Design Ecologies - Volume 8, Issue 1, 2019

The following article examines the television show The Leftovers as a means of exploring the relationship between mourning, fiction and the possibilities and impossibilities allowed by a given world structure. In particular, I analyse the work of Quentin Meillassoux to see how mourning and narrativity place strain on the categorical divisions between worlds (and between the living and the dead) by using the work of Ray Brassier and Reza Negarestani.

Today we live within a highly networked environment in which new technologies are increasingly blurring the lines between physical and virtual worlds; as a result, we are struggling to imagine new spatial typologies for our increasingly ephemeral and nomadic lifestyle. In response to London’s rapidly growing housing crisis, the article theorizes the architectural implications of creating and co-inhabiting an interactive mixed-reality version of a home where space is born (not from site-specific and/or structural constraints) but from the finely tuned sensorial interplay between the body and physical/virtual objects that are connected to the Internet of Things. First, designing for utopia is revisited in the form of a sampled historiography looking at critical moments of radicalism that relate to the domestic interior of the second half of the twentieth century. The return and reassessment to the avant-garde practices of the likes of the Smithsons, David Greene, Superstudio and Archizoom, will set up the account for the effectiveness of a reconceptualized virtual design practice. Second, the historical study of late-modernist domestic utopias is reinvested in first-hand experiments and mixed-reality fieldwork culminating in the speculative script and location-based virtual reality installation entitled Micro-Utopia: The Imaginary Potential of Home. The prototypical model of domesticity explores the possibility of co-living within an infinite grid of shared tactile objects while virtually inhabiting a highly bespoke and selfdetermined digital space of one’s own, liberated of any physical constraints. Drawing on radical art practice, interiors in historical painting and contemporary product design, the virtual multiverses of Micro-Utopia are populated by sensing and speaking objects that encapsulate highly immersive and unfathomable spaces. Finally, the article discusses the art of inhabiting the dream of a house that is nothing, but the parameters of our perception triggered through the metaphorical dimension of the objects we interact with daily.

The use of analogy is considered suspicious in architectural design. Tutors of architecture tend to eliminate its use by students suggesting avoidance of ‘literal metaphor’. This probably is a symptom of an ideological bias towards the modern movement principles of abstraction. It is also arguably dangerous as it eliminates the powerful tool of analogy in developing original ideas and techniques. Besides, it eliminates potentially great architectural designs that can come from the use of analogy. Gehry´s Chiat/Day building in Venice, California, the unexpected architectural interior of Statue of Liberty, the design of a lamp that attempts the use a mechanism of design based on analogy of behaviour and finally a proposal for an archaeology museum are proposed as examples of the varied use of analogy in architecture to prove its potential.

Over the past 40 years a strange and worrying behavioural split has taken place concerning the arts and governing powers. For me The 1975 Trilateral Commission report, The Crisis in Democracy (1975), represents a triggering point when the arts in western society started to become more disengaged, maybe even fearful with presenting an effective, inventive and critical voice on the side of the public in relation to governing forces. An artist’s understanding of an ever expanding picture plane continued and possibly even accelerated well into the twentieth century. By the early 1970s however, time had long caught up with the go-to space for presenting these changes, the gallery context; the location associated with much innovation throughout the 1960s and early 1970s. It is my belief that today the gallery and art institution pulse more with the brotherly echo of the Too-Big-To-Fail-Banks, systemically flawed; underwriting any ideas-with-legs, in order to inevitably to cripple them. This is further complicated by artists not seeing or choosing not to see this; so in the same way that banks and corporations exercise huge power over how society is structured, contemporary galleries and art institutions have unwittingly or not, become the authoritarian interphase or gatekeeper between visual ideas and the public. The curious split however, is in the contrast we see between the arts, increasingly retreating behind a showy but compromised context and how the powers that be (or shouldn’t be) have emerged out of that mid 1970s triggering point. The governing powers appear to have shown themselves to be the true descendent of the spirit of Dada and Duchamp; far more ready to diversify, infiltrate and step out of their comfort zone. Represented through the inventive zeal, excessive chance taking, increased double speak, contradictions, flip flopping, lies, fakery, spying, spinning, torture and complex layering employed in their work. Unlike the pioneering work of the artists mentioned throughout this text, whose central concerns, I would site as, less to do with power and more to encourage the liberation and freedom of their fellow man, this contemporary trickery of governing power is manifest as a brutal form of repressive control. What is more they don’t seek to promote the artistry of their work and although people from all walks of life highly suspect something fishy is going on, the powerful keep the mechanisms of their ever evolving work well hidden and often within plain view. This text is a call to the artist within us all to connect from ground up with the important visual heritage that questions and invents in the service of humanity. To pursue a life where we can act as ourselves in relation to others, not one where every action is taken in fear of how it will be interpreted, praised or condemned by a more powerful party.