21.11.2014
with Guillaume Dupetit and Catherine Geel
Design, Music, and Mysti-Fiction: Part 1
Modernity in music and design as a starting point of mystification. Modes of production, historical gestures, heroic narratives & personal fictions.
The series of seminars will take a mixed and movable form to question individual and collective practices in a theoretical framework composed of 5 seminar sessions. Through a parallel between music (mainly its popular expression) and design (from its radical to speculative side) – both dealing or struggling with the cultural capitalism, and possible transgressive norms , the project consists of articulating many systems of representation, of diving into their potential subversion in order to discuss and criticize it. Is a system which “promotes” subversion a system which annihilates it? In short, of what languages or subversive positions are the tools?
Subversion requires a complete involvement in a present framework, a present time filtered through the prism of distortion, acceleration, referencing, and interpretation. It is a present time which bounces off the walls of the past and the future. In this sense, mystification, fiction, and narration become special assets to a subversive expression.
Mystification is a product of a modernity closely related to its intensification. It might not be conceived as looking backwards but rather as an eye on the present. In the same way, fiction is not more concerned with the past and the future than with the present, while narration allows blurring the boundaries of these same distinctions as a component of a complex reality. All three of them can be viewed as mediators between an objective state and its representation – in our case to subvert both –, and are facing experimentation and reconsideration of reality. In other words, capture of the immediacy in the realm of the real. It is indeed the language in its very broad sense which acts as an engine of subversion.
Part 1: Modernity in music and design as a starting point of mystification. Modes of production, historical gestures, heroic narratives & personal fictions.
Part 2: Is it subversion? Acts of language or acts of experimentation till the commercial position…
Part 3: Inside /Outside of relation to the global system
Part 4: References and symbols: norm or normality? The relation to the “vernacular”.
Part 5: On staged performances and scripted objects: fiction, alternate realities and mystification?