Mike Michael
University of Exeter
Why Design? Because it can be SO idiotic, of course….
In this presentation I discuss certain dimensions of the mutual impact of Design and Social Science. After a brief overview of the literature, I consider my own initial encounter with Design, specifically what is sometimes called speculative design. What I experienced was a profound sense of disorientation which, drawing on Isabelle Stengers amongst others, I re-formulated in terms of ‘idiocy’. This helped open up a range of conceptual and empirical possibilities which culminated in a collaboration in the Interaction Research Studio then at Goldsmith, University of London (the Energy Babble). I reflect on the pros and cons of such an idiotic interdisciplinarity, and how this might illuminate the intersection of practice-based and textualized versions of research. Following from this, I provide an account of how a recent ‘idiotic’ design artefact – namely, Matty Benedetto’s ‘Vague Ruler’ – triggered a series of explorations around metrology, and particularly the potential invention of affect-laden units that can better support people’s energy use reduction. I end by drawing some broader lessons about the usefulness of idiocy in design…..not least the counter-idiocy of social science.
Anne Haaning
Associate Professor, The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts
ACCELERATE or DIE: Artistic Research on the Accelerationism of Silicon Valley
By way of introduction, I will talk about my journey from architecture to art – from designing, in pursuit of a function or purpose, to using those skills idiosyncratically, seeking to make a work perform in intuitive and abstract ways. This protesting of conventions has shaped my distinctive artistic language, a means of expressing knowledge through constellations of image, material, sound and duration. I work with these constellations self-reflexively: the tools and mediums I employ, in dialogue with the artistic uses to which I put them, comment on the latent, intrinsic, politics and histories that formed them.
I will then discuss this approach in relation to the early development of my research project We Are Supernova, specifically in context of accelerationism. A concept stemming from Marxist critique of capital, it was given new life in a sci-fi novel from the 1960s, and picked up by philosophers Sadie Plant, Nick Land and Mark Fisher, the avantgarde of British Cultural Studies in the 1990s. In its most recent incarnation, rediscovered by the tech billionaires of Silicon Valley; it has been given a quasi-religious spin and now serves to argue against all regulation of AI. I will end the presentation by speculating with you on how I expect this self-reflexivity to unfold as a result of my own investigation of AI – artistically as well as politically, historically and materially.