Noir

The first book to be published on the work of their partnership (in 2001), Noir is the essential primary source for understanding the theoretical and conceptual underpinnings for Dunne & Raby‘s work. Consisting of three elements - a ‘manifesto‘ on the possibilities of ing with and for the ‘secret life‘ of electronic objects; notes for an embryonic network of critical ers and, most famously, the presentation of the Placebo Project - a prototype for a critical poetics enacted around electronic furniture-objects - Noir offers an in-depth exploration of one of the most seminal projects of the last two decades, one that arguably initiated speculating through in its contemporary forms. By detailing the logic and character of the objects that were constructed; the involvement of users with these objects over-time, and in the creation of a new kinds of spatially and temporally distributed moments of critique and engagement with things, Noir presents the case-study of the Placebo projectas a far more complex and subtler project than is often thought. As a bold and in many ways unprecedented experiment in writing and book ing, Noir is itself an instance of the speculative propositional it expounds.