ARE WE HUMAN?
THE DESIGN OF THE SPECIES
2 seconds, 2 days, 2 years, 200 years, 200,000 years
Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley will present the curatorial concept of the 3rd Istanbul Design Biennial, which they are directing and will open in October 2016. They argue that design always presents itself as serving the human but its real ambition is to redesign the human. The history of design is therefore a history of evolving conceptions of the human. To talk about design is to talk about the state of our species. Humans have always been radically reshaped by the designs they produce and the world of design keeps expanding. We live in a time when everything is designed, from our carefully crafted individual looks and online identities, to the surrounding galaxies of personal devices, new materials, interfaces, networks, systems, infrastructures, data, chemicals, organisms, and genetic codes. The average day involves the experience of thousands of layers of design that reach to outer space but also reach deep into our bodies and brains. We literally live inside design, like the spider lives inside the web constructed from inside its own body. But unlike the spider, we have spawned countless overlapping and interacting webs. Even the planet itself has been completely encrusted by design as a geological layer. There is no longer an outside to the world of design. Design has become the world.
BEATRIZ COLOMINA is Professor of Architecture and co-director of the Program in Media and Modernity at Princeton University. Her books include Manifesto Architecture: The Ghost of Mies (2014), Clip/Stamp/Fold: The Radical Architecture of Little Magazines 196X-197X (2010), Domesticity at War (2007), Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media (1994) and Sexuality and Space (1992). Colomina will co-curate with Mark Wigley the 2016 Istanbul Design Biennial.
MARK WIGLEY is Professor and Dean Emeritus of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation. The author of The Architecture of Deconstruction: Derrida’s Haunt (1993), White Walls, Designer Dresses: The Fashioning of Modern Architecture (1995; both MIT Press), and Constant’s New Babylon: The Hyper-Architecture of Desire (010 Publishers, 1998), he coedited, with Catherine de Zegher, The Activist Drawing: Retracing Situationist Architectures from Constant’s New Babylon to Beyond (MIT Press, 2001). He is the Co-Director with Beatriz Colomina of the Istanbul Design Biennial 2016. His latest book is Buckminster Fuller Inc.: Architecture in the Age of Radio (Lars Muller, 2015).