On deforming forming and other design paradoxes

This paper joins the philosophical reflection on design. A historiosophical approach to this phenomenon is complemented by phenomenological descriptions depicting different types of its paradox. Design is considered here as an effect of the impetus for visualization encoded in Western culture and connected with the privileged position of the sense of sight present in this culture. The visibility of things – products – is to restore in modern people a sense of security and to deliver them from the fear of nothingness. Such a historiosophical approach is connected to constructivism, as it combines design with the creation of reality, the creation which consists in imposing form – i.e. human program and project – on (chaotic) things. Main theorem: Thing-form-shaping practices are not neutral with respect to existence and axiology because they also inevitably de-form the world. Questions: What does this paradox mean and in what ways does it emerge, and how is it given in experience? What is the end of all these experiments (with regard to appearances, shapes and forms) conducted on reality or nature? What are the cultural, moral, political or social consequences of reducing the meaning – and existence – of things to their visible shapes? 

From the philosophy of design to the phenomenology of gestures. Vilém Flusser on the state of things

This article aims at presenting general outline of, what is called here, Vilém Flusser’s philosophy of things and it arises from two different fields of interest. First one is the philosophy of design: reflexions on today’s status of objects that we can find in our environment; mostly, Flusser focuses on media and technology. Second field appears within Flusser’s phenomenology of gestures – a theory which deals with the interaction between man and objects; but the emphasis here is put on the way objects “produce” us – not the other way around. Those two fields are presented and interpreted in the first two paragraphs of this paper. The last part is devoted to four other theoreticians: Deyan Sudjic, Wolfgang Welsch, Lev Manovich and Bruno Latour. Here the author draws a parallel between those thinkers and Flusser in the context of the theory of design, aesthetics and others. 

From Isotype to Many Eyes. Social responsibility of design in data visualization

Isotype (1925–1971) and Many Eyes (2007–2015) are two projects that share the intention of using data visualization methods and techniques as a tool for democratizing knowledge, although they differ in a considerable set of features and a large distance of time. The main goal of the creators of Isotype Otto Neurath and Marie Neurath was to overcome cultural divisions and educational stratification with an effective visual method of communicating important social facts, promoting specific values, or showing the rapid social, cultural and economic changes at the beginning of the 20th century. On the other hand, Many Eyes is an open social participation environment (web application) that gives users the ability to share data resources, generate their own visualizations and discuss the procedures for their creation and cognitive effects of their use. The authors of the system are Fernanda B. Viégas, Martin Wattenberg – two researchers and designers who have been consistently exploring the “social life of visualization” for several years. Isotype and Many Eyes – as examples of socially engaged design – are analyzed in this text on two important dimensions: firstly – how the complex conditions of design practice have been integrated (design skills and teams, design procedures and methods, technological and institutional resources); scenarios for the transfer of identified challenges, threats and barriers to a specific solution that responds to the real needs of users; secondly – scenarios for the transfer of identified challenges, threats and barriers to a specific solution that responds to the user needs. 

The article concerns speculative design in the context of bioethics. The author analyzes and interprets projects by designer Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg and Age Haines in relation to modern biotechnologies, future scenarios of medicine and machine ethics.

Painting as light design in projection spaces

Among numerous aesthetics forms of light practices present in the galloping High Definition technoculture light festivals (applying various types of video-mapping practices in urban areas) and immersive performances based on projection (screen) design of painting (the Alive cycle, performances using the AMIEX Technology® – Art & Music Immersive Experience) have become increasingly successful all over the world. Their expansion is undoubtedly a legacy of promotion of light in the almost a century old Bauhaus theory and practice (including Kurt Schwerdtfeger’s and Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack’s light games, or László Moholy-Nagy’s light modulator).

Thus, on the basis of painting a kinetic art of light (a kind of video art) is created. This art promotes „using” projection design of painting, not just a contemplative watching (as in the case of a museum). In this way, a digital form of timed painting in motion is implemented and initiates new styles of experiencing traditional painting art, equipped with qualities of an immersive light spectacle. The results are „video frescoes” – intermedia at the intersection of painting and projection, simulation and recording, where the subject of experience is comprised of a light spectacle and a place of its disclosure. Accordingly, we deal with paintings transferred into the dimension of a digital spectacle. The paintings are managed by users in an environment where a light trick works for the design of simultaneous cinema. In such a laboratory of digitalised paintings relocation of cinema to another new cinema or painting with light in the spaces of „poly-cinema” (Moholy-Nagy) occurs. 

Non-human face design. Posthuman contexts of facial imagery technologies

The face seems to be a category that should take a very important and special place in posthuman thought. It is in fact the battlefield between various forces and is the result of biological components, affects, technology and biotechnology, screens and communication codes. The reflection on the face that has already begun from Deleuze and Guattari, which detaches it from the human subject, undermines its status as an emblem of humanity and shows it as the intersection of various types of tension and dynamics, finds its practical expression in current technological reality. Facial imaging technologies in film CGI, specialized methods of face-tracking and analysis using artificial intelligence algorithms, fusions of human and inhuman faces in artistic and commercial projects, and finally the face as an important element of robotics, all these areas show this category as a real field of experiment and designing practices in the visual layer. The face thus appears as a critical category, inclining to ask questions about the veracity of her image, its integrity, property rights to her, and communication potential. The aim of the article will be an attempt to build a map of face design practices in post-digital media reality and answer the question about its very complex and defying contemporary status. 

The article aims to shed light on the relationship between digital media and emotional experiences such as love and loss. It follows Lee Mackinnon’s theoretical assumption that love can be considered and experienced differently depending on the technological system which facilitates it, broadens that assumption to the wider range of emotional social experiences, and employs that view in analyzing the emotional game design of Emily Is Away – an interactive story about a relationship with an old high school friend as depicted in conversations via instant messaging client. In doing so, the article aims to investigate how the digital context and mediation of personal conversations through instant messengers can influence the ways in which we experience drifting away from people we once considered important, crafting a set of cultural associations later to be used within a text of culture. It focuses on the accessibility and immediacy of contact via internet contrasted with the spatial divide, as well as the capacity for representation of uncertainty and longing in the visual form on the interface. It also discusses the seeming universality of the depicted emotional experience, as it became recognizable enough to be thematized into a game which relies on the feeling of nostalgia. Finally, by exploring the emotional design of the game on the levels of its aesthetics, narrative, mechanics and procedures, the article attempts to show the potential of the digital medium to represent and/or reproduce such experiences and emotions, thus broadening the spectrum of our cultural emotional experiences. 

Thomas Bernhard and photography. Around Extinction and not only

Thomas Bernhard was not an expert in photography, its history and especially theory. He never dealt with the discursive description of her phenomenon. However, in his last great novel, Extinction (1986), he made several photos a kind of memory trigger and a center for building a story. The article deals with the issue of a special, extremely critical, not to say iconoclastic, assessment of the role of photography as a medium of stupefying people who succumb to its seductive power. The analysis of the fragments of photography appearing in the novel is just a starting point for deeper reflection on the impossibility of erasing photography as a medium of memory, it is a fundamental polemic with the thesis of the novel narrator, which the author identifies with the author himself. Here, Thomas Bernhard’s Extinction is an excuse to reflect on how photography and photographing can be considered a disease of our time, as the Austrian writer anticipated in his novel in the eighties of the last century.