Social and ecological transformation requires design and architecture fields to develop new, more expansive ways of thinking and acting that better engage questions of ecology. What forms of thinking and acting can work through the particular complexities of environmental crises in the contexts of design and architecture, bridging between rich ecological ideas and the practical challenges of concrete situations?
This project examines how the work of anthropologist and cybernetician Gregory Bateson (1904-1980) might contribute an alternative frame of action to navigate this challenge. The project brings together scholars who are currently working with different aspects of Bateson’s work in architecture and design in Germany and the United Kingdom, affording a significantly broader engagement with this question.
As early as the 1960s, Bateson argued that the environmental crisis resulted from a broader crisis of ideas and the forms of organisation that resulted from this, criticising piecemeal approaches to environmental action that address only those ‘problems’ that are identifiable and solvable. Bateson pointed to various aesthetic practices that support fuller ecosystemic engagements and speculated on how to develop a ‘systemic philosophy’ to guide human relationships with the environment.
This research is supported by the DFG (German Research Foundation) grant number 508363000 and the AHRC (United Kingdom).
Recording of an hybrid event as it is. Daniel Christian Wahl in conversation with Dulmini Perera. Including a panel response with research team + discussion with audience.
In this session we will reflect on intersections and interstices between Bateson`s ecology of the mind and decoloniality with a special focus on the echoing yet different concepts of the double bind and differential or border consciousness.
These issues are directly linked to the onto-epistemic processes of sensing-knowing-making and therefore to decolonizing aesthetics through aesthesis, crucial for reimagining design of/by the South.
In the second part (Q&A session) we also look forward to expanding the discussion on the relationship between questions of aesthetics and decoloniality in relation to design/ architecture/artistic research and methods. As such we warmly welcome researchers, graduate...
In this conversation, we explore the relationships between Gregory Bateson and Francisco Varela's work, particularly the ways in which their work contributed to expanding our understanding of the 'mind' in the context of living. Starting from their time at Lindisfarne Association in the 1970s, a context that had multiple relationships to their intellectual projects, we will explore how they reformulated concepts such as wholes, boundaries, and recursion in their respective critiques of mainstream Western science/epistemology. The discussion would end with a focus on action. How does their expansion of the notions of 'cognition', 'mind', and consciousness' enable us to think...
