Page 87 - META

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ISSN 2309-0103 www.archidoct.net
Vol. 7 (2) / February 2020
material enables physically encountering or capturing information and interconnecting hybrid layers of reality. So-called “material agency” (Knappett & Malafouris, 2008; ix) plays its (essential) part in the creative, inclusive source of new formations of knowledge production — as “a multi- ple and collective affair,” as a complex assemblage and equal entity (Braidotti, 2019; ix).
3.4 Affect and resonance and post-colonial aethetics
“Various ecologies” (Stengers 2005; 2010, 40) of discipline-specific practices have become part of affect and resonance. These have gradually erased discipline-oriented working methods and cre- ated collaborative (socially, spatially and materially embedded) participation and engagement. Affect, as Deleuze (1990) tells us in discussing Spinoza, is impersonal. While it is not bound to subjects, it nevertheless produces them. Pursuing this logic of affect, Massumi has underscored its autonomy in terms of subjective production, yet without being able to predetermine their becoming. To grasp affect, Deleuze and Massumi (2014), writing from within a Western and colo- nial context, gesture towards the aesthetic theories and practices of sensation. This, they claim, eludes the (colonial) subject while determining it. Likewise, Mignolo (Mignolo & Vázquez, 2013) contrasts the concept of aisthesis (i.e. the modes of perception) with that of aesthetics. The con- cept of affect and decolonial aisthesis endeavour to break up the predominant “division of the sensual” (Rancière, 2006). This, as V. Foerster (1985) has shown, is the political dimension of an aesthetic founded in the concept of perception. The principle of responsibility, which is deter- mined by two imperatives. The post-colonial theory of aisthesis is seen as a way of thinking in order to overcome the gap in the discourse of pragmatics and aesthetics, structure and function (Von Foerster, 1985). This means switching the theory of perception from the static view to the dynamics of movements. The focus lies on how aesthesic design practices of “enactive”/interac- tive systems impact contemporary societal, cultural, economic, environmental, or political move- ment and social engagements.
3.5 Alchemic experimenting with digital and material processes
The symbiosis of additive manufacturing processes and performative material behaviour, whose interaction creates the final form, is called generative design. Generative design imitates nature’s evolutionary approach to development and represents a post-humanist ideology, in which de- signers are no longer the “creators” of form. Nor do they determine how material is formed, or how it should behave and look. Instead, they become composers who, similar to the old alche- mists, conduct analogue and digital experiments to see which phenomena emerge from, become recognizable and crystallize through this process. This generative relationship — between ma- terial arrangement and form behaviour —endeavours to work together with the environment. It seeks to use growth — arrangement and stiffening principles (bionics, biomimicry, mathematical principles) to develop a new language of form involving less material consumption, and thus to create a new design aesthetic of things. The proposed post-digital turn encourages a dialectic re- lationship between embodied interaction and digital, generative design. It suggests that the fu- ture of interaction lies not in the interface “disappearing,” but in it becoming even more visible or available for a broader spectrum of engagements and interactions, interpersonal relationships, experiences and embodiments. “Thus the call for a more experimental attitude toward reality and the potential for self-organisation is inherent in even the humblest forms of matter-energy” (De Landa, 1997; 273).
Humans may assume the role of the other. Perspectives intertwine in the interaction between
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Inbetween – A Post-digital Turn – Craftmaking 4.0
Verena Ziegler