Filtern
Erscheinungsjahr
- 2018 (4) (entfernen)
Dokumenttyp
- Dissertation (3)
- Bericht (1)
Sprache
- Englisch (4) (entfernen)
Volltext vorhanden
- ja (4)
Schlagworte
- decolonial thought (2)
- design research (2)
- design studies (2)
- Beuys, Joseph (1)
- Designwissenschaft <Informatik> (1)
- Entkolonialisierung (1)
- Eurasia (1)
- Eurasien <Motiv> (1)
- Geburtenregelung (1)
- Geschlechterforschung (1)
- Joseph Beuys (1)
- Mensch-Maschine-Kommunikation (1)
- Nam June Paik (1)
- Paik, Nam June (1)
- Wearable Computer (1)
- birth control (1)
- electronic textiles (1)
- gender studies (1)
- interaction design (1)
- knitting (1)
- sound studies (1)
- violence (1)
- wearables (1)
Institut
The project DAAN (Design of Assistive Ambient Notification Systems, funded by the German Ministry for Education and Research) explored ambient notification as a part of an assistive computing system for elderly users. Within the framework of this project we investigated the potential of textiles as ambient notification devices, with a focus on knitted fabric. This is the documentation of the project activities at University of Arts Berlin.
This dissertation offers a critical engagement with design’s implication in the ontological constitution of gendered, racialized, subjugated bodies. To do so, it starts from a broad understanding of design as an activity that articulates modes of being in the world — and that, in so doing, also shapes itself. This approach is grounded on an interrogation of the political motives that permeate and inform design processes; I take particular interest in how these have been manifested throughout the history of birth control technology.
Starting from this background, I outline and propose the concept of technoecologies of birth control — that is, spaces that emerge through the performances of co-constitutive material-semiotic actors, for the purposes of birth control. Throughout this dissertation, I identify two fundamental sets of actors operating within the technoecological space: bodies and things. The co-constitution of these actors is realized across historically, geopolitically, socioculturally, technoscientifically located performances; as such, technoecological actors are approached as relational, contextual and mutually structuring entities.
This conceptualization of technoecologies of birth control is informed by feminist and decolonial theories, and posits that these spaces are crucial for the establishment and sedimentation of biopolitical regimes of domination. Design is thoroughly implicated in the emergence of technoecologies of birth control, as it holds a crucial role in the management and regulation of bodies characteristic of biopolitical regimes of domination. In other words, design inscribes ontological meaning onto some bodies in detriment of others; it is with the sedimentation of these conditions that bodies become coded as ‘naturally’ or ‘fundamentally’ different. The constitution of difference amongst material-semiotic actors in technoecologies of birth control is thus articulated by design; in other words, it is the result of a planned, deliberate inscription of ontological meaning.
My interrogation of design’s role in the constitution of subjugated bodies occurs within the scope of these technoecologies. Starting from this framework, I discuss the insights offered by a series of experiments (‘Yarn Sessions’ and 'Oniria') conceived as both explorations of the technoecological space, and speculations on the instability of the social constitution of bodies by design. My theorization of technoecologies of birth control happens, thus, through a process of research through design — that is, a process in which theory and practice are deployed as mutually informing forces in design research. Through the analysis of these design experiments, I propose three fundamental aspects of the performances of material-semiotic actors within technoecologies of birth control: relativity, opacity, and duplicity.
Decolonizing the Earview of Design: Listening Anxieties and the Apparatus of Auditory Governance
(2018)
This dissertation attends to the intersection of sound, material culture, racism, and police violence in Brazil from a decolonizing perspective. With a focus on theories informed by cultural and sound studies, it unravels the contingent arrangements through which certain designed objects and practices function as material-discursive nodes for the normalization and perpetuation of racialized violences. To explore these ideas, it reads design—a field of knowledge and a set of practices—as a material-discursive apparatus, accountable for not only the results but also the conditions of possibility for any research endeavor.
The main driving force of this work is the identification and evincing of ‘listening anxieties.’ These emerge through enactments of political consensus, policing, and compliance; the articulation of these three in institutional, designerly, as well as everyday practices is what this research identifies as the Apparatus of Auditory Governance (or AAG). More specifically, I look at three manifestations of these auditory governances in contemporary Brazil—from the early 2000s to the judiciary Coup d’Etat of late 2016. These range from the criminalization of jukeboxes by a Military Police acting outside the scope of written law in so-called ‘pacified’ neighborhoods in Rio de Janeiro, to the construction of a seven kilometer-long acoustic barrier in the city as a device for urban segregation, to the deployment of sound bombs as devices for the enforcement of silence by the same police force in São Paulo.
The articulation of auditory governances, however, is not fixed; rather, it shifts and mutates to account for distinct and diverse experiences of listening. These shifts are what this work calls earviews: a conceptual orientation which determines the “listening point” where narratives and perceptions of auditory reality unfold from. The AAG, articulated and deconstructed at the intersection of distinct and conflicting earviews, forms the main method of this dissertation, and is of particular interest for sound and design studies. By understanding the earview as an asset of and for designing, it is possible to interrogate the role of design in the enforcement, reproduction, and normalization of sonic violences, and the erasure of other(ed) narratives of listening. Rather than simply evincing the hegemony of normative—qua racialized—earviews, I intervene by reading them through first-person accounts and storytelling stemming from fieldwork with artists and activists in Brazil, as well as from two movies by Brazilian directors—O Som ao Redor (2012) and Branco Sai, Preto Fica (2014). These intersections are further complemented by a semi-fictional narrative created throughout five collective pedagogical sessions fusing designing and fabulation. This format, named “Yarn Sessions,” is my methodological proposition for design research in this work.
This research started out by posing three broad questions relating to the connection between auditory practices—i.e. sounds and their social, cultural, and political engagements—and the design of listening devices. It asked: what is the contribution of design to the politics of mediated listening and its devices? What might be the possible, probable and/or preferable enactments of the political agency of designed listening devices? These initial questions are all addressed by this work, and have shifted from their initial form as a general investigation on the entanglement of design and listening, to offer an inquiry and an intervention on violences enacted with and through sound.
This work thus participates in a re-historicization of the colonial underpinnings of design, while at the same time offering a decolonizing methodological proposition for design research and design studies with a sound and listening-oriented locus. It demonstrates that the material conditions of sonic violence—from architectural planning to transitional/illegalized sound objects to the development of weaponry—are a form of ontological design (cf. Anne-Marie Willis) which succeeds by making its own colonial and racialized ethos discursively and materially invisible. This ontological enunciation demands the accountability of the designer as both producer and reproducer of racialized/colonial phenomena in the making of their own practices.
Yet this research does not align itself completely with discourses from the “ontological turn” or “new materialisms” in philosophy (cf. Karen Barad), insofar as these often undermine and erase the role played by coloniality and “racialized assemblages” (cf. Alexander Weheliye) to the constitution of its own ontologies and epistemologies. My proposition for design understands the field to constitute in itself an ontoepistemology (cf. Willis, Gloria Anzaldúa), albeit reading such ontological alignments through decolonial and critical race studies. In so doing, it opens up a new field of inquiry in which sound studies and decolonial thought inform designerly inquiries into material culture not only for the evincing of specific material-discursive phenomena (e.g. sonic violences), but also for intervening on them with intersectional and decolonizing frameworks.
Introduction
Following their first meeting in Düsseldorf in 1961, Joseph Beuys and Nam June Paik began their lifelong series of artistic collaborations so-called EURASIA. Sharing a common interest in Europe and Asia, they started to consider Europe (=West) and Asia (=East) as one continental culture, and tried to connect them as EURASIA.
Containing Europe and Asia, Eurasia is one continuous mass of land. Europe and Asia, or West and East are merely imaginary divisions, but once they are named Europe and Asia or West and East, this fixed division makes it difficult to understand that these two areas are in fact one continent with common roots, and that they developed through mutual influence. To realize the continuity of Europe and Asia and understand how to connect these two regions is becoming an urgent question.
In our globalized world, it is becoming impossible to uphold protection through the entity of the nation-state, which defines the enemy as being outside the nation. In order to find an alternative to the nation-state, we need to look back in history and restructure the world on a more abstract level; in other words, the sublation of Westphalian sovereignty which developed after the Thirty Years’ War is now required.
Also if Asia becomes one political entity, just as Europe is becoming one political entity, the tension between Europe and Asia will be intense; it will be no different from that between nations, which caused two World Wars. As Asia, a large part of which was once colonized by Europe, begins to gain political and economical power, it becomes necessary to prepare a plan to reconcile Europe and Asia. Meanwhile, if Eurasia is united as an expansion of the nation-state, the result may be regional hegemony with a one-sided national perspective, similar to that of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere led by the Empire of Japan. The Eurasian Economic Union led by Vladimir Putin’s Russian Federation threatens to make the same mistake. Bearing in mind the fact that the bloc economy triggered World War II, to connect Europe and Asia while eschewing regional hegemony will be crucial for our co-existence in the 21st century.
Having endured World War II, both Joseph Beuys and Nam June Paik were aware of the contradictions of modernity and the nation-state which originated in Europe. They reflected on how to overcome divisions such as those between nations, between Europe and Asia in colonial history, and between East and West during the Cold War at that time. Eliminating borders, Beuys and Paik’s utopian vision of EURASIA is an abstract and archetypical metaphor for connecting Europe and Asia, West and East, or two opposite things into one, and it will give us a hint on how to overcome the divisions caused by modernity.