[-empyre-] design become unrecognizable to itself

[Johannes Birringer]

dear all

[Oron schreibt]
>What is interesting in our context, which is something that I would like to explore and unpack in the next few days, is that as unsuccessful as this field [designing life] is in delivering its medical promises, it holds a great symbolic and seductive power as to our fantasies of controlling and designing life forms and forms of life. >

Well, is seems Oron is giving us room to breathe, for the conjuring of the imaginaries.  I admit that my fantasies were not fired up by the Ear Mouse, much as I had not been convinced by Stelarc's third ear on arm, when it was present while he was with us here at the school. In the colder winter months, sleeves rolled up, it would remain invisible, and we'd rather enjoy the conceptual challenges in Stelarc's lectures on extended operational architectures of bodies and expansions off into the virtual and avataric. The performances stuck, of course.

Similarly, Susan Kozel's performances were often daring expansions, testing the digital prosthetic body, but they were performances. I suppose I worry whether there is an either/and, or whether we know when regenerative medicine (say a replacement of a knee, as my oldest brother has undergone in surgery) is medically advisable, and when, in the context of cosmetic surgeries under conditions of "perverse capitalism (Boyan Manchev), the "plasticity of bodies" as sculptural material is out of hand or out of ethical parameters. What were the promises of bio art vis a vis biotechnologies, and what medical promises were offered by design? What is meant by regenerative?

Again, I think I follow Susan when she suggests that 

>I see affective flows and motion, and increasingly I am not able to choreograph these but am choreographed, perniciously and unceasingly, by them.>

and when she worries that "we are affectively shaped by our structures and technologies increasingly and at all times."    One would still think that one can recognize, then modify, the "affect design," if one is troubled.  Otherwise the
scenario would be hopelessly perverse indeed. 

As to Meisenheimer's writing on architecture/design through the corporeal and through movement, he would propose that our thought-constructs and our concepts are derived from elementary "Leiberfahrungen" (bodyexperiences), and I wonder now how one departed,  from this more modest and older humanist position (remembering Susanne Langer, Feeling & Form), and from a world of cohabitation (farmer and water buffalo) to any movement/gesture that is projected as transhuman, posthuman, transanimal, transavataric, usw. 

Then on to fictions and hybrids, and other subjects,
as I glance at the opening of Emanuele Quinz's essay "TECHNO-HETEROTOPIAS. CRITICAL DESIGN AS MICRO-HUMANISM" (https://www.academia.edu/8366891/TECHNO-HETEROTOPIAS._CRITICAL_DESIGN_AS_MICRO-HUMANISM)
where he writes about a few robots, and then on to fashion (and I remember that Oron also has worked in haute couture tissue culture):  

> the interactive clothes produced by the Canadian designer Ying Gao remain enigmatic. While using the same technologies (intelligent textiles) as Wearable Computers, they stand apart from them. Their interaction is not instrumental and functional but, on the contrary, constructed upon an opaque, unstable exchange: they seem to breathe when they hear us breathing, they vibrate and become undone when we approach. Their language remains elusive and mysterious. If Wearable Computers are posited as intermediary devices for the user, Gao’s clothes become actual interlocutors. By refusing any functional transition, they are no longer prostheses. They are neither skin, nor body, they are neither objects nor merely machines. They become subjects."


Quite possibly, Quinz imagines that odd design makes for better and more critical imaginaries ("Instead of coming up with technologies which perform better and better, design proposes useless,
dysfunctional, precarious and unstable machines. Instead of pursuing functionality and innovation, design focuses on faults and shortcomings, disorders (in people and machines), accidents, deficiencies, ambiguities and paradoxes").

what do you think?


regards
Johannes Birringer
http://www.brunel.ac.uk/dap