IN THE MAKING – An Investigation into Creation in Art, Design, Architecture and Technology
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Edited by Georg Trogemann, Konstantin Butz.
Contributions by Tobias Bieseke, Christian Heck, Karin Lingnau, Steffen Mitschelen, Zahra Mohammadganjee, Tiago Ive Rubini, Christian Rust, Somayyeh Shahhoseiny, Georg Trogemann / Konstantin Butz, Natalie Weinmann
| URN: | urn:nbn:de:hbz:kn185-opus4-2377 |
|---|---|
| ISBN: | 978-3-942154-62-8 |
| Subtitle (German): | An Investigation into Creation in Art, Design, Architecture and Technology |
| Publisher: | Verlag der Kunsthochschule für Medien |
| Place of publication: | Köln |
| Editor: | Georg Trogemann, Konstantin Butz |
| Document Type: | Book |
| Language: | English |
| Year of Completion: | 2022 |
| Release Date: | 2022/12/16 |
| Tag: | Architecture; Art; Design; Poiesis; Technology |
| Page Number: | 362 |
Georg Trogemann and Konstantin Butz, 5
Introduction
This book is an interim report on a series of ongoing dissertation projects at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne. Its title fulfills a double function. Like any book title, In the Making primarily points to the content. The publication addresses various issues related to poiesis, i.e., the forms of knowledge that become active when we make, create, invent, or produce something. In this case, however, the title also says something about the actual state of the works presented. The contributions are reports from doctoral projects that are halfway through, i.e., still being (re-)searched, experimented, and reflected on. Their final statements and final form have yet to be developed. A particular difficulty arises from the situatedness of these particular research approaches. The doctoral candidates have an artistic-creative background (design, art, musicology, film), but their questions and topics reach deeply into other scientific disciplines. This specific starting point deserves a closer look. (…)
Christian Rust, 17
Creation as experiment – A pragmatic approach to being in the world
Abstract
Building on the foundations of cybernetics and philosophical pragmatism, I argue for aesthetic experience and physical interactions in the (art)world without the necessity of viewing the world first and foremost with analytical eyes. I suggest the actual use of matter and tacit knowledge in the tradition of craftsmanship and a specific kind of artistic research as an addition to analytical approaches. This will be investigated through the guiding line of philosopher Andrew Pickering’s interpretation of poiesis as a “doing without knowledge.” I consider those thoughts relevant not only to art and media studies, but to any kind of interacting with the world, be it creating one’s own experiences in everyday life or enabling such experiences for others through teaching.
Natalie Weinmann, 57
The unforeseeable in the design process
Abstract
In current design processes, the unforeseeable is often regarded as a mistake. It is prevented, covered up or stylised as deliberate in retrospect. If at all, the unplanned is seen as an obstacle to overcome. With this essay, I would like to counter this tendency and address the productive moments of the unforeseeable. By exploring dimensions of a design process frequently ignored in relevant debates, I aim to make the unforeseeable, which is inherent in every design process, more tangible and illustrate its diverse manifestations. This essay explores the necessity of interruptions in chains of actions and illustrates how perception, interpretation, and a mostly unconscious handling of the unforeseeable often lead to a supposedly goal-oriented and plannable design approach. Using examples involving different forms of the unforeseeable, this essay illustrates the impact of a hands-on approach through the process of making, and the relevance of expectations, prior experience, knowledge and imagination of the designers. With this essay, I wish to raise awareness and appreciation for how those unplannable dimensions can strengthen designers and design projects and ask what must change to create space for this awareness in the future.
Steffen Mitschelen, 113
Design and the role of tools
Abstract
The disciplines of design have always been characterized by the tools available to them. In contemporary design, such tools are largely provided in the form of computer interfaces, designed to help users perform their everyday design tasks more quickly and efficiently. They ensure the feasibility and usability of design results by introducing standardized formats.
While the advantages of such tools have made them an indispensable part of today’s design practices, they simultaneously impose limitations on the design process: When using such tools, designers go from authors to operators. The tools handle design problems from fixed perspectives and define the degrees of freedom within which design work can take place.
In this essay, I reflect on how design tools affect design work and argue for a more deliberate approach to the creation and use of such tools and the models they provide.
Zahra Mohammadganjee, 153
Active experience, not knowing and unlearning – An investigation of alternatives for methods in design
Abstract
This article discusses systematic design methods, reflecting on whether they have worked in practice, and whether alternatives can be considered. For this purpose, the history of methodology in design and various opinions in this regard are reviewed. The article tries to show that the design process cannot be confined to an operating system that is predefined and sequenced, as many designers have shown. Furthermore, it describes three alternative approaches that are not necessarily far apart and can even be complementary. They articulate the precedence of intuition, not knowing, and active experience. The article focuses on the ideas of John Chris Jones, Bruce Archer, and Andrew Pickering.
Somayyeh Shahhosieny, 187
Poetic experimentation – Towards experiencing the space of agency
Abstract
Starting from the notions of experimentation and experience and the fundamental differences between them, this article aims to demonstrate how the poetic design of a place can lead to experiencing a space of agency. To this end, the discussion endeavors to illustrate the concept of poiesis in experimentation and praxis in experience. It investigates the relationship between these two notions in the context of space design. In that, the place is defined as the place to live, and those characteristics that are independent of cultures or geographical locations are examined. These aspects are considered from an ontological perspective and are encountered through a phenomenological approach in both experience and experimentation. The essential notion in the article is indubitably that of place, and the main goal is to investigate how the qualities of place that have been removed in the era of industrialization and mass production can be rebuilt and returned. The importance of addressing this issue is that our understanding of place is now detached from its characteristics as the place of living. In conclusion, some of the fundamental qualities are introduced as an instruction for poetic experimentation.
Tobias Bieseke, 257
The making of the observer – Visual perception and spaces of action in natural and artificial environments
Abstract
This essay is about the extension of human perception through technical manipulation. It focuses primarily on the description of visual perception. The ways in which technical extensions also lead to an extension of the possible spaces of action for a receiving subject are investigated. Promising research results and intentions are presented here, but in the future the focus will be on our own technical experiments, allowing us to explore the connection between visual perception and the resulting possibilities for action, such as the feedback scheme between recipient and actor.
Christian Heck, 261
Adversarial poetry – The tools of resistance
Abstract
A large number of current “social movement prediction models” are automated using Natural Language Processing (NLP) methods. Poetry presents probably the greatest challenge to this computational way of processing texts in natural language. It has a high density of ambiguity and usually plays by its own rules.
This article aims to provide an introduction to the concept of adversarial poetry, i.e. a practice of subversive resistance by composing politically motivated texts in such a way that they are misinterpreted by common NLP prediction models.
It is not only governments and their secret services that are interested in surveillance through recording and analyzing the structures and individual actors in social movements. By evaluating social media accounts, private companies and platforms such as Twitter or Facebook have also created their own instruments of domination to automatically detect “abnormalities” and pass them on to the relevant authorities in natural language. As a result, activists must create new spaces to communicate on the web under the radar of surveillance. This requires self-determined and self-organized platforms for participation within socio-technical spaces of action. Spaces that are always based on text, since computers are semiotic machines.
The literary currents and movements of the last century were, so to speak, the forerunners in a development of alternative forms of language that are very difficult for computers to read today. In connection with the social dynamic of hacktivism, strategies can be developed that provide activists with the possibility to play with contemporary instruments of domination.
It is possible—if you know which rules to break and how to break them without bringing down the overall set of rules—to destabilize this socio-technical space of action. How to appropriate this space with poietic rule-breaking will be the subject of the following chapters.
Tiago Ive Rubini, 303
On the creation of virtual communities
Abstract
Artistic and cultural aspects at the dawn of the commercial Internet are the main subjects of the following paper. Special attention will be paid to their role in global networks of home computers, and how certain metaphors such as neighborhoods and sit-ins are pertinent in this case. In order to better understand how important user-generated content was for the development of digital services in the early 1990s, I will discuss the project One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age, developed by artists Olia Lialina and Dragan Espenchied. To reflect upon how material and linguistic resources were articulated in the Global South in this period, I will discuss artist and researcher Brian Mackern’s NetArt Latino Database. Finally, I will turn to Floodnet, a digital artwork made by the group Electronic Disturbance Theater, and its effectiveness as a means of online civil disobedience. The principles of so-called open-source culture, such as the collective construction of knowledge and criticizing power relations within digital culture, are crucial in this debate.
Karin Lingnau, 329
Spore drive – The function of fiction
Abstract
Based on the book Mycelium Running by mycologist Paul Stamets, the TV series Star Trek: Discovery (subsequently abbreviated to Discovery) extrapolates scientific facts about mycelium networks into the fictional setting of an intergalactic organic transportation technology, the spore drive. This example serves as a starting point to examine the intersections between science, fiction, and the implications for scientific and artistic processes in society. The approach offers a perspective on how fictional aspects, as extrapolations of scientific knowledge, can retroactively influence the treatment of these processes and related future proposals or realizations by science, art, and society in general. With the spore drive, an example from science fiction literature that lies beyond real implementation is deliberately chosen. This makes it clear that the interplay between science fiction and advanced technology is not limited to technical issues.
Subsequently, the text comments on related societal discourses such as the consideration of ecosystems in the light of climate change and the issues of exploitation and destruction through the prioritization of the current economical model of technologies. Due to the human impact on our ecosystem, it also seems logical to consider alternative perspectives on the relationship between humanity and what we have come to call nature, humans and other species, and a conceivable symbiosis of some kind in the future. Movement and transportation by means of advanced technology as core themes of science fiction are inherently linked to the topos of exploration. In this context, the spore drive as a technology also functions as a metaphor for a human motivation to explore and encounter the unknown.
The text also considers research on organisms as energetic forces and how—in and through a fictional setting—their materiality can be referred to as “fictional material.” Fictional material as a premise (a topic for further research) could be conceptualized as a potential conveyor for alternative patterns of thought (and subsequently behavior). This potentiality is shaped in science fiction universes such as Star Trek, linking it to ideas about actual change and real-world applications. The question of changing patterns of thought and behavior in the context of biotechnologies and an ecologically conscious society also implies thinking about a paradigm shift in dealing with our own planet.