Technoetic Arts - Volume 16, Issue 2, 2018

This paper presents and discusses design studio outcomes that followed the brief that was collaboratively developed by the authors, and that was linked to the Fun Palace Futures initiative launched by the Royal British Institute of British Architects (RIBA) in honour of the architect Cedric Price and the artist Joan Littlewood. One of the core questions set by the brief was: How the thoughts that guided the development and design of the Fun Palace – a project that was never built but is still today cited as a model for thinking flexible and open architecture – could be re-interpreted and renewed for the future? This line of thinking guided the initial and experimental research phase within which students were developing an understanding of what indeterminacy is or could be. This paper shows that through translation of some of the major principles of Fun Palace into pedagogical instruments, students were allowed to approach the questions of indeterminacy in an open and innovative manner. It argues that methods such as media shifts and the use of a variety of media, which often went far beyond the conventional architectural pallet, helped students develop their own tools for creating a new kind of open and flexible architecture. The aim is to present one pedagogic approach that postulates that the conditions of indeterminacy, of uncertainty, of chance and change hold potentiality for establishing a challenging framework for the design and creation of a new kind of dynamic architecture, as well as for initiating experimental architectural thinking in a design studio setting.

We are mastering engineering behaviour on a molecular level. A growing number of researches investigating the relationship between microbiota, human brain and behaviour examine the impacts of manipulating specific microbial colonies in human hosts. To enable discussing and understanding communicational phenomena that occur in scales not visible to the naked eye, we propose the term Molmedia – a metaphorical reference to the concept of mole, denoting here not exclusively the quantitative amount of substance but the information exchange processes (taking the substances as messages) that are going on at elementary entities level such as atomic, subatomic and molecular, within a given system that can be a living organism. We take media (plural of medium) as an intervening agency, means or instrument. Interacting emitters and receivers in this system are the microbiota and the organism actual cells. Within this self-organizing structure, the ongoing informational processes produce, as an emergence, the self and behavioral patterns that can be appreciated, manipulated and cannibalized. The art and science installation Transplanting the Self: Microbiome Anthropophagy is presented as an explorative exercise of the concept and related possibilities in science concerning gut–brain communication and the use of neuroregenerative nutrition in treatments for neurologic conditions.

Hinton’s methodology of perceiving four-dimensional space is based on the application in higher dimensions of the geometric properties of objects that exist in our familiar three-dimensional space and on colouring all the points of these objects according to their movement through these four dimensions. Hinton applied his methodology on coloured cubes, thus leading to a mental perception of the hypercube. In this article, we evolve Hinton’s methodology aiming at the mental perception of the hypersphere, based on tracing and colouring the hypersphere’s points according to their four coordinates. Finally, we describe an interactive application that we developed for visualizing the hypersphere.

This article proposes a re-reading of the chromolithographic algorithm on the front cover of Fox Talbot’s seminal photographic work Pencil of Nature, 1844. The wet and dry of analogue and digital photography are proposed to both be in fact unfixed. A third, fluid, intermediary state is identified. The practitioner in this alternate zone is receptive to the isomorphic potential of the elements and is able to utilize a form of remote viewing – or rather remote perception – to both upload and download.

‘Uncanny’ works by a number of contemporary artists are analysed in relation to the themes and insights of both cybernetics and existentialist philosophy. This reveals that central ideas from these largely neglected fields remain current and potent within innovative art practices. Artists employ cybernetic systems to provoke aesthetic sensations of the uncanny, while simultaneously encapsulating existentialist concerns. Pierre Huyghe’s mysterious installation responds to the life-breath of visitors to mutate human cancer cells. Susan Collins and Rafael Lozano-Hemmer construct cybernetic worlds-within-worlds to render us beings-for-others during intimate encounters with strangers. Urich Lau and TC&A involve and implicate the audience in eerie expressions of what existentialist term being-towards-death. These artworks prompt feelings of separation, alienation and existential angst; and emphasize human estrangement within a mysterious, incomprehensible or absurd world. But a cybernetic-existentialist reading also reveals that their evocation of human disquiet and isolation is tempered by an equal emphasis on positive notions of feedback loops, ‘separation with communion’, existential freedom and authentic interactions with the world and with Others. The artworks articulate cybernetics’ and existentialism’s shared interest in collapsing boundaries and erasing distinctions: between agents within a system; between the self and the Other; and between perceiving, feeling and acting.

As a designer, in order to fully comprehend the community where I work, I have to shift my attention from creating objects to build relationship; by doing so I have transformed myself as node of an expanding network of people and knowledge. This does not mean that I reject the objects that I have realized within the collaborations of artisans, institutions and local entrepreneurs, but rather that I give more importance to reviewing the process of designing. I comprehend that it is a cumulative procedure raised by the necessity of understanding the new–normal context that I have embraced in the last few years. Here, outcomes if physical are then to be considered a shell of a temperament raised by the encounters within moral and social elements. As a profession, design evolves and moves from a solo, collective to a participative approach; it is relevant to underline here that in my perspective co-design, it is a process that aims to fabricate physicality as a sum of encounters and dialogues with other people. The process can be read as a response to visual stimuli. By unfolding the narrative of persuading this path, the article looks at cultural studies and it evolves the role of design profession in the momentum flux. Case studies conceived as world-view translate to corporate as site-specific point of view are then deconstructed in this article as sections of a rhizomatic process that is still in process. The article draws the lines between context and people where the objects are responses to the built relation.