Hello!
I wrote this statement to describe the current project I am working on. I still haven't found a less dense way to describe my project in detail. In case the methodology in my statement is a little too specialized, my project is attempting to link critical design as a way to disrupt ways of thinking and being that I see are connected to a modern interpretation of colonialism and a capitalist world system. I believe both material and immaterial objects are infused with colonial and capitalist rhetoric that shape our way of interacting and understanding between ourselves and with others. And one might ask, well why disrupt a capitalist world system or modern interpretations of colonialism- despite their terrible track record for unabashedly transforming humans into disposables? I am not the biggest fan of the tag team duo colonialism and capitalism so through my research I hope to generate a design practice that both illustrates how design is deeply connected to the ways we understand the world socially and physically, and this could be used to design equity, and resistance towards power imbalances that are currently at play. I dare to question what happens if we can politicize, weaponize, personify design?
I read capitalism and coloniality- the historical presence of colonialism as two ideologies separate yet deeply interconnected. My project explores capitalism and coloniality as aesthetic discourses with material and immaterial strategies and outcomes that influence world making including contemporary conceptions of race,class and gender. Investigating across three planes the built environment, cyberspace, and hertzian space I question how capitalism and coloniality interpolates aesthetic discourses, co-opts design practices and other material and immaterial objects for the reproduction of itself. While I understand built environment as simply the objects that make up the materiality of our social/ physical world, and cyber space as a world in which communication and materiality is rendered into virtual over computer networks, hertzian space is a little more nuanced by comparison. According to cyborg anthropology, hertzian space is a term used to describe the holistic view of the electronic devices and its cultural interactions. Critical designers and architects including Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby described this "electro-climate," in Hertzian Tales (1999) as a space “inhabited by humans and electronic machines, as the interface between electromagnetic waves and human experiences”. The steady increase of interest in electromagnetic real state from both various national military complexes and multination technology companies reinforces that this invisible yet very real electro landscape plays an active role in shaping contemporary social realities and identities.
To aestheticize both capitalism and coloniality is to transform understandings of design, it is to look beyond the quality of human relationships with objects themselves to the aesthetics of the social, psychological, and cultural experiences they mediate. To read capitalism and coloniality as an aesthetic discourse across three planes (the built environment, cyberspace, and hertzian space) is my way of understanding capitalism and colonialism as both material and immaterial structures deeply interrelated yet separate. Cultivating a theoretical vocabulary for aesthetics as a form of literacy illustrates that design is a language in which ideas manifest, and institutions, individuals and communities communicate. Taking a closer look at the process of aesthetic appropriation and appropriation at large I question the process of production and re-production as a conversation mediated through design practice, material and immaterial objects themselves to ultimately effect the power relationships within a world system. A few guiding questions I have:
Can we discuss world events or history as a kind of aesthetic event that has a design practice? How does capitalist incentives and colonial rhetoric infiltrate material, the virtual and in hertzian? In what ways does technology demonstrate that is not exempt from the conception process of social identities and world making, how can we politicized technology as an interstitial space between the visible and invisible? Can we reimagine the role of design and aesthetics at large as a form of resistance?