Collaborating with the Thuringian Museum for Pre- and Ancient History (Museum für Ur- und Frühgeschichte Thüringens), the studio ‘Prehistoric ≈ Postdigital?’ explored the fertile tension between the newest of technologies and the oldest of material and ritual practices. In the test tube of our design laboratory, we mixed technological emergence and current desires with lively histories and narratives and probed and developed the results of this reaction as physical prototypes. The Museum’s spaces and collection became an initial catalyst for the development of our own speculative design practices.
Students used technologies like 3D-scanning, digital modelling and simulation, digital fabrication (CNC-machining & 3D-Printing) to rediscover and revive traditional ways of understanding and using materials as “alive”, many of which have been lost through industrialization. The goal was to learn from the past and, especially in the face of resource scarcity and climate emergency, develop future proof approaches to use resources in mindful, sustainable but also imaginative ways.
*Prehistoric: from the era before written accounts. There are no narrations, only finds – giving us all the more space for speculation.
*Post-digital: the digital is in the process of dissolving – it is everywhere, like the air we breathe; the digital as such is not very exciting – more exciting is what we do with it; the digital can be fabricated physically and the physical can be digitized, both nearly instantaneously – what is key is that we learn to navigate the in-between fluently and with ease and to use these constant translations playfully and speculatively.
*Ongoingness/Ongoing: a central concept in Donna Haraway’s more recent techno-feminist writing. It can be understood to mean many things:
- To continue, to follow, to connect, to pick up the threads…: as designers we have to engage with the pre-existing, the inherited (whether positive or negative), the accumulated data set, the slowly grown and the quickly decaying. This is not only an ethical obligation – it is also an invitation to tap into the pre-existing to spark our imagination and inventiveness. It is the opposite of the blank canvas, of the sad grey grid lines of an empty Rhino-file that stares back at us: it is a richly textured point cloud with millions of spatial and colour coordinates, precise and provocative.
- To survive, to continue to exist, to sustain: how do we, as designers, contribute to our survival, the ongoingness of the planet?
- To persist, to be tenacious: how do we keep going, how do we fail better, how do we think in iterations and prototypes?
- To continue, to unfinish: How can we create works that might never be “finished”, that might continue to be productively unfinished, that are active and stay active?
Lecturers: Jun.-Prof. Dr. Thomas Pearce, Dipl.-Des. Timm Burkhardt