Process, Design & Aesthetics

“Ta panta rei” (“Everything flows”), according to Greek philosopher Heraclitus (500 B.C.) – allegedly. This idea of the world as an infinite ongoing process has been the general principle for most modern, scientific world-views. The British mathematician and philosopher A. N. Whitehead claims – in Process and Reality (1929) – that the world consists of events or happenings rather than solid and permanent objects. The world is Becoming rather than Being. Nothing comes into being once and for all. Objects can only endure insofar as they renew or recreate themselves in an infinite process.
Whitehead’s philosophy was informed by the insights in the condition of the world brought forward by Einstein’s theory of relativity and Bohr’s quantum physics. This epistemological landslide within science had a tremendous impact on art as well. When Marcel Duchamp submitted his Fountain - the infamous urinal – for an exhibition in 1917, he both challenged the art institution and the concept of art as such. The single work or object – or ready-made – became secondary to the process that produced art. Just like the world, art must renew and recreate itself in an infinite process.
The paradigmatic shift from a representational mode to a processual, has expanded the meaning of the term ‘design’. As a verb, “to design” refers to the process of originating and developing a plan for a product, artwork or object. As a noun, “a design” is used for both the final plan or solution (e.g. proposal, drawing, model, description) and the result of implementing that plan (e.g. the object produced, the result of the process). On the other hand, processes have recently also been treated as products of the design, giving new meaning to the term “process design”.
The Canadian designer Bruce Mau takes this as the point of departure in his notion of design: ”It’s not about the world of design. It’s about the design of the world.” In this understanding of design, we see an emblematic shift from the material (design) object to the very process creating it.

With the title Process, Design and Aesthetics we want to continue the work carried out by the Nordic Summer University study circle 4: Technology, Information and Aesthetics. Process and design provides a new approach to aesthetics in the sphere of processual and immaterial production and distribution. We want to investigate how design – in broad sense – can be seen as the constituent for the ‘in-between zones’ of a world in process. Design can in this perspective be seen as a new aesthetic model correlative to the ontological shift from representation to creation that is taking place in the arts and society in the 21st Century as well as in the liberal order unfolding now in what may be called the performance society.

Kristine Samson (kristine@ready-made.dk)
Claus Krogholm (clauskrogholm@mail.dk)