aside —
don't lose sight of work you have done earlier in semester, both posted on blog, and shown in class. it's all still in play, to so speak.
strap / speech scroll / phylactery —
an illustrative device denoting speech, song, or, in rarer cases, other types of sound. (wikipedia)
discussion and images of Tefillin here
Love-hate relationship with being natural (Zaruga)
Ben Lerner begins his The Hatred of Poetry (2016) with this poem, entitled "Poetry," by Marianne Moore —
I, too, dislike it. Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers in it, after all, a place for the genuine.
so poetry, or art, or a hobby, or braiding hair, can be a "place for the genuine," and play other roles too — e.g., a sense of stability amidst chaos, a retreat, etc.
readings
Cameron Tonkinwise, "'I prefer not to; / Anti-progressive designing" in, Coombs et al, eds., Undesign : Critical Practices at the Intersection of Art and Design : 74-84
also at academia.edu
"Designers do not change existing situations into preferred ones; they destroy what currently exists by replacing it with a preferable one." (75)
"All design is redesign." (Jan Michl, 2002)
"This is the arrogance of design, an optimism that is nevertheless a kind of permanent dissatisfaction, the persistent, even insistent, sense that things as they currently are, are not what people should consider preferable... design seems motivated by 'the rumour of functional perfection.'" <75)
"No artifact is 'an island.'" (76)... "Buildings and even cities may need to be destroyed for preferable devices if those devices require access to different kinds of resources."
"What resists new designs are not just existing versions and their associated product ecologies, built environments and infrastructures, but also all the skills and habits associated with using those existing versions... With each new update to an app, habituated ways of doing things must be destroyed and replaced by the new ones... ¶ ... these changes function like ratchets — it is almost impossible to reverse them..." (76)
So designers, who think of themselves as creators, in fact are, and must be, in many different ways destroyers: destroyers of existing products and even whole product ecologies; and destroyers of existing patterns of everyday life and expectations associated with those habits and systems... (77-8) ¶ ...Better to ignore that you are a destroyer and instead focus your brand on being a creator... [but] ... How to undertake carefully targeted comprehensive acts of destruction by design?" (78)
"Designers who want to take responsibility for the destructive side to their practice, and apply it at a larger-scale against unsustainable systems, can take advantage of other destructive events...: (79)
innovation junctions
(79)"In the diminishing number of places where a social safety net still exists for such 'disasters,' these moments of unexpected, external, yet not total destruction create opportunities for the preferable to be trialled. People might be more open to lifestyles with fewer possessions, less electronic devices perhaps; or they may come to see the value of more diverse communities and tolerating dependence upon, perhaps even working to actively sustain, commons-based resources." (79)
De-progressing
"...we have to destroy the perception of them as the latest and the best." (81)
practices that are moved out of mainstream, are still around (bicycles) and can be revived, reinvented... (82)
—
Jia Tolentino, "What it takes to put your phone away." The New Yorker (April 22, 2019)
which is review of Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing : Resisting the Attention Economy (2019)
"Our preferences and personal data are tracked and sold to advertisers; our relationships are framed as potentially profitable conduits; We continually capture one another's lucrative attention by performing some version of who we think we are. Over time, we have absorbed these terms and conditions..."
"Nothing is harder to do than nothing," Jenny Odell writes..."
"She sees 'little difference between habitat restoration in the traditional sense and restoring habitats for human thought'... we are neglecting, even losing, our mysterious, murky depths..."
"To make money from something — a forest, a sense of self — is often to destroy it... As Odell sees it, the only way forward is to be like Old Survivor [a famous redwood in Oakland, "never cut down because it was runty and twisted and situated on a rocky slope"]. We have to be able to do nothing — to merely bear witness, to stay in place, to create shelter for one another — to endure."
"I began thinking about my selfhood as a meadow of wildflowers that had been paved over by the Internet. I started frantically buying houseplants..."
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