[ongoing]

UCLA Design | Media Arts , 2002-08

[07.2008]

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I taught at the UCLA Department of Design | Media Arts from 2002-08. Graduate courses included the core design and media theory seminar and others on the intersections of code and architecture. Undergraduate classes included Brand Lab (research/theory seminar taught in sequence with Rebeca Mendez's production studio course) as well as introduction to design theory. Brand Lab courses included theory/research seminars on the future of Design-as-media-arts, the re-branding of money, an MVNO for the "last" 2 billion people, post-human brands for extraterrestrials, etc.

While there I had the privilege of working with some truly amazing faculty and students who have
defined a mode of design that is informed at its core by new media arts, and an open set of genres for new media arts that establish a viable and thriving intellectual and aesthetic agenda for their exploration. Some of the students I worked with were daniel sauter, osman khan, sean dockray, michael chang, peter cho, zach blas, casey alt, fernando sanchez, krister olsson, aaron koblin, and many others.




As part of the first Brand Lab, we took the Department of Design|Media Arts itself as our virtual client and developed an extensive positioning and organizational design document both for locating the department and the social practice of design-as-media-art and media-art-as-design more broadly. As part of that effort I wrote an introductory manifesto for the findings book.

D|MAnifesto,
Benjamin H. Bratton

Friedrich Kittler once suggested that in order to succeed in our contemporary world, one must be fluent in at least one natural language and at least one artificial language. But even as software enables people and networks to communicate and produce in ways fundamentally impossible for a natural language system (like literature or theory) to imagine, the Humanities has largely considered “digital” practices to be novel methodologies, but usually not more than a new means to an old ends. The “interoperability” of natural language and computational languages is considered a kind of “hybrid condition,” a combination of two unlike things. But even the quickest scan of contemporary society makes clear that it is precisely the dynamic exchanges between both forms that are at the productive center of global culture, not its fringes. In fact, the combination is the norm, not the exception.

Consider the pipe that literally holds D|MA together. The pipe is a bit of coding lingo, a slice of artificial language that has made its way out of the computer and into the name of our Department here at the University of California, Los Angeles. This migration is really pretty remarkable achievement for a bit of code.
What could be a more official purpose for a word or letter than employing it to describe a state-sanctioned field of knowledge? The list of departments is an index of things to be known about in the world, of “the order of things” as that society sees it. At the D|MA, we see code as the thing that links design to media arts and media arts to design. Inherent in the name of the department is not just a description of what we do, but an argument about what is at stake.

D|MA is the place where the experiential conditions through which global culture emerges in the image of the media that links it are imagined, prototyped, critiqued, manufactured, displayed. “Experiential condition” is the key phrase here. We work very seriously in that crucial space where the objects and surfaces of our world turn into characters in a drama of the moment, when they come forward as media of our common condition. This is not just about design, or art or media; it is about a fundamental condition of life in global society. As much as D|MA is an abstract engineering, it is also a very practical form of philosophy.

“D|MA,” whatever that discipline is, whatever the parameters of this new discipline are, is not just a receiver of intelligence and insight from other places (computer science, sociology, engineering, theory) and a place where it all gets mixed up into interactive structures. It is the center of a post-post-modern intellectual and design project to decode, code and recode the immediate and mediate fabrics of our world.



Design is the Future of Media Arts
In the real world, we connect to each other through media. In our current radicalized form of Modernity, the cumulative importance of “mediation” in the production and reproduction of everyday norms…. Media culture is not just about broadcasting, mass audience reception or proprietary content. Ours is, as we know, a network society based upon the strategic and tactical enrollment of big and little media by big and little people alike. The “issues” of media and mediation are not a category of events and occupations, media studies is not an area study the center of everything

In The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Benjamin treats the activation of a plurality of copies as a model of intelligence intrinsic in the media of Modernity.  Several others have extrapolated from Benjamin’s insight regarding the mechanically reproduced cultural object, the thing in and of the world, to another understanding of the plurality of subject positions, figures and sensations of embodiment and experience that are activated in and through contact with the electronic image. This regime of the copy, and of the phase iteration (multiple generational elisions – frozen animation from Muybridge to Maya as a form generator) as its contemporary digital form, complicates the Modern form of wha Merleau-Ponty called the “flesh of the world,” but hardly abandons it. The Situationists argued that Atomic Age affluence shifted the digestion of mechanical images (their production and consumption) from a superstructural ideological effect to the very center of how economies regulate the collective synchrony of social time and space: the image is the city is the image. The spectacular fall-out of May 68 on the Parisian architecture-scape (Beaubourg, La Defense, Eurodisney, Bercy, Forum des Halles, the video stores of Pigalle, etc.) is an urbanism by and for a society that is itself organized around cultures of the electronic image (electronic art, commerce, fantasy, event, commodity, desire, etc.)

In a parallel register, when “Media Arts” emerged in the 1960’s (to pick a period, certainly many others are just as useful to support arguments complementary to mine) it was an expression of Cold War technological affluence and its fruitful sensory cultures of consumption. While McLuhanite slogans of cool and hot media, expanded cinema, plug-in cities, etc. dominated the public appreciation of what was at stake for a contemporary “media arts,” others worked through more existential concerns. At this time, the problematics of Film centralized a world of concerns about how the reproducible image could and would restage the operations of communication and experience. Filmmakers like Stan Brakhage, Hollis Frampton and Chris Marker and theorists like Siegfried Kracuer, Christian Metz and Jean-Louis Baudry developed (for widely divergent purposes) a media discourse equally practical and philosophical. These biopsies on the fabrics of perception of memory worked to decode the fundamental workings of the cinematic image, itself understood as a fundamental grammar of contemporary thought and culture.

Later, as such avant-gardes retired into various forms of self-parody, the alchemical momentum moved to a more authorless manipulation and manifestation of code per se as the mechanism of information and computation, a post-visible generative center of image and object agency. Software becomes a means..transcoding….Skipping ahead a few decades, we see around the time of the first Gulf War an explosion of interest in the cultural potential of digital media. Different phases of the this discipline’s cyclical birth processes yielded considerable institutional legitimacy but at tremendous cost. The notion of “art,” and the experimental freedom the word and the institutional space allowed also brought with it peculiar bargains. Galleries as installation spaces. Bienniels. Collections. Precious objects. Works. Genres. Boredom. As we witnessed the speed with which Media Arts moved from the lunatic fringe to the sane fringe we became sad.

Not so much “great works”… there will be “great works” of media art. Someone who calls him or herself a “media artist” today might well win the Priztker Prize or attend her own retrospective at the Guggenheim, or whatever official reckoning you prefer. This is great. But what is, I feel most at stake for Media Arts is the radical reoperation of both media and art toward unimagined potential for both…. Similarly, the User displaces the Reader, the Viewer.  In other words, it becomes possible for media arts to become design when (1) individual experience of the world is media (2) collective experience of the world is media. When the “art” becomes, for better or worse, infrastructure.


Media Arts is the Future of Design
For philosophy, now media philosophy, the analytical subject moves from “the reader” to “the user.”  Design already understands the user as audience, but has allowed for a fatal confusion of this subject position in at least two ways. In design education and practice, the figure of the Law is assumed by the body that enrolls the design in her everyday life, but by the Client, the entity from which exchange value is apparently derived. Second, the notion of the user has been subsumed (and not only by Usability wonks) under a sign of utility. The specters of Taylor and Gropius are in league with the bottom line. Media Arts suggests itself as a powerful antidote to both conundrums, pointing the way back to a Design as an autonomous pursuit of material intelligence.

To some degree such a blend is inevitable of any declaration. In the heyday of Modernist design, “new media” ruled the day: mechanical typography, “cine-photography,” industrial materials, mathematical methodologies, etc.

Interactive media (like telephones) have dislodges themselves from their original installations in buildings and now roam around the world with us. Telephony and the economies of communication it affords are no longer part of the architecture as much as they are an extension of our bodies. We no longer have to go to the place where the phone is, now all that comes with us. The capacity to speak to the world’s social networks and to be spoken to by them is now a feature of the globally mobile citizens. Far from erasing “place” from the equation, this turning of communication from fixed architecture has the potential at least to revivify the city as a reopened territory of flight, contact and adventure.

Software turns one design discipline into another… see aspen…Not just visible.. the function of the world is not just things we can see and touch… to “design” the operation of a thing and object or a process is to design its code. Even Walter Gropius would accept this, even if Yale Design School will not.

As I write in the thematic introduction to this year’s Aspen Design Conference,
“In our network society, points of contact are condensed into windows and menus, dashboards of buttons and icons, into familiar pathways and fast surfaces, diagrams and directions. On a continental scale interfaces are nodes along lines of flow, terminals, ports and stations. On a global scale,  interfaces link and partition society itself, as belief systems, ballots and borders: the interface is elemental, material, imminent. Such points of contact, everywhere and nowhere at once, connect us to the operating systems of power, interdependency and opportunity. They are not just our interfaces to the world, but also the world’s channels to us.”

To question what is designed is immediately also to question how things are designed, and today both are increasingly computational in form and content. Not only does software change how design works, more importantly it changes how design thinks. The logics of computation and the design languages of user interface transform one practice into another: cinema into architecture, product design into philosophy, urban planning into advertising.”


What is To Be Done
The following pages are schematics for further play. Based on our appreciation that when the discipline of D|MA works best when it discovers counterintuitive possibilities for the mediation of the built world, we have indexed our recommendations according to what our parents told us not to do: run with scissors, talk with your mouth full, stay up past your bedtime, pee in the pool, play in the street and make a mess.

Deleuze’s last book defines philosophy creates an image of thought, an image that contains a plane of immanence. Philosophy produces concepts. Science produces functives. Art produces percepts. Design, wearing its most political face, is an “open source” vision of the physical framework of collective mediation. Everything on the horizon wants to be respoken, wants to be refigured, and wants to mediate new things. The investigative methodology is declarative and argumentative but not metaphysical or transcendental. The politics is not just that of administration but of the plausible future, the imminent option, and simultaneous versions

For code, and for the mutually productive integer of the Pipe in particular, the politics of design are paramount. The epistemology of code supposes a world of recombinant systems, of large forms comprised of many smaller machines, themselves comprised of rewritable expressions, equations and dictions.  But this image of the world as program privileges technology as the agent of complexity only to the extent that technology is defined as a linguistic medium, as the means and ends of software, of code. Finally, this politics of programming implies, in fact demands, the imminence of reprogramming.  The world is never done, the world always wants to be respoken.


Still from Light Attack by Daniel Sauter, originally student project (2004).

Tags: branding

Published: 07.07.2010

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