Design for a post-humanity

We do not have to hypothesize a post-apocalyptic scenario anymore. The same pattern that wants to annihilate the heaviness of the commodity and the machine that has reduced human expression to a signifier devoid of any meaning or that has give to any materialization to assume an anarchic meaning disconnected from the primary intention. Already in “Beyond the Pleasure Principle”, Freud wonders whether psychotic and pounding repetition should be considered as the beating of Eros or something that instead lies behind this voluptuous principle, threatening it with vehemence, a compulsive repetition identifiable with Thanatos, death. Is this pulsating primal function, this event in which the subject is witness and at the same time absences, situated in the unconscious or instead forms part of reality, devastating a subject that was not present and did not have time to defend itself? This condition must be read as the articulation of witnessing one’s own absence, making the subject-object totally incapable of signifying, dismantling the whole body in infinitesimal parts-objects that cause the same body-nostalgia. The formal and regular identity must then be addressed and designed with object-matrix that allows the collapse of the same regularity, breaking the identity that finally moves towards the bad form, the violence that lies waiting for the form. To survive, what must be re-invented is the use value of the form, of matter, of that tangible component that must be rediscovered – in virtue of a world that is collapsing under the weight of digital abstraction – through three main strategies: low or base materialism, entropy and heterology.

Entropy – what leads matter and energy a state of disorder – attack against meaning

Verticality – is an important aspect of gestalt imagery emerging of animal state – getting things low – cultural chaos – disruption – horizontality. Refusing to assimilate any kind of concept

Heterology/Scatology – the science of what is completely other – rejected by our homogeneous society, everything that our society is powerless to incorporate and so understand

The act of design, intended as an artefact, that is, made by human, must be reduced to the maximum of silence, eliminating every text or hyper-text.

The need is to approach in images and words, entering in the interest in what task a work of design can fulfil, not necessarily in its meaning – an image as a locus of an event, removing the signified from the sign, letting the signifier create a new meaning.

In post digital, post-artisanal context, where the natural manifests itself in the artificial and the artificial takes on a naturalness never seen before, the way of creating is addressed to a purely carnal and material vote, that same carnality made of primary instincts, to finally find and reveal what has been forgotten.

The object of veneration and sacrifice acquires sub-human connotations, wanting to rehabilitate the body component long forgotten and rejected by the dictatorship of capitalist alchemy, which through a process of reification has transformed everything into food for commodification. The creative process find then its basis in the rehabilitation of the waste, as truth, of the residue. In this way, design, solves the traumatic nature of the encounter with a Real that is no longer symbolizable, it aestheticization of what lies in it, attacks the rational and tectonic force of the “well done”, strategically sweeping away the constructed object to disperse the fragments.Through those expedients – that is the creative process, the space of creation, the matter – what is frozen is the interstice, the space in its condition of being “like anything else”; freezing the possibility of meaning, the semiotic is articulated through a flow, a transfer of energy that is maternal.

Form and content loom with their new de-semantization: a desublimatory act of aggression that takes hold, which serves to declassify, bring down things into the world, a performative act connected to an unverifiable hierarchised beauty, (cfr. Pic. 13) to destroy any pre-estrablished concept, to be wrecked in unprecedented manifestations and artistic expressions, precisely because primal and uterine. What counts is the operative act in itself, neither the form nor the content, but the operation that now displaces these two terms. If in the contemporary the blind arrogance of virtualisation has eradicated every material substrate, making each super-flat human ravine, terribly vacuous, where the work of art in its inert form of object is assumed as a symptom of a larger reality replacing it to an ultimate truth. The materiality of the body has lost its value, nature and historical and social meanings are devoid of any explanatory endowments. The nature of the formless is inserted in this perspective, breaking every subject and re-establishing it on different bases, with the intent not to deny it, but to sacrifice it as in an act of dismemberment; a new classification by virtue of de-classification: if the human creation is liberated from the structures of representation, its existence must be justified by virtue of the search for its essence: from the visual to the tactile, from verticality to horizontality, from the human to the animal, in a sublimatory and aesthetic activity that separates the person who perceives it from the body.

The accumulation of non-assimilable waste is inevitable. The patina of human that surrounds this operational act becomes and index of a duration, dust and ashes as a double index of the human passage, favoring the production over the over-production.