DESIGN IN THE AGE OF DISSIDENT CYBORGS
Xenofuturism as caring-curing practices
RODRIGO MARTIN IGLESIAS1 , CRISTINA VOTO2 and
ROCíO AGRA3
1
University of Buenos Aires
1
rodrigo.martin@fadu.uba.ar
2,3
Universidad Nacional de La Matanza
2,3
{crivoto|rocioagra}@gmail.com
Abstract. This paper synthesizes several years of research in the field of
the theory of architecture and design, and its subsequent undergraduate
and graduate teaching. Specifically, it is a work that reflects on
how architecture and design should face the three most important
paradigmatic phenomena of our present and near future. Paradigms as
things we think with, rather than as things we think about (Agamben,
2008), or in other words, it matters what ideas we use to think of
other ideas (Strathern, 1992). These phenomena refer to environmental,
technological and anthropological aspects, and the strategies to cope
with them, involving alternate design thinking and practice in which
futurabilities and futurizations depart from the displacement generated
by post-utopian visions based on dissidence and subalternity.
Keywords.
Chthulucene; Cyborg Design; Dissident Futures;
Futurization; Xenofuturism.
1. Diagnosis
From an environmental point of view, there is no longer any doubt that we live in
a context of transformations on a planetary level and that these are a consequence
of the impact of human activities on the earth. It is clear that if we do not change
the ways in which we extract primary resources, produce and consume stuff and
food, and manage waste, we will be heading towards mass extinction. Humanity is
losing the ability to control the effects it is having. It is no longer enough to “stop”
negative behavior or have a “sustainable” relationship with the environment. For
this reason, to think about the future we chose to speak of Chthulucene instead
of Anthropocene. Donna Haraway (2016) says that Anthropocene will be short.
It is more of a border event than an epochal event, similar to the K/Pg limit (the
massive extinction of the Cretaceous-Paleogene). And she wonders if it is possible
that the brevity of this Anthropocene/Capitalocene/Plantationcene “border event”
is due to the fact that multispecies entities, including human beings, forged in
time powerful alliances with the generating powers of Chthulucene, to provoke
RE: Anthropocene, Proceedings of the 25th International Conference of the Association for Computer-Aided
Architectural Design Research in Asia (CAADRIA) 2020, Paper 242 (Preprint). © 2020 and published by
the Association for Computer-Aided Architectural Design Research in Asia (CAADRIA), Hong Kong.
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resurgence and partial healing in the face of irreversible loss, so that old and new
world-makers could take root. In this sense, the earth of the current Chthulucene is
simpoietic, not autopoietic, it does not close on itself, it is not complete. “Bounded
(or neoliberal) individualism amended by autopoiesis is not good enough figurally
or scientifically; it misleads us down deadly paths. Barad’s agential realism and
intra-action become common sense, and perhaps a lifeline for Terran wayfarers.”
(Haraway, 2016: 34). Following that, by refusing to reduce the urgency of the
earth to an abstract system of causal destruction, Anna Tsing (2015) argues that
precariousness (the failure of the lying promises of modern progress) characterizes
the life and death of all earthly creatures in these times. She seeks contaminated
and non-deterministic, inconclusive and continuous practices of living in ruins.
She shows how it matters which stories tell stories as a practice of care and thought.
“If a rush of troubled stories is the best way to tell contaminated diversity, then it’s
time to make that rush part of our knowledge practices”.
From a technological point of view we were using the concept of postdigital,
a concept inspired by a paper by Nicholas Negroponte (1998) where he states
that “the digital revolution is over”. Postdigital is also a paradigm, but as in
posthumanism, for example, the understanding of post-digital does not aim to
describe a life after the digital, but tries to describe the opportunity to explore
the consequences of the digital. While the computer age has improved human
capacity with attractive and unusual prostheses, post-digital thinking can provide a
framework with which it is possible to examine and understand this improvement.
Following Negroponte, there is no doubt that we have been living in a digital age
for a long time, to the extent that our culture, infrastructure and economy allow.
But also that truly amazing changes will occur elsewhere, in our way of life and in
the way we collectively manage ourselves on this planet. In addition to the broad
scope of artistic discourse, the notion of postdigital describes the exploration of
our relationship with the information age as the dominant paradigm in an age
of global mixing, intertwined economies, demographic certainty and planetary
boundaries, for example in Berry’s work (2014). In this sense, Mel Alexenberg
(2011) defines “post-digital art” as works that address the humanization of art as a
whole, postdigital technologies through the interaction between digital, biological,
cultural and spiritual systems, between cyberspace and real space, between
embodied media and mixed reality in social and physical communication, between
high technology and high contact experiences, between visual, haptic, auditory,
and kinesthetic media experiences, between virtual reality and augmented reality,
between roots and globalization. Works of art created with alternative media
through participation, interaction, and collaboration, in which the role of the artist
(architect or designer) is redefined.
In continuity with the two previous points, from an anthropological point of
view, we establish the need to think architecture and design in relation to a cyborg
corporeality and subjectivity. A cyborg is simultaneously a cybernetic organism,
a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of lived social reality and a creature
of fiction (Haraway, 1991). A cyborg, on the other hand, does not require a
stable and essentialist identity. The physical attachments that humanity has with
the most basic technologies have already turned us into cyborgs. In this sense,
DESIGN IN THE AGE OF DISSIDENT CYBORGS
3
Haraway’s question that we must transfer to architecture and design is: when
do changes in degree become changes in species, and what are the effects of
the biocultural, biotechnological, biopolitical and historical situation of people
(not man) in relation to the effects of assemblages of other species and other
biotic/abiotic forces, and combined with them? Haraway’s cyborg calls for a
non-essentialised metaphor, semiotic, capable of uniting all political coalitions in
planes of affinities. It calls for a reconstruction of identity, no longer dictated by
naturalism and taxonomy, but by affinity, in which individuals can build their own
groups by choice. In this way, groups could build a kind of postmodern identity
from otherness, difference and specificity as a way of counteracting Western
traditions of exclusive identification.
Finally, we add a fourth theme to take into account, which introduces social and
geopolitical aspects into the above, from the reflection on how to think about future
scenarios from Conjectural Design based on dissidence and subalternity from the
crisis of certain cultural hegemonies. That is what we have called Dissident
Futurities. Following, we develop these aspects from a theoretical approach,
specifically in the field of architecture and design, although using pedagogical
and design experiences that we have carried out in the last years.
2. Therapeutic
According to paleoanthropology, the possibility of making tools, that possibility
that we would call design today, was a feature that originally characterized the
hominids of the species Homo Erectus and that Homo Sapiens have assumed
singularly thanks to our ability to project uses, functionalities and applications. In
this line of thought, archaeologist André Leroi-Gorhan (1993) stated that already
in that original manufacture two supposed and intended purposes converged: the
expected of the tool once finished and the expected of the action that the tool
should perform. The tool would be, thus understood, the end of an action, that
of its manufacture and the means of another, that of its use. Continuing with this
reasoning, it can be stated that what is expected of the tool is at the core of the
production of the tool itself. In this sense, to produce also requires a thought of
the effects, those desired and/or possible, in terms of a desire to make-make. This
is what we mean when we speak about design.
Recognizing the importance of planning and imagination when designing
something was also among the interests of Karl Marx, who in Volume I of Capital
stated that “what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that
the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality” (1977:
344). However, almost two centuries later, according to Franco Berardi (2017),
the current social and productive conditions that mark contemporary capitalism
are precisely the separation between planning and imagination regarding socially
assigned and differentiated productive functions. Berardi finds in the current
specificities of this separation not only a decisive dilemma of our contemporary
context, but also a strength point that can reopen the possible of design, its factual
power. Emphasizing the type of productive act rather than the subject that carries it
out, Berardi understands that it is key to overcoming the fragmentation of cognitive
work if we want to make viable a bet for a creative society without exploitation,
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extraction, or private appropriation of what is socially produced.
In this critique of contemporary separation, which can be traced back to Marx’s
1844 Manuscripts, the inclusion of design is significant. Indeed, we live in a world
deeply conditioned by design knowledge: Information and transport systems,
flow governance, logistics, agronomy and rural exploitation, genetics, finance,
urbanism, and algorithms are the backbone of a design and planning matrix
that in the last half-century has expanded its exploration towards information
processes and systems, from large entities to the atomic and molecular. It could
be said that this is not a common form of design to present itself, but it does
underlie in this definition a possible creative torsion, even artistic, of itself. In
this sense, it is worth highlighting the use of the expression “virtualities” that
Latour uses because it allows us to think that there is a virtuality in the materials
that participate and configure the extended virtualities, those of potential uses,
those of futurities. Because, as Etienne Souriau wrote, “if this table is physically
made by the carpenter, it is still to be done as far as the philosopher or the
artist is concerned”. They discover what is missing, in a process that recognizes
milestones and openings. When Umberto Eco (2011) spoke of unsurpassable
objects (such as the spoon or the book) he referred exclusively to the conscious
functionality of these objects; when Otl Aicher spoke of the difficulty of architects
in understanding that the concept of building must include use and not only
construction and completion he referred to the functional definition of things
(1991: 269). Almost supplementing these openings, Souriau allows to extend that
panorama to incorporate heterodox uses, interpretations, reconfigurations in so
much possibility always there, always available. They are not exhausted because
they belong to heterogeneous dimensions, to “other modes of existence”.
In these pages, futurity is understood as that figuration that seeks to overcome
the notion of future from its exclusively teleological dimension. Here it is worth
following Souriau, who first of all seeks to distance the future from an enigmatic
condition but also from its consideration in terms of final cause. It is not something
that can be, in terms of a potential act, but something that is in a certain way,
that way is the futurity, that is: “the virtual consummation that completes the
movement of this present inclined towards the future, of that future falling into
the present” (1943:179). Futurity is a power that is never fulfilled or completed
and that allows acts to be fulfilled and completed. Futurity is the possibility just
before it emerges; it is the virtuality of that consummation. “The event to come
is called and captured, then released and referred to the past by that constant
form, by that ”and after“, by that ”and then“, whose essence is to be located, not
in the instant, but between two (think of this expression: the intermission, the
interval, the interim), in the inter-world, between the instant that departs and the
one that comes” (1943:180). Futurity is that interval that is born of the encounter
between two forces, a way of naming the fact of the possibility that there are
supports, propensities, precipitations, landings. It is the way in which conditions,
projects, possibilities exist as a virtuality of events. Continuing with this reasoning,
futurization and futurability refer to the ways in which we link with futurity. If the
first is defined by planning, in terms of an act in the future; the second is understood
through transitions and journeys, a power that does not close its definition.
DESIGN IN THE AGE OF DISSIDENT CYBORGS
5
Perhaps the aforementioned ways of approaching the world and invention are
a valid way to renew our ideas about futurizations, futurabilities and virtualities.
In this way design appears, “the point of articulation between the artistic and
the engineering” (Berardi, 2017). It emerges as a field of problematization and
exploration of contemporary links between projects and discoveries. Materials
and knowledge, the futurizations of which they participate, the improvisations
they propitiate, become a decisive zone in the social production of open links with
futurities. A field to explore inventiveness.
Let us start then from an affirmation of Arturo Escobar, “design generates the
structures of human possibility” (2017:58), to rethink its way of linking up with
futurities as a redefinition of the conditions of the possible. Design thus becomes
a methodological input or, in the words of Bruno Latour: “There is neither a
manufacturer, nor an owner, nor a creator that can be said to have mastered the
materials; or, at least, a new uncertainty is introduced regarding what is going
to be built, as well as who is responsible for the emergence of the virtualities of
the materials that are handled” (2005: 8). Social relations, institutional forms,
political economies, infrastructures and design objects are literally emptying the
planet of futurity through their incalculable social and ecological impacts and it
is worth asking ourselves if designers have been able to deeply understand the
disaster caused by the economy of hyperconsumption. As we see it, part of the
apocalyptic risk that today flies over the planet, part of a link with futurity capable
of making futurity itself impossible, corresponds to design.
According to Escobar, “design is ontological because each object, tool, service
or even narrative in which it is involved creates particular ways of being, knowing
and doing” (2017:47). Design is a way of linking with the virtuality of events that,
while provoking them, seeks to explore and inscribe them. Can we, as the Spanish
philosopher Amador Fernández Savater proposes, “hack into” the codes that
hegemonically organize things, their uses, their circulations, their modifications?
(Savater, 2016). What trends would we find where infrastructures beat? What
would happen if we followed the advice of the coinners of the concept of Critical
Design, Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, for whom the role of design can be “to
facilitate visions and not so much to define them, to be a catalyst rather than a
source”? (2013: 9). To elaborate questions that link materialities, fabrications,
uses, ethics, is to discuss a design policy as the sensitive nucleus of our links with
futurities.
If we assume that the goal of design is to fabricate not only the object (the
service, the idea) but its world around it and that “every object, tool, service or even
narrative in which design is involved creates particular ways of being, knowing and
doing” (Escobar, 2017: 47), it is possible to think that, through the invention of
objects, infrastructures and practices, design modulates time. It is a protagonist
in the production of social semantics that include and propitiate, exclude and
make impossible, links with futurities. In our terms, design is a component of
futurizations and a vector of futurabilities. A practice in which futurabilities
and futurizations do not disable each other, and which can articulate a dialectic
between project and path. Because if to design is to maintain “a conversation about
possibilities” (Escobar, 2017: 203), the open game of the feasible is a strategy that
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R. MARTIN IGLESIAS, C. VOTO AND R. AGRA
reveals the decision and its contingency, as well as the productive multiplicity of
the world.
As Escobar (2017: 120) states, in the last decade “important trends have
emerged in the world of design that seek to reorient its practice from traditional
meaning, tied to the production of objects, technological change, the individual and
the market, seen and led by professionals at the height of their expertise, to a way
of seeing design as user-centred, situated, interactive, collaborative, participatory
and focused on experience and the production of life itself”. Something similar is
indicated by Dunne and Raby when they refer to the emergence of “critical design”
(2013: 34). Diverse groups, collectives and organizations of all kinds are oriented
towards collaborative forms of design and designed forms of collaboration,
propitiating a panorama of rearticulation of creations, knowledge, imagination
and life that does not submit to the project of monetary valorization; even, more
generally, that seeks not to submit to utopia as a project to be fulfilled. The
challenge is to create links of post-utopian justice with futurities through the
“creation of systematic domains in which definitions and rules can be redefined to
make interdependencies and commitments (or their absence) visible” (Escobar,
2017: 212). This attests the shift from a design centered on futurization to
one centered on futurabilization, a displacement that invites to produce sensible
changes regarding figures of social and cultural transformation, and to open the
ways in which these creative practices position themselves regarding becoming
and build bonds of futurization. There is no final design, no final figure. In
this sense, design practices can assume a logic of change and attention to what
is effective, which utopian policies did not consider.
Taking into consideration these post-utopian potentialities of design, its ability
to open new horizons, to counteract the advance of a hegemonic narrative to leave
room for an imagination of differences, we wanted to design an exercise for the
implementation of a thought towards futurabilization. The exercise was presented
in different academic contexts within the framework of the public teaching of
architecture in Buenos Aires. First the participants were invited to choose a space
for dissident thought according to their own experiences, where by dissidence we
recovered more the meaning of dissenting over disagreeing in the construction
of diverse relationships. In other words, each participant had the freedom to
choose the field of futurability of their design according to the construction of
diverse relations of imagination and projection, whether from the point of view
of class, gender, race, age, etc. From the understanding of this dissident space,
the participants were asked to detect a common place that relates to the chosen
dissidence and then to fictionate this commonplace in a possible future, from the
dissidence. The interweaving of the common place with the fictional proposal
reveals a certain kinship with predicative operations, operations that emerge from
a bond of similarity, to pass from a “being like” to a “being”, a performative bond
with which to imagine new futurities, new semantic, material, and sensitive paths.
DESIGN IN THE AGE OF DISSIDENT CYBORGS
7
Figure 1. The Walking Ombú. Acosta, Vega, Carenzo, Petkovsek. UNLaM, San Justo, Buenos
Aires, Argentina. 2018.
3. Design as caring-curing toward xenofuturism
From
this
epochal
diagnosis
referring
to
the
context
of
Anthropocene/Capitalocene/Plantationcene and Chuthulucene, to the post-digital
circumstance and to our cyborg condition, we propose design strategies that
become new con-figurations where design is a component of futurizations and
a vector of futurabilities. We take as paradigmatic and exemplary case of these
strategies the project “The Walking Ombú” (Figure 1) developed by students
of Architecture of the National University of La Matanza. The case reflects
the post-utopian approach that we are unfolding in this article in counterpoint
with Archigram’s utopian Walking City (1964). The ombú (Phytolacca dioica)
is a centenary vernacular tree whose roots have an extended reticular system
and whose classification escapes botanical taxonomies. The project is based on
the evocation of two huge urban ombus recently cut down and connects their
presence-absence with the collective memories of local multi-species. Thus,
students detected invisible networks of experiences related to each ombú and
made them visible in terms of vectors of futurability.
These design strategies for futurization function as a therapy (from the Greek
therapeia: care) that seeks to care-cure. From the proposal of a tentacular
thinking (Haraway, 2016) we continue towards a radical thinking (in the most
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R. MARTIN IGLESIAS, C. VOTO AND R. AGRA
etymological sense, from the Latin radix) that cares-cure as holobiomatic-semiotic
connectivity between-species and between stories. In this sense, “The Walking
Ombú” takes care of the collective memory of the place as holobiont (Margulis,
1990), as an entity formed by the association of different species that give rise to
semio-ecological units. The proposal of a design as a care-cure opposes that of
a design that makes/unmakes worlds and opens up the possibility of collectively
growing a xenofuturism, as a theoretical construction that makes it possible to
elaborate a framework not only for the future of design but above all for the design
of futures.
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