Call for Papers for the VIII/2 Special Issue: Total(itarian) Design

The totalitarian art of various historical and contemporary regimes from that of Mussolini through Hitler to Stalin has become a legitimate research topic from the point of view of the total aestheticization of the world in design capitalism. One of the legacies of Romanticism—the age of “aesthetic differentation” (Gadamer)—is the ambition to make art autonomous from other lifewords.

Ever since, the counter tendency of reunification has pushed back against the perceived losses to values and life qualities that result from the autonomy of art. The Romanticists, and then the Avantgarde already tried to generally re-aestheticize their lifeworlds and create a certain total art of life.

These intellectual endeavours often ended up being engulfed, stolen, and culturally appropriated by totalitarian regimes before being gradually dismissed by them as degenerate or politically designated as representative of ideologies striving for a totalitarian state art based on the total aestheticization of politics. Design was the bastard child of this process and the culture industry was gradually created as an unfortunate result of the aim to blend art and life.

During the neoliberal revolution in the Postmodern era this aestheticization accelerated to that extent that we currently live in a design capitalism with its total aestheticization of the world in which virtually every aspect of our lifeworlds is meticulously designed. The “posthumous era” (Garcés) is defined by the total forgetfulness or even the unbearable designedness of being in a perfectly “sublimated slavery” (Marcuse) that hinders all our capacities to recognize the overexploitation we experience through our lives. Understanding the art of the totalitarian state could surely help us better negotiate our current conditions in design capitalism.

This call is open to (but not restricted to) the following topics

  • philosophical, ideological, and rhetorical approaches to the total(itarian) aestheticization of everyday life
  • designing authoritarianism within contemporary democratic structures
  • legislation and institutions in service of totalitarian art and design
  • particular design and art practices (film, media, and beyond) from different eras and totalitarian regimes, from Pol Pot to Ceaușescu and beyond
  • from services to surveillance: designing total(itarian) social systems
  • totalitarianism from mass events (speeches, parades, demonstrations) to social networks
  • total aestheticization in neoliberal and in woke policies

Disegno accepts research papers (5000–7000 words), essays (c. 3000 words), and book/exhibition reviews (c. 2000 words). Research papers undergo double-blind peer review; reviews and essays are typically reviewed by the editors. If you are interested, please submit a 150–250 word abstract, 5 keywords, and a 140-word CV in prose form to disegno@mome.hu

Deadlines:

July 30: submission of abstracts

August 15: feedback on accepted proposals ● October 30: deadline for submitting the accepted papers ● May 2025: publication

Felhívás a Disegno VII/2. számába, 2024 tavasz: „Város”

Immár az emberiség nagyobbik része városokban él, legyenek azok hivatalos megapoliszok, avagy illegális „árnyékvárosok” (Robert Neuwirth). New York, Casablanca, Sanghai és Rio, s az őket övező-átszövő szlömök és dzsumbujok Észak-Amerikában és Ázsiában, bidonville-ek Észak-Afrikában, vagy favelák Dél-Amerikában. A város designkultúrája határozza meg többségünk életvilágát, a város a zsigereinkben huzalozott immár jó ideje. A város álmaink és tetteink, vágyaink és csalódásaink, örömeink és bosszúságaink alfája és omegája. Városban gondolkodunk, érzünk és érzékelünk. Jóllehet városi környezetünket mi alkotjuk, az legalább annyira formál bennünket is. A városkép, ahogy Kevin Lynch fogalmazott már a hatvanas évek elején, nem csupán vizuális: multiszenzoriális élményt nyújt. Ez a tapasztalat, amely a designkultúra kutatóját is foglalkoztatja, diszkurzív forrásokban testesül meg: városéletrajzokban és városregényekben – mint Simon Sebag Montefiore Jeruzsáleme, Geert Mak Amszterdamja, Michael Pye Antwerpenje, Joyce Dublinja, Giuseppe Montesano Nápolya –, képeken: fametszetektől rézkarcokon, festményeken, fotókon és animációkon át a filmekig; háromdimenziós, „architekturális” (Eco) forrásokban: szobrokban, installációkban, vagy éppen idézetek sorával dolgozó városi tájakban és témaparkokban.

Magyar nyelvű számunkba különösen szívesen fogadunk a város múltjával foglalkozó írásokat, amelyek a város eszméjének és eszményének megszületésével, a városírás (writing cities), a város diszkurzív és ikonográfiai megalapításának történetével (gondoljunk például Hogenberg és Braun Civitates orbis terrarumára!), a város emberi élettapasztalataival, életvilágával foglalkoznak. Puszta munkaoptimalizálási területként vagy természetes életkörnyezetként alakult-e ki a város, és elgondolható-e szembeállítás nélkül város és természet? Milyenek a város ökológiái (Banham)? Miként affirmálja és tagadja az uralmi szándékokat? Hogy változik a középkortól Hausmann Párizsán és Cerdá Barcelonáján át korunkig, a tiltott, nyílt, láthatatlan, látható, tapintható, ízlelhető városok élménye – sétálva, futva, kordén, velocipéden, léghajóból, önvezetve, hoverboardon, szárazon és költőien, Moszkvától Petuskiig, a Csömöri úttól egészen a Filatori gátig? Hiába utazhatják be az emberek „egész Európát, olyan benyomásuk marad, mintha sosem léptek volna ki […] az ízléstelen pályaudvarokból, amelyek mindenüvé elkísérik őket – akárcsak semmittevésük és az élvezetre való képtelenségük […] A látás nem jelent már semmit. Azért érkezünk meg, hogy továbbutazzunk,” írja Delacroix a XIX. század közepén: mi a „generic city” disztópiája és utópiája a kezdetektől Koolhaasig? Nyitottak vagyunk a jelen nagyvárosi kultúrájának kritikai olvasására és a jövő városának kutatására is, az okos városok, a digitális figyelem és fegyelem, vagy az összeomlás utáni katasztrófavárosok és nyomornegyedek vízióira – testesüljenek meg ezek urbanisztikai, várostervezői, futurisztikai koncepciókban, avagy műalkotásokban. S bár nem rajongunk a poszthumanista elméletekért, szívesen veszünk olyan kritikai felvetéseket is, amelyek a poszthumanista város tematikáját érintik.

Felvetések:

a város művészeti reprezentációi és metaforái • városéletrajzok • apodemica, utazási irodalom és a város • városírás, városregény • a város mint mnemotechnikai eszköz • „how buildings learn” és hogyan felejtenek a kerületek? • térkép és város • megtestesült olvasás (embodied reading) és 4E cognition a városkutatásban • a város kognitív modellezése • biopolisz • természet/kert/város • városimázs • „Keep Austin Weird” • rekonstruktív stílus • „nemzeti építészet” • árnyékvárosok, nyomornegyedek, favelák és bidonville-ek • „Learning from Lagos” – a rosszléti város ideológiái • trollurbanizmus: triggerelő köztéralakítás • a közművek, csőposták, kábelek, adatsugarak szövedéke • milyen formaviszonyok – utca, tér, árkádsor, járda és út, pozitív-negatív sarkok – keltik a város képzetét? • a szabályozás hatása a városélményre • okos város, digitális felügyelet, digitális diktatúra • nem-Budapest • Érd: a magyar szuburbia eredője • Fiume (mint tégely és zsilip)

Lapunk főleg tanulmányokat, esszéket, és recenziókat közöl kb. 6000, 3000 és 2000 szóban, de kísérletezőbb formátumokat is megfontolunk. A tanulmányok elbírálását a szerkesztők mellett (kölcsönös anonimitásban) két független külső szakértő végzi.

A 150–250 szavas absztraktokat 130–150 szavas életrajz kíséretében január 31-ig várjuk a disegno@mome.hu címre.

Call for Papers Fall 2023 Special Issue: Designing Digital Humanities

In the last nearly seven decades, the Arts and Humanities have drawn a lot from the methodology and toolkit of computational technology. As the two domains linked and influenced each other, new research areas were defined under the terms of computational humanities, humanities informatics, and, from the 2000s onwards, digital humanities (DH) as an umbrella concept. Whether DH is understood as a discipline, or a methodology and a set of tools used in specific fields of Arts and Humanities, its emergence has definitely been decisive.

As researchers of DH typically agree, the domain has two fundamental aspects: data and design. Data-driven research is already a widely known, theoretically founded approach even in many fields of Arts and Humanities. Without the appropriate quality and quantity of research data, data-driven DH research would not exist. Existing publications on DH have focused largely on the importance of data, with less attention being paid to design, both in a theoretical and practical sense.

The Special Issue Designing Digital Humanities is dedicated to the diverse interactions of DH research and design. From a theoretical point of view, designing is the process of modeling our knowledge, organising information, and building structures. On the other hand, design in a practical sense may provide an interface to this knowledge—or research data—from aesthetic and functional perspectives. This call is open to (but not restricted to) both approaches in the following topics.

  • design and the digital medium: user interface, user experience (usability and user empowerment) ● information visualisations (graphs, maps, trees and more) ● virtual exhibitions and augmented reality
  • modeling knowledge in the humanities: data models ● text representation ● design and the attributes of humanities research: comparing sources, criticism, handling uncertainty and hiatus/lack of sources
  • designing complex systems: research environment ● digital ecosystems ● green web, fossil-free internet design as a research topic in DH research with the assistance of DH tools (data analysis methods, NLP tools, etc.) ● design history through the lens of DH ● databases focusing on the theory and practice of design
  • research through design: how design affected DH research?
  • open science and digital humanities: what roles can design play?
  • popularisation/scholarly communication in DH: reaching the wider public through design

Disegno accepts research papers (5000–7000 words), essays (c. 3000 words), and book/exhibition reviews (c. 2000 words). Research papers undergo double-blind peer review; reviews and essays are typically reviewed by the editors.

Expected timeline of the publication process:

Extended deadline: April 23, 2023: submission of abstracts (300 words).

April 5, 2023: submission of abstracts (300 words). April 15, 2023: feedback on accepted proposals.

July 15, 2023: deadline for submitting the finished papers. Fall 2023: publication.

moholy=nagy – Disegno 2021/1-2 out!

Our journal’s new issue on László Moholy-Nagy has just been published!

For this issue we invited scholars, researchers, and designers to present their thoughts and perspectives and thereby provide a critical assessment of one of the most important designers, educators, and thinkers of the early-twentieth century, László Moholy-Nagy.

The title of the issue (moholy=nagy) refers to Moholy-Nagy’s signature.

The issue can be accessed here.

cover design: Borka Skrapits

CFP: Total Cinema: Film and Design

The Call for Papers for our next, Spring 2022 issue is out! Extended deadline for abstract proposals: 15th January 2022.

The next issue of Disegno will investigate, from the perspective of design culture, the contemporary role and significance of cinema, film, VR and moving image installations within the context of the institutional, technological, and media-related developments and lifeworld in the twenty-first century. Our basic aim is to shed more light on how critically oriented design culture studies conceive of design not as it is in the world but how it creates our lifeworlds (Lebenswelten) as seamless webs of discursive meanings and sensual experiences. On closer inspection, our particular interest lies in how this worlding (scil. es weltet) can be understood in the realms of cinema and film making. That is, how life worlds – with their meanings, practices and qualia – are constructed and perceived in cinema. Working this out with respect to movies involves, as Ben Highmore has claimed, “[h]ow the world seems to us, how it feels to us, is materially embedded in the technoaesthetic assemblages which are design culture’s natural objects.”

The myth of total cinema is one of the key concepts and seminal essays of André Bazin, who argues that the impulse towards a total technological representation of reality is essential to cinema, thus – and quite surprisingly for many of his contemporaries – he welcomed any spectacular technologies pointing in this direction, like technicolor, widescreen or 3D projections. The apparatus of cinema has been subject to thorough investigations from ideological and psychoanalytical perspectives, but we suggest that a design-focused approach could reveal intriguing aspects related to the construction of spectatorship in the context of the Bazinian myth of total cinema. Especially given the constant changes to how moving images are received, which started with television, and continued with home cinema driven by VHS and DVD only to migrate on our computer screens, and lately to our mobile phones. A different kind of moving image spectatorship has been created by game designers and recent developments in immersive film experience/Interactive Digital Narrative (360 degrees recording, VR films) are also opening new paths for the reception and interpretation of moving images.

As Vivian Sobchack described in her 1992 book The Address of the Eye, one of the major effects of films is how they variously address our senses. This is true, even of lesser-known senses such as our vestibular system, nociception and thermoception which Luis Rocha Antunes discusses in his 2016 book, Multisensory Film Experience. To control and direct the sensory experience of the viewer, creators must be aware of these various effects. In the case of traditional cinema and film, the effects are largely direct but unilateral, and the system cannot accommodate the audience’s responses. The early days of interactive cinema (and even VR) already anticipated and contributed to the myth of total cinema mentioned above. In her seminal work Hamlet on the Holodeck, Janet H. Murray uses the symbol of the holodeck as the ultimate story experiencing apparatus. Murray explains that interactive digital narratives can already offer us an advanced level of agency, interactive storytelling productions that bring the viewer closer to the notion of holodeck. When designing IDNs, a key aspect is whether they can offer a transformative experience. This transformative experience is closely related to some important questions:
1. How the transformation is enabled by the possibilities of technology?
2. Is a sense of immersion and presence enabled by design?
3. Does this affect the user and what kind of empathy creating strategies can be identified?

And finally, it is also important to raise the issue of ethics. These immersive technologies aim to offer a certain sense of embodiment for their viewers/experiencers, we thus should ask the question, what did the creators intend when designing their immersive work? Towards whom does the viewer feel empathy? How is this sense of empathy constructed, how does it address the user on an emotional and sensory level?

The emergence of video art, and later gallery films and moving image installations in contemporary museums, have significantly widened the possibilities of cinema and the type of audience. Designing installations that create site-specific spectatorial experiences, able to actively influence the interpretation of the artworks has been a central preoccupation of many video artists. Moreover, enhanced immersion is only one direction in which artists have moved. Others have shed light on the cinematic mechanisms and materials that created moving images. Thus screens, projectors, cameras, and film stocks have become integral parts of artworks, their physicality contrasting with the transient projection of images. This has promoted self-reflexivity, but has also stirred up nostalgic attitudes towards past technologies and design.

Furthermore, design has been associated with film since its beginnings, not only regarding the technological apparatus of recording and projection, but also concerning the design of different representations of reality, of the onscreen lifeworld of the characters. One can identify at least three issues associated with this:
1. How films use and create markers (signs and symbols) of specific periods of time or locations, how buildings, objects, clothes, elements of graphic design, sound and musical excerpts etc. contribute to the representation?
2. To what extent we can track and trace trends of design that are contemporary with the production of motion picture that represent distant past or future events?
3. How films contributed to the dissemination and popularity of revolutionary evolutions in product design?

Finally, Disegno is very interested in approaches that highlight the ways in which media and media technology are used as tools of social transformation. A particular example of this can be identified in the recent democratization of moving image production, where the production and distribution of short format videos has become an everyday practice for millions of users worldwide.

The proposed articles can be related (but are not restricted) to the following topics:

– historical and/or critical approaches to developments in the technology of cinematic representation
– analysis or interpretation of object- and design-centered films and authors (editors suggest considering Todd Haynes, Pablo Larraín, Jacques Tati and James Benning)
– rules and roles of production design in film; creating on-screen diegetic worlds through design
– how the projection apparatus designs spectatorship in different contexts (cinema, television, computer, museum/gallery, etc.)
– how the different forms, formats, technologies of moving images affect our senses
– lifeworlds of total cinema – totalizing internal logic (e.g. Sándor Kardos, Tamás Waliczky, Zbigniew Rybczyński)
– lifeworlds of total cinema – totalizing sensory experience, from B movie gimmicks (and their milieu as in Joe Dante’s Matinee) to art installations
– cinematic VR versus interactive VR production
– interactive films
– social consequences of developments in media technology
– the effect of video art and moving image installations on the reception of films
– media archeology

Disegno accepts research papers (5-7000 words), essays (c. 3000 words), and book/exhibition reviews (c. 2000 words). Research papers undergo double-blind peer review; reviews and essays are generally reviewed by the editors.

Expected timeline of the publication process:

January 15: submission of abstracts (300 words)
January 30: feedback on accepted proposals
March 30: deadline for submitting the finished papers
July 2022: publication

Please send your abstract proposals (300 words) and a short bio (100 words) to our email address: disegno@mome.hu

Free-for-All – megjelent a Disegno legújabb száma!

Megjelent a Free-for-All, a Disegno 2019/1-2 lapszáma!

Jelen számunk felhívása azzal a céllal nyitotta a lehető legtágabbra a kapukat, hogy ne felülről szabjuk meg a témák és perspektívák körét, hanem teret adjunk a design teoretikus feldolgozásával foglalkozóknak arra, hogy maguk jelöljék ki, maguk feszegessék, provokálják a diszciplína kereteit. Számunknak ezért is adtuk a Free-for-All címet, s a végeredmény ennek megfelelően változatos. A párhuzamokból, egybecsengésekből, ellenpontokból mindazonáltal valódi szövedék, hálózat képződött; ezt tükrözi laptervezőnk, Skrapits Borka címlap-grafikája, illetve az EJTech textilkísérleteit bemutató képanyagunk.

(részlet a szerkesztői előszóból)

A lapszám cikkei, rövid leírásai illetve a teljes szövegek ezen az oldalon böngészhetőek.

A teljes lapszám egyetlen PDF fájlban itt érhető el.