Eames Demetrios, In the Factory

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Charles and Ray Eames Online
0:00:14
Visit the online home of the work of Charles and Ray Eames, including the Eames foundation and the gallery.

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Check out Kymaerica
0:00:30
Eames Demetrios is Geographer-at-Large. Check out his fictionalized world Kymaerica.

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Kymaerica Video shot by Eames
0:00:45
Beautiful imagery!

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More from Eames
0:01:15
Read another interview with Eames Demetrios from PureContemporary.com

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Check out 16 of the Eames stamps
0:01:55

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You've probably seen this chair
0:02:16
If not, take a closer look.

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Have you ever seen a Kymaerica plaque?
0:03:06
See a video of Eames Demetrios reading one of his plaques.

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A Gathering of Elephants
0:04:20
Learn more about the film work of Eames Demetrios by watching his film, A Gathering of Elephants, about the small plywood elephants designed by his grandparents.

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Interested in Toy Trains?
0:04:39
Visit the Eames Office for more fun information.

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Intrigued by the In the Factory series?
0:05:00

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Read a book about Eames
0:05:33
Interested in the work of the Eames family? Eames Demetrios wrote a primer about his grandparents and their work, and you can check it out on Amazon.

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Check out an In the Gallery video
0:05:50

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Channels: Contemporary ArtEames DemetriosExhibitions

Eames Demetrios visits the Indianapolis Museum of Art and the Nugget Factory to discuss his role in the Eames Office, his grandparents, Charles and Ray Eames and explains the incredible world of Kymaerica.

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00:00:05 So, my name is Eames Demetrios, and I'm a filmmaker. I make mostly short films. I am also the director of the Eames office, which was founded by my grandparents,

00:00:13 and I have been sort of in charge of communicating, preserving and extending their work, and then I'm Geographer-at-Large for Kymaerica, which is an alternative Universe I am creating.

00:00:28 The simplest way to think of the Kymaerica project, I think, is that it's like writing a novel, but putting every page in a different place. So what it is, I have created this story in my dreams that this story is all interlinked eventually,

00:00:39 but it's going to take hundreds, if not thousands, of plaques to do that and so the plaques are bronze plaques, not dissimilar to what you would see if you went to a historic marker,

00:00:48 and they tell us a story and the thing about it is that, there is humor in it, but it's not a joke on the people who are there. I mean, I enjoyed Borat as much as the next person,

00:01:04 I thought it was very funny, but a lot of that was dependent on the sort of idea that the people who he was interacting with didn't know what was going on.

00:01:12 Whereas this, I wanted you to be able to walk over to it and tell somebody it was part of a work of fiction and still be just be as rewarding. Now, it is always kind of fun to be the person to watch the person

00:01:23 who realizes that but it doesn't depend on that. It is just like you know if you read Moby Dick, you don't throw it down after 100 pages saying, "Well, this isn't true."

00:01:37 Charles and Ray were, you know, are usually ranked as the most important designers of the 20th century. I mean there are certainly any number of candidates and doesn't really matter who is the most,

00:01:47 but they are very important and they are very special people, and I think that they had a very holistic vision of design and the stamp I'm wearing is actually a very helpful graphic.

00:01:56 We just do a series of stamps for the post office, they're coming out next week on Charles' 101st birthday and one of the chairs, it's on the stamps is the aluminum group

00:02:06 which is probably a chair that many of your audience members showing online or whatever are very familiar with, but may not identify it with Eames,

00:02:16 but it's actually one of the most, you know, important and beautiful chairs that they design, and the reason I'm saying that is that in the same year in 1958 that they went there, they did that.

00:02:27 They also went to India and found at the National Institute of Design in India, which is also fifty years old this year.

00:02:32 So, they never saw that as a big, you know, as really a stretch, it was just part of this whole way of how you approach the world, and that's I think what, you know,

00:02:38 to me design is really willingness to surrender yourself to the journey, and I think that they, you know, embodied that.

00:02:49 But I think it does have to do with sort of a juggling act of ideas and waiting for a feeling that they're sitting properly in their appropriate final position.

00:03:01 So there may be something that I have been thinking about for a long time, like the Kymaerica project is something that in my mind I have been working on for about fifteen years.

00:03:10 For a long time, I was taking all these pictures. I knew they related to something and then finally that something revealed itself to me,

00:03:19 I felt like there was a story happening outside the frame of all these pictures that I was taking, I mean, I have seen a lot of pictures.

00:03:25 Then, I was finally able to put a finger on what it was and, why I was working on it, how I would do it.

00:03:37 That maybe that they see possibilities, maybe that they are transported to a place. I think a lot of it turns out to be about creating a world for people.

00:03:49 I guess I am always looking at maps. I have been doing a lot of traveling lately which has been, you know, very rewarding. It can be fun as a tourist, but it is also fun when it's in the context of some kind of work,

00:04:00 because we usually end up seeing people more what it is like in their regular life because we do, you know we all work and so therefore you're kind of a little bit more on the inside of that community, even if it's in your own country, let alone in a foreign place.

00:04:19 Well, I do think, you know, I mean, "The General" by Buster Keaton is pretty perfect, "Lady Eve" is very perfect, "Aguirre, the Wrath of God" is perfect in its own way

00:04:32 and is a great film. Of our family's film, I spend a lot of time with them. I think the "Toy Trains" film is also just, you know, a total gem.

00:04:43 How can you leave out Bunuel? "Exterminating Angel" is fantastic and so that, I guess, those would be my favorite films. In terms of ones this year, I haven't seen enough to make a meaningful comment.

00:05:00 I think I would end up being something like this. I think that the main sort of, you know, random factor is that part of my life has ended up being responsible for design.

00:05:13 I mean, in the sense that's driven by lot of circumstances, but mostly the fact that my grandparents happen to do this amazing body of work.

00:05:21 So I think that if I weren't doing what I've been doing, I'd probably be much more focused on the story telling part of my work

00:05:29 and I mean, I think one of the things I enjoy about the Kymaerica part is that if I hadn't been born after the development of a socioeconomic system that could support film making,

00:05:41 not to mention technological system that could do film making, I still could've done Kymaerica. So I enjoy that. I think that is kind of a nice aspect of it.

00:05:54 Alright, it was my pleasure.