Bottle Flip Bottles

Bottle Flip Bottles is a research and design project.

Digital and physical environments have become inextricable, different but not separate. Our perception of reality must therefore adapt to this new circumstance, shaping a new type of reality, one which we can refer to as hyper-reality. The term meme on the other hand was first introduced by the biologist Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book “The Selfish Gene”, constituting an original complement to Darwin’s theory of biological evolution. With this new concept Dawkins shifts evolution from the particular chemical basis of genetics to a wider concept of “self replicant units of transmission”, counterposing genes (in the case of biological evolution) to memes, referred to human behaviour and cultural evolution. The internet meme is a type of these memes, which spreads through social media, mostly with humorous or sarcastic content. Memes are not always exactly copied; they may be refined, modified or combined otherwise with other memes to create new ones. Memes change over time evolving from one to another. We understand this phenomena as a collective human design process.

Could this logic be applied to physical objects? Do certain designs have the capacity to trigger or intensify a viral phenomenon? Based on the worldwide-spread meme of the bottle flip challenge, this project seeks to design a series of hyper-real objects, capable of working in both physical and virtual realities: a series of bottle flip water-bottles whose shape and materiality are focused on the perfect landing and therefore on an intensified viral spread through social media. Bottle Flip Bottles are physical objects with virtual repercussions. READ MORE

Bottle Flip Bottles is a project by Taller de Casquería (E. Fuertes, R. Martínez, L. Pérez, A. Molins, J. Sobejano) developed in 2017.