Lectures by Tomaso Carnetto

Formative Design
Design History
Coincidental Aesthetics

Since we took over responsibility for the Academy at the beginning of the winter semester 2007, we have been exploring the question of what it means to be or to become a designer in the 21st century.

We are aware of the tradition in which we stand as a so-called author school in the field of design education, like the famous Bauhaus and later the "Ulmer Schule". "Author" is to be understood in the sense that the structure of the studies is not only defined by the individual responsibility of the directors, but also that the didactic concept is based much more on the professional experience of the directors and lecturers than on any given instructions on how to become a designer.

To answer this question adequately, there are three fields we need to understand:

1) The first field is the one where the elements (or modules) of any kind of design need to be identified, selected and prepared. These elements can be thought of as formative particles that form any object, be it a physical product, a media product, or a score (e.g., an interaction between people and physical objects in a space). We call this the field of Formative Design.

The basic studies (semesters 1 to 3) begin with the discovery of this field. A discovery that includes both a theoretical encounter and practical experience.

2) The second field is called Design History. When design was founded, it took over the role that had been given to art: to communicate the duties that believers had to fulfill in order to receive their reward. With the Age of Enlightenment, the reward for proper behavior was no longer primarily found in heaven, but in privileges here on earth. To answer the question of what to do to earn the earthly reward, a different kind of instruction was needed. Thus, communication design emerged as a profession in its own right.

In the basic studies, art history gives an overview of how art before the Age of Enlightenment was divided into two levels, the level of the object (what kind of object and why it was chosen) and the level of the individual tonality of the artist (how the object was created). The what and why has always been a matter of the ideas or ideologies of the time. As from the 18th century, the How became more and more the core aspect of art, design and what we now call communication design gradually became responsible for the What and Why.

In the major studies (semesters 4 to 8), the lecture Design History provides a brief overview of how the profession has become an essential instrument for developing and securing social habits in the sense of "realizing ideologies".

3) The third field is called Coincidental Aesthetics and deals in the major studies with the question of authorship and performance: what methodological knowledge is needed to become an active author in design in the tension between aesthetics (the arts), ethics (the field of the sacred) and socio-political action (the comedy of being).
How do you acquire this methodological knowledge to develop your own way of designing?
This course assumes a basic understanding, i.e. the most intensive experience possible, of the practical application of Formative Design (as taught in the basic studies).

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About the what and why

Now, I want to talk about the What and the Why of everything we do. More precisely, what we do in terms of any kind of creativity, in any kind of profession. Narrowed down even further what we do through design.

Basically, it is about writing a score of the multiplicity of being. The term writing is to be understood here in the broader sense of the use of any artistic language, it can be writing, drawing, painting, sculpture, photography, etc.).

We do this to subjectify the living multitude. In other words, we encode the physical dimension of our being. We do this by extracting those fragments of our perception that can be seen as elements of the multitude and creating a composition out of them, that is, a score of perceptually interrelated modules (points, lines, forms and volumes). In this way, our being becomes the narrative of being physically here, in this particular time, place, and relationship.

The problem with the multiplicity of being is that it contains the unpredictable, the paradoxical, the decaying, and the lost. Every ideology claims to overcome this. All we have to do is follow the given rules. But the price of living in a seemingly safe, i.e. predictable, rationally structured world, where everything remains as it should be, is infinitely high.

For the multiplicity of being, the most elementary part is to be "with each other". For a claimed salvation, we have to give up any kind of living togetherness. According to the ideological assertion: The unpredictable and paradoxical behaviour of the other is our greatest danger.

If we hold on to the multiplicity of being, the content of what we do is to insist on the "with each other". "With each other" becomes involuntarily a becoming of the other. This becoming is the becoming of the artist as well as the becoming of the saint. Artists and saints deal with the same phenomenon, even actively surrender to it: that the undivided totality of the multidimensional multitude is identical to nothingness. A nothingness (what Hegel called "the Absolute") that, although it sounds paradoxical, is the source of everything.

The field in which the becoming of something (any kind of object) and of someone (artist or saint) takes place is the same: the field (we can call it a stage) in which the score (of the figurated multiplicity of being) becomes physically true. That is, the bodies are activated in their interaction "with each other" and with the respective objects, passing through the subjectivized code.

Once the artist or saint has drawn the framework of the stage, the designer enters the performance. The task of the designer now (after the first quarter of the 21st century) is to design the media and physical objects that will be needed to make the score of the multitude a tangible reality. So what a designer has to do today (insofar as we are talking about someone who, as an author, aims at the performance of the subjectivation of the living multitude) is to create "participatory objects".

Now we have the coordinates for the definition of the What and Why that are valid for all three lectures. So I will not return to them explicitly, but for the explanation and consideration of the How (mainly the How of composition) you should keep them in mind.

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How we work

Every profession has its own set of knowledge and methodical procedures to apply this knowledge to the implementation of what is to be achieved.

Especially the human and natural sciences have their own fields of intellectual knowledge and methods. To study means to acquire both in a sufficient way. The same is true for any kind of education in the service sector or in crafts, which is primarily based on practical knowledge.

The peculiarity of the so-called creative studies (art, design, architecture, music, dance, etc.) is that we have both requirements, intellectual and practical knowledge.

The problem with design studies is that, unlike architecture, music, and now dance, design has no specific intellectual concepts. Art is closely related to philosophy. Design has often been understood as a practical skill rather than an intellectual knowledge.

As long as design had to be seen as responsible for creating the aesthetic toolbox to communicate and validate the ideas (or ideologies) that were driving the society (in Western Europe the Enlightenment in the 18th century, the rise of the middle class in the 19th century, the consumerist values of capitalism in the 20th century), no specific intellectual design concepts were really needed.

Today, it is essential for design studies to provide the coordinates for an intellectual understanding of the designer's tasks and responsibilities. This is a specific form of knowledge that is still reflected on the practical level, but in a special way. Faced with the fact that all standardized software-based processes in design will be taken over by so-called artificial intelligence within the next four or five years, the practical dimension (drawing, working with paint, photography, filmmaking, etc.) will be transformed from a tool for implementation to a tool for acquiring the intellectual knowledge needed to conceptualize the communicative demands of design.

We will acquire our specific design knowledge by designing in an elementary way (drawing, working with paint, fabric, collage, etc.) and using the results as objects of reflection; furthermore, by adding and working with text, we will develop our skills in terms of authorship and performance.

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A short note about my perspective on the topics

In my experience as an author (in the fields of poetry, narrative and visual arts), there is a direct correlation between the field of art and the field of the sacred, in that in both fields the respective protagonists become a kind of highly sensitive, but at the same time nonsensical prophet. Perhaps one of the most famous figures in this sense is Prince Myshkin, the main character in Fyodor Dostoevsky's novel The Idiot.

Art has always been associated with the kind of prophecy that claims to let the presence of the otherwise unavailable become true by making it visible and tangible. In a religious formulation, the unavailable is called God, in a philosophical metaphysics. The subjectivization of the unavailable (in the sense of not being available for the regular social demands) becomes real in the figures of artists and prophets or saints. Thus, following the Egyptian meaning of the sacred, artists and prophets (or saints) are those who are excluded from society.

The sacred can only be perceived in the aesthetic dimension of the arts, and the arts can only have an impact on society as a comedy of itself (see how Commedia dell'Arte worked).
Thus we have a simple formula of what comedy is, what art is, and what the sacred is, that they all point to each other and cannot be separated from each other.

This corresponds directly - at least if we follow the argumentation of Giorgio Agamben (in his definition of what the sacred is), Gilles Deleuze (in his definition of the arts), and Alenka Zupančič (in her definition of comedy) - with the ideas of philosophy.

The triad of the sacred, the arts, and comedy also corresponds to the triad of aesthetics (from this perspective related to the arts), ethics (related to the sacred), and socio-political action (related to the comedy of our daily activities as social beings).
The question of how to realize authorship in design, in terms of the reciprocal conditions of ethics and aesthetics in the performance of socio-political activities, is also the subject of my work as director and teacher at the Academy of Visual Arts, Frankfurt.

As an author, I am currently working on a series of publications under the title "Aesthetic Notations from the Sacred Field," which will include books, paintings, and audio-visual productions. It is about retelling the stories of the saints by changing the hagiographic perspective.

A hagiography that takes as its starting point only that sensual experience that we codify through aesthetic techniques and decode through our bodily perception, tells the story of the sacred based on the tension between becoming and word (following Delleuze's image of thought).
It is neither about historical reality in the sense of a chain of logical causalities, nor about canonization according to the Catholic idea of divine power. Rather, it is a matter of becoming part of the sacred field through the use of words, as if speaking in tongues (in the strict linguistic sense, i.e. in an immanent, not in any transzendent mode).

In order to change my perspective as a hagiographer, in addition to my love affair with philosophy, I have to immerse myself in scientific correspondence, especially in history and art history.

Since I am not a philosopher, but someone who writes, draws and paints, my approach to the theoretical dimension of the entanglement of art and design (in their relation to ethics and socio-political action) is based on a referencing of my work to the respective philosophical "image of thought".

I do this in order to give you an example of how to proceed on your own in order to gain the necessary theoretical framework to become a designer for the 21st century.

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Formative Design
Design History
Coincidental Aesthetics