value of Sound. Let's take a look at a few of his pieces from each category.

It's the same kind of automatic breakfast-making contraption that Doc made in the movie "Back to the Future" or Wallace built in "Wallace and Gromit". This machine, however, is the result of a collaboration between Yuri Suzuki and Masataka Kimura. Eggs are carried one-by-one through the giant 13-meter wide gadget before being deposited on a frying pan to be cooked sunny-side-up. Bread is sliced and then sent wobbling along to become toast. The machine even spreads your jam and butter for you. A single orange rolls down and is squeezed to make juice, while the coffee is made straight from the bean. Every step of the process is automatic. All in all, it's an absurd, overly large toy, but believe us when we say this is our highest form of praise!

This project is a rethinking and re-designing of all the meaningless "noise" we have grown accustomed to our everyday lives. This time around Suzuki demonstrated to us a workshop piece entitled "Re-Design Sound Scape - Designing Door Bell".

Simple kits for creating doorbell tones were distributed amongst the participants, with everyone then brainstorming as a team about what kind sound you need when a visitor comes calling. Then everyone made their own doorbell sounds using electromagnetics and motors. The intent here is to get us to reconsider the roles of those sounds that we should be used to hearing and deepen our understanding of these sounds by having us devise the system that creates them ourselves. Looking back at the finished results, I can't help but smile. I'm sure I'm not the only one who felt a little love for how the devices looked as they worked their hardest.

This project is pretty much as the title suggests, with pieces that mechanize the workings of sound. "Sound Chaser" (in the photo below) was displayed at Ars Electronica, and is perhaps the most widely recognized of Suzuki's creations.

"I've been doing design projects that deal with music and sound for a long time. Whether it's records or photos, movies, or music, all of media nowadays is stored invisibly on hard disks. I feel like they are being stored without any substance, that they aren't things that can be used indefinitely. That and there are many kids out there under the age of 16 who haven't ever seen a record before. I started making this type of artwork out of a desire to give people like that the chance to encounter records for the first time." (Yuri Suzuki)

Running along the top of the intricately cut record are several train-shaped "record players". The train cars are outfitted with speakers and have needles next to their tires, so they make noise as they race along the grooves of the record. The sound changes depending upon how the tracks are put together, so the variety of courses is endless. You could say that now records are not the prized possessions of collectors and DJs but train tracks, too, but you could also they are playthings built with unlimited possibilities for a generation that knows nothing of vinyl.

All of Suzuki's creations make it clear that his awareness is always geared towards issues of sound and music along with the laws of physics. His artwork conveys invisible sounds and the means by which things move to viewers as fun experiments. Their concepts are straightforward, clear, and free of trifling technicalities. Add on a pop design and you have the recipe for something good - great, in fact. Looking at his work, it's uncanny how he is able to make machines seem charmingly human. You can see the artwork of Yuri Suzuki until July 3rd at the Nam June Paik Art Center in Seoul. There's no telling what types of inventions this artist will unveil next to dazzle and delight us.

Text_Keiko Kamijo

Yuri Suzuki
Product designer and musician Yuri Suzuki was born in Tokyo, Japan in 1980. In 1999, he embarked upon his interdisciplinary career by working for the Japanese art unit Maywa Denki, where he developed a strong interest in the relationship between music and technology. In 2005, he moved to London to study at the Royal College of Art and supplemented his studies by working for engineer-designer Moritz Waldemeyer. Upon graduation in 2008, Yuri opened his own studio and has quickly begun to show works in venues around the world, including his first solo exhibition 'The Physical Value of Sound' on view now at Clear Gallery in Tokyo.

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