The un-designability of the virtual. Design from problem-solving to problem-finding.

Drawing on Gilles Deleuze (1991) this chapter investigates the virtual as what problematizes the possible by inserting contingency in the process of emergence of the new. The tension between the virtual as what is uniquely placed to engender true innovation, and its aleatory and unforeseeable nature mirrors the tension existing in design between form-making and the need to acknowledge contingency. In embracing the un-designability of the virtual, design is called to take contingency and material variability as forces impinging on the process of emergence of the new. The chapter puts forward a new model for design research that shifts from problem-solving to problem-finding and is predicated on the undesigned at the core of design itself. This points to a further shift: the role of designer from creator to facilitator, teasing form out of the formless, engaged with the manifold forces expressed through material variation

Now I can feel myself!

This paper addresses the visual discourse of psychopharmaceuticals, such as Prozac, in order to investigate the network of relationships of affects, advertising, design and the production of new identity practices. As psychopharmaceuticals enter the public sphere through television and print advertisements, as well as first person narratives increasingly promoted in the media, the cultural discourse surrounding their use and the identity of the users are also changing. Drawing from a Spinozist notion of affect, ‘the trace of one body upon another’, as well as from a semiotic analysis of advertisements, I intend to examine the identity practices and the type of embodiment emerging in, and envisioned by, the increasingly normalised object ‘psychopharmaceutical’. The centrality of affects in the constitution of subjectivity is increasingly relevant to contemporary critical theory (see the notion of ‘affective turn’, Clough). Addressing the network of affective investments we exchange with objects is crucial for an understanding of how embodied subjectivities mutate accordingly to the objects they interact with. Against the theoretical backdrop provided by what Nikolas Rose calls the ‘pharmaceutical biopolitics of the neurochemical self’, the analysis of packaging, colour, visual and textual language of their advertising suggests how new scripts of selfhood are inscribed in the relationship between users and psychopharmaceuticals. The ensuing dialogue among chemistry, affects and design creates narratives of the self as a myth-making operation in which psychopharmaceuticals perform as objects imbued with magic properties

Object-relics and their effects: for a neo-animist paradigm

Our relationship with objects is far less clear-cut than a rational materialism predicated upon a subject/object distinction would have us believe. On the contrary, it is a messy and unpredictable one, electrified by emotional investments, often anxiety-ridden, never innocent or neutral, and always implicated in powerful identity-forming practices. This essay examines instances of contemporary animism in our relationship with object-relics by mapping the symbolic and affective investments these objects are charged with. The hypothesis is that their borderline ontological status defies simple categorization and that it might be better examined through the lens of a neo-animist paradigm able to express the complex, relational and negotiated engagement between us and the material world. The belief in the thaumaturgical power of object-relics is a persistent if irrational cultural topos that, precisely because it operates transversally and adheres to a wide array of commodities, can be the entry point for an investigation into how the meaning of things around us is generated and produces tangible effects in the making (and unmaking) of subjectivities. It is my intention to question the distinction between animate and inanimate objects, to privilege instead their opaque and enigmatic status, and the way in which they act as clusters of excess of meaning, as strange attractors of a surplus of significance quintessentially irreducible

FutureCrafting. A Speculative Method for an Imaginative AI

The issue I explore with this position paper concerns dominant cultural scripts around Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the need to imagine different narratives in light of machine learning’s autonomous performativity. The aim is to offer a philosophical reflection, not only to sidestep narratives of techno-determinism, dystopia and existential risk to mankind, but also to speculate on how to imagine a (more) benevolent AI based on uncertainty and the co-evolution of humans and technology. The paper presents the speculative methodology I call FutureCrafting: a forensic, diagnostic and divinatory method that investigates the possibility of other discourses, equally powerful in building reality, constructing futures and having tangible impact. FutureCrafting is speculation at the juncture of design and philosophy, pivoting around the open-ended figuration of the what if…? It articulates collaboration rather than competition, coevolution rather than antagonism, and privileges the indeterminate and the imaginative. To conclude, the paper makes reference to the non-human intelligence of the octopus and to how this can inform a more imaginative AI

Body marking/mapping: embodied difference and strategies of deconstruction of identity.

Working Papers 300-301-302/C. Centro di Semiotica, Università di Urbino Ital

Digital Uncertainty, FutureCrafting and Animistic Fiction

Keynote. Hybrid Ecologies Lecture Series. cx centre for inter disciplinary studies. Academy of Fine Arts Munic

Shaping the future: the inhumanity of planetary calculation or how to live with digital uncertainty

Planetary computation. An epochal shift rewires humanity by impacting on our capacity to feel, to perceive, to sense and to think. Far from being a mere matter of speed of communication, this change has to do with the creation of new interlocking ecologies where information is sensed and the cognitive, perceptual and affective spheres mutate. Sensation prevails on signification. Data becomes us. Mediation shifts to immediation. This is the 4th Revolution when the digital-online world spills into and merges with the analogue-offline world. In this onlife experience, data is the new currency, code is synchronized to the human and the infosphere becomes synonymous with reality.1 The proliferation of smartalgorithmic environments evolving in real time, the colonization of daily life by social networks, the tsunami of data, the unstoppable googlification of knowledge together create new ecologies of cohabitation and coevolution of the human with the nonhumanity of planetary computation. Given this scenario, two questions emerge as urgent. What is the impact ofthe ongoing informatization of bodies, artefacts and environments on the whole of human cognition, affectivity and perceptual faculties? What kind of narratives, images and fictions are needed to make sense of the ecologies we now inhabit, populated by agents on a continuum between the human and the nonhuman, a mix of the human with machines, dataflows, codes, algorithms; strange entanglements of silicon and carbon

Stay Alert to the Toolification of Experience. The Technocratic Shift is Here.

This paper, written during lockdown while involved in remote teaching, looks at the impact of platform technologies to reflect on how human agency has been machine-reconfigured in the name of efficiency. It posits that a technocratic shift operates by capturing the messy flow of embodied experience, turning it into an operational and constantly upgradable toolkit, and asks for a consideration of the implications of this process of “toolification”, especially in the context of creative studio practice

Zukunftsgestaltung: Die Nichtmenschlichkeit der planetarischen Berechnung oder wie mit der digitalen Ungewissheit zu leben ist

original version FutureCrafting. Speculation, design and the nonhuman, or how to live with digital uncertainty