Description
This seminar will reconsider the social, economic and ecological function of a design practice in the age of platform economics. It will consider how to re-map the shifting boundaries between design and strategy, art, abductive epistemology, and programming. We will consider design as the practice of the artificial: all the ways that the world -including ourselves- can be deliberately recomposed, and examine different ways that "artificial" systems at urban scale are displacing conventional ones (AI, machine sensing, automation, virtualization, disintermediation, etc.) and, more specifically, the novel economic forms that these displacements are taking. Control variables include the function of aesthetics, the aesthetics of function and the always slippery work of enforceable designation. Students will work an existing project --text, cinema, model, or a combination-- and develop further in the context of the seminar discussion.
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