[Nettime-bold] Re: <nettime> Learning from Prada?

[martha rosler <navva@earthlink.net>]

for the obvious and to my mind very good reason that there is much, much
more at stake than teasing out "creative pontential": the question is
always, potential for what?
 If the aim is to produce visual pleasure alone, stuff that goes down easy
with a ready and increasingly shopping-minded audience, then good (as
attractive) design is not very good. (The 90s typographic turn toward
UNreadability seemed to mark not so much a disruptive argument against
domination as an insistence on the precedence of the formal appearance of
the "page" over any possible moment of meaning.)
As the potential grows for increased communication among people in widely
disparate locations, there is also a grave potential for a vacating of the
public sphere of discussion and dissent from hegemonic cultural as well as
social and political models, reinforcing and perpetuating an inside/outside
of cultural entitlement and decision-making ability. Art may still be one
of the areas in which one can open questions that normally fall under the
purview of philosophy, even if in a somewhat restricted circle (ie not
necessarily the mass audience envisioned all at once). Too often in the
hands of the design practitioners, philosophy becomes a matter of color and
form, and things that are posed as questions are always and only
rhetorical. (The language of design as it is developed and "spoken" is the
language of commodification, alas.)

This is a very very old argument, raised increasingly in the dear old 20th
century as modernism tried to respond to the industrialization of death,
domination and conformity brought toward realization by modernity and
modernization. Postmodernism, whatever it means, need NOT mean a complete
shutting down of imaginative strategizing for another future.
Horizonlessness is a poor motivator for devising such a future. Policing
borders is not at issue, raising new SOCIAL possibilities is. It is hard to
see how design fits the bill.

what say you?
best,
martha rosler
brooklyn, ny

PS among students at my university, by the way, my friends who teach design
tell me that students are consistently angry and annoyed about any
discussions of the implications of design, type face and so on. Techne is
what interests them.The technicalization of every possible aspect of
contemporary life is part of the instrumentalization of all modes of
address and (dare I say it) expression.



>haven't we heard enough about design being about "surface" and packaging? As
>any designer worth her salt knows, this is simply BAD design.
>
>We should be asking, why are people still defending dubious borders between
>art and design?  Don't people in the art world realise that the impact of
>new technologies has impacted on all disciplines: art, design and craft.
>Creative practictioners of all diciplines are collaborating to explore the
>creative potential of these technologies - and in this process are expanding
>and overlapping the traditional demarkations between disciplines.


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