invenção

Authors:		Falk, Lorne.
Title:		Le Souci de Soi Digital
Keywords:		community design ethics facilitation sustainability
Abstract:		"...design no longer involves design of the materials forms the finished product will take, so much as design of information and of various stimuli. It is just a small step from the multimedia screen object to the metadesign of computer-assisted perception... " This paper is a speculation about a certain tension between physical and digital matter and space - about a two-sided membrane which forms their common boundary and which is increasingly permeable to the senses, permitting a flow of information that carries expression, intelligence, and personality. This affective interface is used by real people living in telepresent neighborhoods, live buildings, and hot rooms. Wired and unwired people living in an archipelago of digital niches, they are a brave new audience who want the interrelations between themselves and artificial life-forms to be symbiotic, to be something mutually beneficial and natural to do. Their project is to model their own affects and transfer them to their computer presences, which currently exist as mostly dull, unintelligent data scrolls (citizenship, credit histories, medical histories, etc.) created and maintained by location technology. Their disposition is adventurous, compassionate, and consequential - hence, brave. In short, the theoretical issue I want to address is le souci de soi digital: Is there a more coherent, ethical way to cater to one's digital needs and desires? Is there a socially conscious agent-based knowledge and a practice of using it? How literally to manifest one's own agency? How to empower modeling our digital selves, expanding our wired presence (interconnectedness), making it collective, dispersed, decentralized? Le souci de soi digital contributes to the framework for an ethics of perception which has radical implications for the creation of virtual communities and the myriad products and processes being designed for them. It grounds communities who wan to move across a critical threshold to less idealistic, more sophisticated, and more ethical development strategies. Enter design consciousness. Design consciousness goes directly to the content and use of digital technology for culture on the virtual street or in the virtual institution and, as such, is at the methodological heart of an ethics of perception. As such, this paper also has radical implications for the role of designers in facilitating the emerging global culture of collaboration.

Falk, Lorne. forlorne@aol.com Hong Kong Polytechnic University has worked in the fields of culture and education for 25 years as a director, educator, curator, writer, and consultant (knowledge architect, strategic thinker). His background and experience in the visual and media arts is interdisciplinary and transcultural. He has written and published more than 60 critical essays, produced (editor and/or publisher) 19 catalogues and books, and curated and organized more than 150 exhibitions, including 8 major projects. He currently works at the School of Design in Hong Kong where his teaching, research and academic management focuses on digital culture. His involvement in digital culture goes back to the beginning of the 1980s, when he researched and curated an exhibition called Chicago - Biographies of an Interactive Life Style. In the early 1990s he was Program Director of the Art Studio's international residency program at the Banff Centre for the Arts. The residency program was committed to interdisciplinary cultural research and production in relation to issues of great urgency in today's world. Themes such as "Border Culture," "The Bioapparatus," "Rhetoric, Utopia and Technology," "Nomad," and "Living at the End of Nation States" foregrounded how digital technologies are altering the social, cultural and geopolitical landscapes. In the mid-1990s he helped conceive and develop the program and architecture for the Getty's multi-year virtual community project called "LA Culture Net." His research, teaching, publishing, and consulting continue to focus on how to articulate the aesthetic and ethical characteristics peculiar to digital technologies for those committed to community-centred-technologies and a culture of collaboration.