BLOCK

Two-thirds of the world's population has a smartphone. And moments without rrrrrrrings, pings, pushes and Likes are rare. Almost a luxury you could say. BLOCK helps you find a healthy balance between being connected and when not. Simply because smartphones have no connection in this modern and stylish version of the Faraday Cage (1836).

It functions as a beacon of space, rest, attention and silence in these hyper-connected times. But it’s also a statement about breaking the habit of having a smartphone always on you, or in sight. In BLOCK our smartphones now have a fixed place where they can no longer interrupt. And this might even help us notice how much we used it. And how hooked we are.

Team BLOCK
Fabian Sapthu & Ernst Koning

INLINE starts from the observation that the line between online and offline no longer holds. BLOCK is the one name in the season that draws it again — not by argument, but by physics. Inside the aluminium shell a phone is still a phone; it simply stops receiving. The principle is Faraday’s. What Fabian Sapthu and Ernst Koning added is the form: an object made to stay on a desk or a table, so that being unreachable has a fixed place.

In The Vitrine of the Gallery Lounge, BLOCK stands among works that live on both sides of the line. It is their counterweight: a reminder that the condition INLINE describes is one you can still step out of — by choice, and for as long as you like.