After Nature:The Arts of the Machine

Research Through Practice Studio 2
Konstfack University College of Art, Craft and Design
Fall 2008
Tutors: Rolf Hughes and Alberto Frigo

"Another very wrong idea that is also going the rounds at the moment is the equivalence that has been established between inspiration, exploration of the subconscious, and liberation, between chance, automatism, and freedom. Now this sort of inspiration, which consists in blindly obeying every impulse, is in fact slavery. The classical author who wrote his tragedy observing a certain number of known rules is freer than the poet who writes down whatever comes into his head and is slave to other rules of which he knows nothing."
Raymond Queneau


Keywords:
Alterity, authenticity, originality, copy, authorship, design theory, creativity, auto-poiesis, human experience, accountability, authority, ownership, oeuvre, intention, OULIPO, emergence, generative & evolutionary design, interdisciplinarity, art, metaphor, biotechnology, nanotechnology, fake, forgery, masquerade, ventriloquism, counterfeits, non-inductive, spontaneous, copyright, disguise, deception, natural, non-heroic, automatic, mechanistic, rituaistic, repetition, difference, the inhuman.

Aims:
This studio is set up to question whether or not practice-based research, with its particular emphasis on experiential, embodied and “tacit” knowledge, is dependent on concepts of authenticity and integrity grounded in a historically specific understanding of human selfhood. In order to investigate this, we will investigate performances of creativity and/or cultural production which are variously characterised as combinatorial, generative, “post human”, automatic etc. By automating acts of ‘creativity’, we seek to explore whether the concept of the “human” is becoming a nostalgic fetish in art, craft and design discourse as well as practice-based or “artistic” research.