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December 11, 2019
Istanbul Design Biennial
5th Istanbul Design Biennial
Empathy Revisited: designs for more than one
September 26–November 8, 2020
Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts (İKSV)
Sadi Konuralp Caddesi No: 5
Nejat Eczacıbaşı Binası
34433 Şişhane İstanbul
Turkey
tasarimbienali.iksv.org
Instagram / Facebook / TwitterOrganised by the Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts (İKSV), the 5th Istanbul Design Biennial, titled Empathy Revisited: designs for more than one, will be curated by Mariana Pestana and take place on September 26–November 8, 2020.
Starting off from the idea that design comprises the devices, platforms and interfaces through which we relate to one another, the 5th Istanbul Design Biennial will revise the notion of empathy, to reimagine a role for design concerned with feelings, affects and relations.
Invented in the 1910s, the word empathy is nowadays used to describe the capacity to perceive other people’s expressions and feelings, but in the beginning of the 20th century it was much more generous in that it encompassed the relations between bodies other than the human. Now, 100 years after its inception, it seems like the right time to revisit the original sentiment of the term. The ecological crisis we live in can be directly linked with notions of progress and development based on practices of extraction and exploration. The post-human paradigm posits that all things have their own relations with the world, that there is no human/non-human divide but a multinatural continuum across all living and non-living entities.
In a time marked by technological speed and environmental crisis, the 5th Istanbul Design Biennial is attentive to practices of care, rituals of connection, and things we can feel with. Curious about new-animism or indigenous perspectivism, it absorbs southern and eastern influences in the way it thinks about the relations between things, between people, and both. The 2020 edition privileges local knowledges and territorial practices in face of the increasing homogeny of a globalizing world.
Some of the fundamental questions that this edition raises are, what structures of collective feeling does design put forward, and how may we design for, and from, more than one perspective, more than one dimension, more than one body? Under the contemporary post-human philosophical gaze, and in face of the current technological horizon, these gestures gain a whole new potential.
Empathy Revisited: designs for more than one celebrates commensality and other protocols for sharing. Interested in tables, pots and dinner sets but also virtual reality headsets, digital currencies and online chat rooms, the 5th Istanbul Design Biennial will welcome myth and ceremony. It will be about how design brings us together.
The biennial will comprise an Observatory and a Kitchen, which will manifest in two separate venues. The Observatory will be an exhibition from which to watch, record and perform practices of empathy in the contemporary world. The Kitchen will be a place of action and experimentation, where a range of guests will be hosting on rotation transforming the space, the menu and the conversations. Through food we will access the pluriverses that our post-human existence touches upon and constructs. An open call will be announced in January for projects and events that revolve around the Kitchen.
The biennial will also for the first time form a Young Curators Group, made up of curators based in Istanbul, working as part of the curatorial team of the biennial. This group will be responsible for contextualizing the theme of the biennial locally by connecting to practitioners, thinkers and makers in the city, and establishing links between the programme and historical approaches in Turkey.
Joining Mariana Pestana for the 5th Istanbul Design Biennial’s curatorial team will be Billie Muraben (Assistant Curator & Deputy Editor) and Sumitra Upham (Curator of Programmes).
The Istanbul-based group Future Anecdotes will undertake the exhibition design of the biennial, while Studio Maria João Macedo will do the graphic design.
The details of the 5th Istanbul Design Biennial programme will be announced in 2020. The media and professional preview will be on September 24 and 25, 2020.
For further information about the theme and the curatorial team: tasarimbienali.iksv.org/en
For media inquiries: media@iksv.org
For high-resolution images: http://www.iksvphoto.com/#/folder/29acct
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Emanuele Coccia La vita delle piante. Metafisica della mescolanza
Emanuele Coccia è professore associato all’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) di Parigi. Con il Mulino ha già pubblicato «La vita sensibile» (2011) e «Il bene nelle cose. La pubblicità come discorso morale» (2014).
]]>by Maja Kuzmanovic, Nik Gaffney and FoAM
https://medium.com/invironment/groworld-c777f5c09c4f
The interconnectedness of the human and the vegetal has been a recurring, age-old theme in art, science and religion. Medieval healer and mystic Hildegard of Bingen wrote about plants radiating a greening life-force (Roth 2000), which she called viriditas. Any translation of viriditas into words and symbols would remain inadequate, but it is a phenomenon that can be viscerally experienced by most humans. Viriditas can be felt while walking through a lush forest, or picking leafy greens from a garden. It is the feeling of freshness and incomprehensible greenness, a quiet, elemental consciousness permeating all life. Sadly, the cultural values of our times seem to have strayed away from viriditas in favour of the active aspects of our animal attributes — speed, expansion, predation and consumption. The balance has tipped toward the bestial side of humanity at the expense of the vegetal. However, we can reacquaint ourselves with viriditas when we slow down, become still but acutely present, like a plant. We can witness viriditas in our own resilience, awareness, compassion and contemplation.
Most noble
evergreen with your roots
in the sun:
you shine in the cloudless
sky of a sphere no earthly
eminence can grasp,
enfolded in the clasp
of ministries divine.
— Hildegard Von Bingen
While viriditas can be an experiential and spiritual muse of a vegetal human culture, for the analytically inclined a more empirical approach to the idea of vegetal sentience is needed (aside from the well-known psychedelic and shamanistic perspectives). Justifiably, before encouraging development of a vegetal mind in humans, we’d like to understand the plant’s point of view first, rather than modelling our human existence on an incomplete interpretation. We might want to engage with the botanical kingdom directly, and grasp how plants perceive and communicate. There are several examples from both mainstream and fringe science looking at plant perception, signalling and sentience. Daniel Chamovitz recently wrote about how plants experience and respond to the world (Chamovitz 2012). Plant neurobiology developed in the last decade as a scientific discipline researching plants’ signalling and adaptive behaviour (Barlow 2008). On the edges of scientific replicability, we find Clive Backster’s biocommunication experiments with a specimen of Dracena Massengeana connected to a polygraph (Backster 2003), or the imaginative crescographs by Jagdish Chandra Bose and Randall Fontes (Theroux 1997). These experiments look at plant growth and movement in response to external stimuli, and attempt to understand plant perception and communication.
Venturing to communicate with plants would require humans to grasp the logic of the “vegetal mind.” Plant consciousness would no doubt be considered alien and impossible to perceive without assistance. This is where knowledge of human-computer interaction might be informative. The field of computer science has developed a variety of methods to determine the nature of machine mind by comparing it to the human mind (the Turing test being the best known example). However, it is quite anthropocentrically arrogant to think that human sentience, perception and behaviour is the only possible expression of consciousness. Why measure sentience by how well it mirrors that of humans? Nature may contain a myriad of disparate sentiences, operating according to their own internally consistent, externally incomprehensible logic. We might be “hearing their voices” daily, but having no sensory and mental capacity to translate and interpret their meaning. Perhaps we should focus our energies on “an attempt to give the physical world itself a voice so that rather than us asking what reality is, reality itself can tell you” (Schroeder, retrieved 2008). Writer Karl Schroeder called this “post-scientific” communication with non-human sentient beings “thalience.” A plant-inspired culture could benefit from getting to know its verdant neighbours from a range of perspectives, including direct and unmediated experience, moving away from teleological, utilitarian and reductionist analyses of human relationships with plants. Schroeder talks about “non-human intelligences who come to different conclusions about what the universe [is] like” (Schroeder, retrieved 2008). Plants are such “non-human intelligences” with whom we share the same universe, yet the way in which they experience the world remains beyond our grasp.
We have nothing in common with the Geometers. No shared experiences, no common culture. Until that changes, we can’t communicate with them. Why not? Because language is nothing more than a stream of symbols that are perfectly meaningless until we associate them, in our minds, with meaning; a process of acculturation. Until we share experiences with the Geometers, and thereby begin to develop a shared culture — in effect, to merge our culture with theirs — we cannot communicate with them, and their efforts to communicate with us will continue to be just as incomprehensible as the gestures they’ve made so far.
— Neal Stephenson
At the intersections of culture, gardening and technology we can start to see how plants can become organisational principles for human society in the turbulent times of the 21st century. Although we may need to scavenge at the fringes of contemporary society, we can observe many healing effects that humans can have on their surroundings through a symbiotic collaboration with plants. Some fight desertification and remediate industrial wastelands through natural farming and permaculture. Others design whole lifecycle, closed-loop technological and architectural systems inspired by natural processes, based on the art and science of biomimicry. Yet, these are scattered examples. We still don’t have widespread methods to improve wasteful, often counter-productive human behaviours. How do we encourage broader, longer-term cultural changes? What varieties of culture would be capable of forging symbiotic relationships between postindustrial human societies and the rest of the earth? How do we compost bitterness to grow beauty?
From these questions and assertions sprouted the groWorld initiative, a long-term inquiry into human-plant interactions and their effect on the longevity of human culture. The people of FoAM — a distributed laboratory for speculative culture — initiated groWorld to “minimise borders and maximise edges” between the man-made and the vegetal. In these zones of liminality and ambiguity, groWorld abets “unholy alliances” between contemporary culture and cultivation, building and growing, botany and technology. Inspired by the way in which plant species propagate – spanning multiple temporal layers – the initiative encompasses both long- and short-term explorations. The slow processes of cultural adaptation and plant cultivation are researched across several decades, through observation and interaction. At the same time, quick technological and social changes are incorporated through techno-artistic experiments in three interconnected branches: {sym}, {bio} and {sys}. The {sym} branch looks at how human culture can be infused with vegetal characteristics: in botanical fiction, plant games, active materials, and responsive environments. The {bio} branch is about a direct collaboration with plants, using age-old techniques of foraging and gardening and seeing cities as edible landscapes for humans and non-humans. Finally, {sys} deals with botanically-inspired technologies that can help humans engage with plants beyond the physical level, through sensing, perception and perhaps even communication.
Through a cross-fertilisation of {sym}{bio}{sys}, groWorld merges digital culture with environmentalism. Both approaches promote empowerment of trans-local communities and are rooted in self-reliant maker-cultures, yet they don’t often mingle. groWorld encourages their interaction by bringing programmers and gardeners, gamers and botanists together on the common ground of the arts. Together, they create hybrids of gardening and technology, or narrative realities where human and vegetal can merge into a unified, hybrid culture.
On Mar 23, 2017, at 4:17 PM, oana suteu khintirian <khintirian@gmail.com> wrote:hi all,Let me share with you the new concept for the design of SRRA_ripe and please let me know what your think! Would a quick skype on Friday be possible?bestOana
hi all,Let me share with you the new concept for the design of SRRA_ripe and please let me know what your think! Would a quick skype on Friday be possible?bestOana
On Sep 7, 2015, at 11:31 AM, Peter Weisman <peter.weisman@asu.edu> wrote:Hi all,What workshop will be happening in Montreal? I would be more then happy to create a Production Calendar. But, I need to know all of the details and the people to be involved in AZ and those going to Montreal. Who in Montreal would be handling of the physical in Montreal?PeteHappy Connecting. Sent from my Sprint Samsung Galaxy S® 5
-------- Original message --------
From: Xin Wei Sha <Xinwei.Sha@asu.edu>
Date: 2015/09/05 5:47 AM (GMT-07:00)
To: Todd Ingalls <Todd.Ingalls@asu.edu>, Christopher Roberts <cmrober2@asu.edu>, Peter Weisman <peter.weisman@asu.edu>
Subject: production calendar for Montreal Workshop Nov 2-13How about if we draw up a proper production calendar for the Montreal Workshop Nov 2-13: software, local testing, gear, people logistics, workshop scheduling etc. With milestones.I’d like to consult Pete. (We should not expect much active participation from Oana during this time. At the right time with OV agreement, we’ll work with Andre Houle, the TD for O Vertigo. Andre came to ASU with Michael Montanaro.)I will to be in Montreal Sep 19-24, so can advance prep for Todd (and or Julian)’s pre-staging trip in Montreal (October?) before the Nov workshop.I will probably not be able to be in Montreal for the actual November workshop since I’ll have to be in Phoenix to staff the fort, host Lexing, and do a UK loop.Xin Wei________________________________________________________________________________________Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts + Fulton Schools of Engineering • ASUFellow: ASU-Santa Fe Center for Complex Biosocial Systems
Affiliate Professor: Future of Innovation in Society; Computer Science; English
Founding Director, Topological Media Labskype: shaxinwei • mobile: +1-650-815-9962_________________________________________________________________________________________________
Not only handcraft manufacture, not only artistic and poetical bringing into appearance and concrete imagery, is a bringing-forth, poiesis. Physis also, the arising of something from out of itself, is a bringing-forth, poiesis. Physis is indeed poiesis in the highest sense. For what presences by means of physis has the bursting open belonging to bringing-forth, e.g., the bursting of a blossom into bloom, in itself (en heautoi). In contrast, what is brought forth by the artisan or the artist, e.g. the silver chalice, has the bursting open belonging to bringing forth not in itself, but in another (en alloi), in the craftsman or artist.
[Heidegger, Question Concerning Technology, 11]
Laura Boyd-Clowes MSC Ethnobotany University of Kent, School of Anthropology and Conservation, United Kingdom https://kent.academia.edu/LauraBoydClowes/Activity http://seedlibraries.org/profile/LauraBoydClowes
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