RE:ACTION
The ambivalent duality of this series title re:action reflects the inherent and ambivalent duality of the designer’s role vis–a-vis the culture industry she or he serves, that is, an active and/or a reactive role. In as much as any act of design is inextricably and instrumentally linked to its broader cultural context, it is perpetually caught in a cycle of action and reaction to which every culture owes its perpetual susceptibility to change. Much of a designer’s efforts is, consciously and/or unconsciously, focused on fashioning a world that is in accord with our collective beliefs, and presuppositions about the world. However, neither our conception of the world, which is mental and ethereal, nor what we perceive as the world, which is sensory and concrete is ever a stable entity. Each is perpetually susceptible to change, and change in either realm inevitably introduces a divide between our conception of the world and our perception of it. Two immediate cases in point are the digital media and the theoretical advances of the past two decades. The digital mode of reproduction on the perceptual plane and the post-structuralist critique of humanism on a conceptual plane have offered serious challenges to many longstanding and fundamental Western assumptions about the nature of reality and representation, authenticity and reproductions, truth and deception, originality and duplication, etc.
The slippage in between our perceptual and conceptual experience of the world that inevitably accompanies every major change, mandates a measured response that can neither be modeled on prior practices nor simply on new practices. At the risk of exacerbating the gab, the response can neither be simply an action nor simply a reaction, neither simply new, nor simply old. Our four presenters will each explore with us through the course of this series four possibilities of acting/reacting within a volatile and shifting cultural context. They’ll explore with us four possibilities of action/reaction marked by a keen awareness of the imposed limits and proscribed boundaries of conventional design practice all the while charting a different path in recognition of a shifting context.