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Design Futures Desma 104 S 15
Prof. Lunenfeld
Apr 21: Curating & Sensibility
Required Readings: Sontag, “Notes on
Camp” Bourriaud, "Relational Form,”
Lupton, "Design and Social Life,” Skov
Holt and Holt Skov, “The Blobject Begins
to Take Shape” and “The Look and Feel
of Optimism”
Prologue
Resistance & Rebellion
A hangover from last week:
There is no… resistance in contemporary
design: it delights in postindustrial
technologies, and is happy to sacrifice the
semi-autonomy of architecture and art to
the manipulations of design. Foster, Design and Crime, p. 187
Resistance & Rebellion
The Wild One (1953)
Directed by Stanley Kramer
Satarring Marlon Brando!
Resistance & Rebellion
What are you rebelling against?
How can design, or even should design, formulate a strategy of resistance?
LAMA VISIT From the Archives: Art and Technology at LACMA, 1967-1971 April
28th!
!
The Art and Technology Program at LACMA—or A & T as it came to be known—was a forward-thinking initiative run by the
museum from 1967 to 1971. The brainchild of curator Maurice Tuchman, A & T paired artists with corporations in the areas of
aerospace, scientific research, and entertainment. This installation features photographs, correspondence, and ephemera
documenting the original Art and Technology Program at LACMA.!
Field Trip to LACMA!
!
Parking costs $12, so please ride share, or park on
the street. !
!
By bus from UCLA, take either the !
Metro Local Line 20 which leaves from the
Ackerman Terminal and takes 30-60 minutes to
Wilshire and Fairfax !
!
!
!
Or, a better bet, the Metro Rapid Line 720, from
Wilshire and Westwood, which is only 15-30
minutes. Please be at the BP Grand Entrance by
9:45. !
!
The fare is $1.75 each way, exact change. There
won’t be an admission fee at the museum.!
Plan your trip on metro.net.!
!
Field Trip to LACMA!
!
The museum is doesn’t open officially until 11:00, but we are
going to be admitted at 10. So, we can "trickle in" and wait at
the BP Grand Entrance -- by Urban Light (the street lamp
sculpture installation), and then at 10 go up Wilshire and go
to the staff entrance, which is by the "original" main entrance. !
!
!
Camp as a Sensibility
Relational Logics
Relational Design
Blobjects as Plastics
Nowcasting as Design Research https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kbv8p1YfJbI!
Joi Lansing!
"Web of Love"!
Scopitone!
“Notes on Camp” (1963)
Camp taste is a kind of love, love for
human nature. It relishes, rather than
judges, the little triumphs and
awkward intensities of "character." . . .
Camp taste identifies with what it is
enjoying. People who share this
sensibility are not laughing at the
thing they label as "a camp," they're
enjoying it. Camp is a tender feeling.
Susan Sontag 1933-2004
Though I am speaking about sensibility only -- and about
a sensibility that, among other things, converts the
serious into the frivolous -- these are grave matters. Most
people think of sensibility or taste as the realm of purely
subjective preferences, those mysterious attractions,
mainly sensual, that have not been brought under the
sovereignty of reason. They allow that considerations of
taste play a part in their reactions to people and to works
of art. But this attitude is naive. And even worse. To
patronize the faculty of taste is to patronize oneself. For
taste governs every free - as opposed to rote - human
response. Nothing is more decisive. There is taste in
people, visual taste, taste in emotion - and there is taste
in acts, taste in morality. Intelligence, as well, is really a
kind of taste: taste in ideas. (One of the facts to be
reckoned with is that taste tends to develop very
unevenly. It's rare that the same person has good visual
taste and good taste in people and taste in ideas.)
Camp is a vision of the world in
terms of style -- but a particular
kind of style. It is the love of the
exaggerated, the "off," of thingsbeing-what-they-are-not. The best
example is in Art Nouveau, the
most typical and fully developed
Camp style. Art Nouveau objects,
typically, convert one thing into
something else: the lighting
fixtures in the form of flowering
plants, the living room which is
really a grotto. A remarkable
example: the Paris Metro
entrances designed by Hector
Guimard in the late 1890s in the
shape of cast-iron orchid stalks.
The dividing line seems to fall in the 18th century; there the
origins of Camp taste are to be found (Gothic novels,
Chinoiserie, caricature, artificial ruins, and so forth.) But the
relation to nature was quite different then. In the 18th century,
people of taste either patronized nature (Strawberry Hill) or
attempted to remake it into something artificial (Versailles).
They also indefatigably patronized the past. Today's Camp
taste effaces nature, or else contradicts it outright. And the
relation of Camp taste to the past is extremely sentimental.
Random examples of items which are
part of the canon of Camp:
Zuleika Dobson
Tiffany lamps
Scopitone films
The Brown Derby restaurant on Sunset Boulevard in LA
The Enquirer, headlines and stories
Aubrey Beardsley drawings
Swan Lake
Bellini's operas
Visconti's direction of Salome and 'Tis Pity She's a Whore
certain turn-of-the-century picture postcards
Schoedsack's King Kong
the Cuban pop singer La Lupe
Lynn Ward's novel in woodcuts, God's Man
the old Flash Gordon comics
women's clothes of the twenties (feather boas, fringed and beaded dresses, etc.)
the novels of Ronald Firbank and Ivy Compton-Burnett
stag movies seen without lust
"It's absurd to divide people into good
and bad. People are either charming or
tedious."
Oscar Wilde, Lady Windemere's Fan
Flappers, the “New
Woman” of the 1920s
Camp sees everything in quotation marks.
It's not a lamp, but a "lamp"; not a woman,
but a "woman." To perceive Camp in objects
and persons is to understand Being-asPlaying-a-Role. It is the farthest extension,
in sensibility, of the metaphor of life as
theater.
Camp as a Sensibility
Relational Logics
Relational Design
Blobjects as Plastics
Nowcasting as Design Research Nicolas Bourriaud
“Relational Form”
RELATIONAL AESTHETICS
Bourriard discusses the relationship between
artist and audience as a “collaborative
elaboration of meaning.”
The work of art is embedded in social, cultural
and technological web, no longer autonomous
but instead intimately interconnected. !
Artistic activity is a game, whose forms,
patterns and functions develop and evolve
according to periods and social contexts; it is
not an immutable essence. It is the critic's task
to study this activity in the present.!
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer,
Amodal Suspension (2003)
https://vimeo.com/33919731!
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer,
Amodal Suspension (2003)
This is the precise nature of contemporary art exhibition
in the arena of representational commerce: it creates free
arena, and time spans whose rhythm contrasts with
those structuring everyday life, and it encourages an
inter-human commerce that differs from the
“communication zones” that are imposed upon us.
Gabriel Orozco,
Cats and Watermelons (1992)
The possibility of a relational art (an
art taking as its theoretical horizon
the realm of human interactions
and its social context, rather than
the assertion of an independent
and private symbolic space), points
to a radical upheaval of the
aesthetic, cultural and political
goals introduced by modern art.!
Rirkrit Tiravanija, Recreation of “Free, 1992” in 2007
The form of an artwork issues from a negotiation with
the intelligible, which is bequeathed to us. Through it,
the artist embarks upon a dialogue. The artistic
practice thus resides in the invention of relations
between consciousness. Each particular artwork is a
proposal to live in a shared world, and the work of
every artist is a bundle of relations with the world,
giving rise to other relations, and so on and so forth,
ad infinitum.
!
Jorge Pardo’s Spaces for Sociality:!
!Mountain Bar!
!Dia Reading Room!
!Munster Dock !
The Gift Art of !
Felix Gonzales-Torres!
Untitled (Placebo), 1993!
Untitled, 1991!
Camp as a Sensibility
Relational Logics
Relational Design
Blobjects as Plastics
Nowcasting as Design Research “Design and Social Life”
Ellen Lupton
!
Relational Blogging
Blogs have triggered a journalistic
paradigm shift: the editor is now charged
with setting up an inviting social space. A blog is not just a publication, it’s a
party. Ellen Lupton, pps. 25-26
!
“Design technologies – and the information about how
to use them – have become widely available. Especially
among people who have grown up with Internet access,
the urge to make and share media is second nature…
design has become more open to participation.”
Ellen Lupton, p. 27
http://makezine.com/
“At the core of DIY is education.” Lupton, p. 27
Design and Society
“Design builds, and participates in,
society. Every designer is a citizen,
and every citizen is, to some degree,
a designer. The broad-based cultural
and technological phenomena
shaping the design professions in
the new century are molding the
consciousness of us all.”
Ellen Lupton, p. 31
The Case for Optimism
We are living in a time of unprecedented
awareness of design. In the United States and
around the world, people have more access
than ever before not only to well-designed
products but also to the tools and thought
processes that designers use every day. Such
citizens are well equipped to face the future.” Ellen Lupton, p. 32
Camp as a Sensibility
Relational Logics
Relational Design
Blobjects as Plastics
Nowcasting as Design Research Steven Skov Holt and
Mara Holt Skov
Blobjects
Marc Newson!
Lockheed Lounge, 1986-88!
UR BLOBJECT!
“Appearing when it did the Lockheed Lounge’s blobby shape
evoked a whole cumulative history of associations. It looked
“embryonic,” but also Surrealist. In juxtaposition to the high
tech aerospace associations of its construction it rendered in
“natural” form the “unnatural” aspects of technology which
softer shapes - evoking as they did biology and craft - had long
seemed to oppose”
Phil Patton email to Steven Skov Holt
Harmut Esslinger from frog design reworks “form follows
function,” into “form follows emotion.”
KARIM RASHID has… created
a group of trademark forms,
which appear throughout his
work. The capsule the
hourglass, the free form blob,
the asterisk are all in his kit
of parts, lending a consistent
message to everything he
touches… His mediaspanning work has resulted in
objects as diverse as soap
dispensers, chairs, paintings,
perfume bottles, conceptual
installations, fabric, DJ tables,
carpets, and more; his
influence cannot be
overestimated at this point.!
WHAT!
What, then, is a blobby object or a blobject? It
is a product, graphic, building, or other form
of designed object that brings together in one
entity several of the following qualities: a
pleasing plasticity of fluid form a delicious
sense of color, a chance to exist at any scale,
a heightened sense of flowing materiality, and
a powerful connection to our emotions,
including a strong optimistic tendency.
HOW!
Today’s blobjects rely on the powers
unleashed by the computer particularly the
software-based modeling programs that have
encouraged new low-cost explorations in
form making and new options in rapid
prototyping and production.
WHY!
While the new technological possibilities are
wondrous, they do not solve the truly
fundamental questions. Blobjects fail or
succeed by doing what other epochal design
solutions have done before them: by
combining technological mastery with cultural
expression.
MIDTERM ASSIGNMENT
Take home midterm due at
9:05 Tuesday, April 28th.
The Chicago/Turabian Style!
!
BOOK BY A SINGLE AUTHOR, FIRST EDITION !
!
Steven Nadler, A Book Forged in Hell: Spinoza’s Scandalous Treatise and the Birth of the !
Secular Age (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 8. !
!
BOOK BY TWO AUTHORS !
!
Gerald Marwell and Pamela Oliver, The Critical Mass in Collective Action (Cambridge: !
Cambridge University Press, 2007), 104. !
!
CHAPTER IN AN EDITED COLLECTION !
!
Colleen Dunlavy, “Why Did American Businesses Get So Big?” in Major Problems in American !
Business History, ed. Regina Blaszczyk and Philip Scranton (New York: Houghton-Mifflin, 2006), 260. !
!
ARTICLE IN A JOURNAL !
!
Raúl Sánchez, “Outside the Text: Retheorizing Empiricism and Identity,” College English 74 !
(2012): 243. !
!
CLASS LECTURE !
!
Morris Young, “What Is Asian American? What is Asian American Literature?” (lecture, !
Survey of Asian American Literature, University of Wisconsin-Madison, January 22, 2013). !
!
WEBSITE !
!
“Human Rights,” The United Nations, accessed May 29, 2013, http://www.un.org/en !
/globalissues/humanrights/, paragraph 3. !
!
!
for!
question!
#5!
for!
question!
#6!
transmedia
humancentric
bespoke
futures
solutionoriented
design
strategically hopeful
meaning
culture machine
society
pattern
recognition
sensibility
curation
autobiography
utility
design &
abstraction
culture work
running
room
content
form
utopian
dystopian
decorational
technological
nowcasting
design
economics
collaboration
identity
significance
brand
market
vision
context
media
experimentation
public
theory
private
discourse
cultural
intervention