 "If travel is searching
And home has been found
I'm not stopping
I'm going hunting"
The copyright of the track may belong to the outrageous artist Bjork, but I am pretty sure
that lyrics resembling this one have been haunting the minds of many 'coolhunters' for
quite a long time. Hunters are on the look out for the next cool thing to own, the next
icon to worship and the next trend to follow. Welcome to the new era, where everybody gets
their share of fame; where consuming rules over production; where art transforms into
popular culture. What we have labeled and looked down on as "popular culture" is
having it's conceptual recreation as an art-form. Kate Moss' digitalized pictures are
being displayed at Tate Modern as artistic paintings; Hussein Çağlayan's LED dress is
all over the front pages; Turkish habits and rituals are being fancily packaged by BTURK.
Orhan Pamuk is confusing us with postmodernism. The new design of Turkish tea glasses is
making me wonder: have we reached a level where being different is actually valued over
being a part of the community? Are the run-away sheep actually having a better life than
the ones following the herd?
'Coolhunting' is a term used by marketing specialists to describe the profession of
searching for upcoming trends in fashion, industrial design, technology and pop culture.
The theory is that once the 'cool' people - defined as alpha consumers- start using a
certain product, the 'uncool' ones will follow which, in the end, will lead to a larger
market. It's no wonder that the Olsen twins have a million dollar share of Wal-mart.
According to TIME magazine, 'coolhunters' are using what is "cool" and
"exclusive" to predict the future; so they are picking up the limited designs in
a variety of areas and helping big firms integrate them into the mainstream products.
I can go on about the innovative Prada heels, or the crazy clock by Franck Muller, but I
will tone this down a little bit in order to get you accustomed to the upcoming wonders of
this column. My first 'coolfind' is Mark Z. Danielewski's "House of Leaves".
This is a rarity; postmodern, futuristic and experimental.
The book tells the story of a family that moves into a small house only to discover
something terrifyingly odd: the house is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside.
The narrator finds the Navidson Record, a document written about the creepy house by a
blind (!) man called Zampano. When characters start running, only a few words appear on
each page to quicken the reading pace. There are parts in morse code, foreign languages
and even mirrored fonts. The footnotes turn into an another story after a while and start
taking over more space. The fonts change color as well as size; the narrator changes every
now and then; there's even a list of meaningless hexadecimal numbers that are actually an
AIFF audio file that has been saved in a hex editor. There are endless mythological
references, fake interviews, eerie poems, pictures and more that relate to the house. As
the story unfolds, the structure becomes schizophrenic; words flying vertically,
horizontally and even in a vortex. I'll let Mark finish off this column with a quote from
his prologue: "This is not for you." So beware!
Yiğit Turhan (EE/IV)
yt_coolhunter@yahoo.com
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