Wednesday 4 December 2013

Grad Prog talks (5/12): Design Research Impact // Accelerationism in the Present Moment

Thursday 5 December, Media City Room 2.20

Internal Speaker: Mik Pienazek (Design); 3-4pm.

Three Themes of Impactful Research in Design
This presentation will present a number of successful research projects in the field of design:
1.                  SME Innovation strategies: with reference to graduate business start ups
2.                  Co-design as a strategy for advocacy, representation and inclusion of marginalised groups
3.                  Future 'assisted living' scenarios: with reference to the applications of ambient technology
Each of the research themes have been driven by a rigorous process and disparate methodologies. In addition, the 3 themes have achieved quantifiable impact relative to user groups, enterprises and curriculum.  




 


External Speaker: Benjamin Noys (University of Chichester); 4-5pm.

Days of Phuture Past: Accelerationism in the Present Moment

The claim of accelerationism is to a dynamism that can break the stasis of the present. In classical accelerationism – the work of Nick Land – this dynamism was located in the fettered forces of capitalist deterritorialization, which had been unlocked and realized in a virtual future. In the retooled forms of contemporary accelerationism dynamism is located in the epistemological possibilities of rational inhumanism, Promethean politics of maximal mastery, and sociotechnological hegemony. I dispute that this accelerationism can truly grasp the present moment. Poised between images of past encrypted dynamisms and future realized dynamisms the present moment is missing. This occlusion detaches claims of epistemic acceleration from any referent. Contemporary accelerationism cannot grasp the political and technical compositions of capital, including how the so-called “forces of production” are bound-up with “relations of production” and so “moulded” by capitalism (Panzieri). While true to a certain Marx, the resulting exaltation of a metaphysics of forces (political, economic, aesthetic, and epistemic) is nothing but an exultation without an existent object.

Benjamin Noys (Bsc, MA, Dphil) is Reader in English at the University of Chichester, and the author of Georges Bataille: A Critical Introduction (Pluto 2000), The Culture of Death (Berg 2005), The Persistence of the Negative: A Critique of Contemporary Theory (Edinburgh University Press 2010), and editor of Communization and its Discontents (Minor Compositions 2011). Benjamin has published widely in contemporary theory, aesthetics, psychoanalysis, film, literature and cultural politics. He is on the editorial boards of Film-Philosophy, S: Journal of the Jan Van Eyck Circle for Lacanian Ideology Critique, and Anarchist Developments in Cultural Studies, and is also a corresponding editor of Historical Materialism. He directs the interdisciplinary Theory Research Group at the University of Chichester (http://theoryresearchgroup.blogspot.com/).

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