The Second Line Cocktail Service

Designer Geoffrey Mann combines cutting-edge digital technologies and time-honored craft to make thoughtful observations about materials, human emotions, and the passage of time. In The Second Line Cocktail Service, a commission for the New Orleans Museum of Art, Mann demonstrates that ordinary objects can capture extraordinary connections that happen in a fleeting moment. The undulating, dancing shapes of these drinking vessels and the accompanying animation video embody not only the cadence of jazz in New Orleans, but forever hold, in three-dimensional glass, a moment when two strangers came together.

The work of art begins with a set of cocktail glasses in skewed versions of recognizable shapes.

There's a martini glass and a wine glass...

...a champagne coupe...

...a hurricane glass and a margarita glass...

...with a cocktail shaker...

...and its lid.

In a nod to the specific drinking culture of New Orleans, Mann includes a "go cup." These small plastic cups are commonly stacked in French Quarter bars so patrons can bring along their beverage as they wander into the street.

While all the drinking glasses are recognizable, the classic shapes are interrupted with waves and ripples. Why? How was this done and what does it mean?

These glasses began with the idea that a moment can be captured in an object. On a busy night in 2016, Geoffrey Mann recorded what he heard on Frenchmen Street in New Orleans. The visiting Scottish artist was touched by a meaningful conversation with band leader Aaron Blanks, set to lively jazz on the street. Back at his studio computer, Mann used these recorded sounds to directly derive the shapes in The Second Line Cocktail Service. In Mann's computer-modeling software, the sound waves of the encounter digitally pass through the classic barware shapes. The next screen shows this digital design animation.

Hitting "pause" on the animation, Geoffrey Mann captures each glass in a unique shape altered by the sound wave's rise and fall of jazz and conversation. These digital designs were rendered in three dimensions through rapid prototyping (3D printing) in nylon. The final shaker top and lid are the printed nylon plated with gold. For the final glass objects (because glass cannot yet be printed) the nylon shape was painstakingly copied by artist Jochen Holz using traditional lamp-work glass techniques.

In The Second Line Cocktail Service, the glass and video animation act together to demonstrate how new technologies encourage us to think of familiar objects in new ways. This everyday glass barware witnessed two strangers connecting, and in its unique undulating shape will forever reflect that split second of human interaction. Geoffrey Mann's work asks us to consider that while we as users engage on an emotional level with objects around us, perhaps those objects, too, are emotionally connecting with us.