Inter-disciplinarity, Trans-disciplinarity, Multiplicity & Pluralism

This lecture introduced us to some core concepts such as multiplicity, pluralism, pragmatism and experience and explores their coming to prominence in the early 20C as well as their influence on art and design education. It also examined the way in which such concepts underpin many material practices and contrasts them with a set of more unified, enlightenment ideals. During this lecture i got interested in the idea of 'Design and Violence'. Design and Violence was and is an exhibition that exists entirely on the Internet. "The show includes pictures, descriptions, essays and discussions about design objects used for violent purposes, including the AK-47 rifle, animal slaughter systems, bullets, plastic handcuffs and graphics depicting everything from refugee migration to incarceration demographics to violent video games. It’s a heavy and heady gathering of information that leans at times toward a symposium rather than an exhibition, but remains grounded in innovative objects that have made — or could make — a cultural impact".  

Confrontation is kept open - power relations are always being pout into question and no victory can be final. - Carl

One of the main designers mentioned in the lecture that I took an interest in was Carl Disalvo. Disalvo is a professor in the Digital Media program in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at the Georgia Institute of Technology in a America. His work draws together science and technology studies, the humanities, and design research to analyse the social and political qualities of design and prototype experimental systems and services. In his work we get the idea about there being a lot of screaming noises of the grounds of democracy. He talks about this film called ' This is what democracy looks like', we could say he was influenced by this documentary which shows the kind of resistance of design. It is focusing very much on the idea of antagonism. One of the things he is interested in is tracing back in the history of the process how intimately creative of straggly design is and another way to think about this is to think of design as a public display. In his work trying to introduce that we have noise movement that is driven by disagreement.

These type of projects that he does, is all about listening to the ground of politician. He takes it straight forward and revealing how really noisy the situation is around us. There is no politician that represents us because we all think about the world in a different way, so everything would be a lie if we participated in the votes due to that fact that the person who will be representing us, also have their own way of thinking. We may have one of two things in common but in reality there will always be many things separating us. 

I think the design is very much in the service of politics Anything that has to go into document, or anything that can promote people to go out and vote, anyway they want people to be involve. The link to that is the idea of democracy as we normal think about it, we live in representative democracy, what that means is that a bunch of politician and they say what they are about, they tell you their values and we a voters have to vote for one of us. And that is the point, we lose the sense of noise in the culture because we are just following orders and we lose of identity the moment we vote for a certain person because they have their values and such.  All the noise of you is lost by the representation of that one person that is apparently working for you. 

We also looked at Million dollar blocks project by Laura Kurgan, and Eric Cadora, is a data visualisation project that is about trying to understand the working of a culture, in terms of the idea of such of force and noise and intentions of moving things. United States currently has more than 2 million people locked up in jails and prisons. A disproportionate number of them come from a very few neighbourhoods in the country’s biggest cities and the concentration is so dense that states are spending in excess of a million dollars a year to incarcerate the residents of single city blocks. The maps suggest that the criminal justice system has become the predominant government institution in these communities and that public investment in this system has resulted in significant costs to other elements of our civic infrastructure — education, housing, health, and family. Prisons and jails form the distant exostructure of many American cities today. They are focusing on the way to draw attention to something to do with the social type of problem, what they can do to slow it down, so people from the area from this city will not be in this institution of prison, he is not implying that there is something dangerous about all these prisons. They wants us to make us think about the idea of if we voiced these idea from people that we will have more of productive way of moving forward as a society.

Reference:

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/31/arts/design/art-listings-for-july-31-aug-6.html?_r=0

http://carldisalvo.com/

http://spatialinformationdesignlab.org/projects/million-dollar-blocks
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ad3km2AP8hA