----------empyre- soft-skinned space---------------------- To follow up: If you permit, in connection with Ross'e earlier comment on the depoliticizing "melancholia" of design discourses planning for no-future, may I go back to a comment posted by Susan Kozel early last week, addressing her concern with the 'colonization' of bodies in the context of consumer-oriented and mass produced interactive wearables?
[Susan schreibt] < I contribute the 'embodied' strand to the Master's and PhD education but am increasingly uncomfortable with the way bodies play into interaction design, just as a placeholder for the word 'context,' or more worryingly as another domain for design to colonise under the rhetoric of increased personal freedom, efficiency or health benefits. > As I meditated on what some of you said regarding design and/of uncertainty, and now thinking through bodies and social choreogaphies (the disappearance of space in time, as Wolfgang Meisenheimer subtites his book on "Choreography of the Architecture of Space"), I wondered about that uncertainty, and how that is actually contradicted by our corporeal perceptions and the momentum of our having to adapt continuously to (phenomenologiocal) occurences and incidents, and thus temporal developments which are or which shape the condition of spatial expressiveness, thus space cannot be a model of doom for human or animal perceptions? Meisenheimer speaks about "die Gesten der Wege" (gestures of passageways) in a poetic way that I like, but these passages are interpreted phenomenologically through the innate (and not necessarily culturally specific) relationships between bodies and architectures derived from proprioception and kinetic memories (since womb time); bodily movement and gestures would thus initiate (since the body thinks in movement) possible scenarios of the future (and virtual space or void space) as it is accustomed to scanning gestures; the body, Meisenheimer suggests, will always attempt to employ its sensing, ordering and interacting repertoires.* Thus, my question to Susan would be – what kind of architectures of interaction (not consumption) are imagined when you teach or practice your work, how do they relate to past-times/future-times and the fabric of our activities in life, vital and social processes. what is recognized, or should be recognized rather than becoming natural and familiar (and here Meisenheimer does not offer a political reading of the consequences of alignment). regards Johannes Birringer DAP-Lab http://www.brunel.ac.uk/dap * [from "Choreography of the Architecture of Space", Munbal-li : Dongnyok, 2007, published in Korea (in 3 languages), p. 28.] _______________________________________________ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
