When Worlds Collide

In my graduate seminar on the politics of design at the San Francisco Art Institute we are just now shifting gears from discussions of green design discourse (we've read Janine Benyus's Biomimicry, McDonough and Braungart's Cradle to Cradle, and David Holmgren's Permaculture, for example) to discussions of social software and network design (we'll be reading lots of Lessig, Yochai Benkler, and Michel Bauwens, for example), and I think this is the point at which many of my students -- some of whom are practicing artists of course, many doing exhibition studies, but many others are actively committed to variations of what they would call "design" practice -- are really starting to feel the connections of these texts to one another but, more significantly, to their own under-interrogated assumptions about what "design" is about, what it is for, what its designs on us might be.

Starting to read Lessig after spending weeks on sustainability, suddenly I'm getting questions about how the politics of copyfight and digital democracy that they often have no firm opinions about at all seem to connect up quite forcefully to writings like those of Nicolas Bourriaud (who is read by all of my art thesis cohort at SFAI but none of p2p thesis cohort at Berkeley, for example) on relational aesthetics that they have all sorts of opinions about already. It's very interesting, very provocative to me.

You know, I'd been working on the political theory of social software and p2p formations more generally for years before I encountered -- mostly through teaching at SFAI -- the incredibly rich ramified Social, Participatory, and Relational Aesthetics discourses that are in play in art theory and exhibition studies at the moment. I was enormously surprised to find how often the problems one finds in, say, Lawrence Lessig or Clay Shirky or danah boyd, recapitulate the formulations one encounters in, say, Claire Bishop's Participation volume, a survey of more or less programmatic statements mostly from the latter part of the 20C about the relationality or sociality of art interventions and practices.

The connections between good righteous democratic skepticism about the curatorial and the authorial are rich, and as yet underexplored, if you ask me -- which isn't to say that there aren't people talking about these things, just that there are people who aren't talking to each other who probably should be.

This is not the place for me to line up my own conclusions on the matter, but just to say that I decided to teach this sort of material at SFAI precisely with the expectation that these connections would spark all sorts of fruitful associations in my students, and I am happy to report that this seems to be the very thing that is happening, and right on cue. I'd like to think I will have more to say about this in months to come. Stay tuned.