Enacting Ecological Aesthetics

Design and Regenerative Practices: Daniel C. Wahl in Conversation with Dulmini Perera

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.

Double Bind, Decoloniality, the Question of Aesthetics

Madina Tlostanova in conversation with Dulmini Perera 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 expand the discussion on the relationship between questions of aesthetics and decoloniality in relation to design/ architecture/artistic research and methods. This research is supported by the DFG (German Research Foundation) grant number 508363000 and the AHRC (United Kingdom).

Mind, Ecology, Enaction: Encounters between Gregory Bateson and Francisco Varela

Evan Thompson and Bruce Clarke in conversation with Dulmini Perera 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 about (design) action within the context of the present ecological crises? This research is supported by the DFG (German Research Foundation) grant number 508363000 and the AHRC (United Kingdom).

Gregory Bateson, Long Sixties, Ecological Consciousness

Anthony Chaney in conversation with Dulmini Perera In this conversation, we look at Gregory Bateson’s role within the broader 1960s conversations on cultural and ecological change. In order to do so, we will revisit what Chaney identifies as the long 1960s, particularly the sites where explorations on finding better ways to engage questions of systems change at social, environmental and political levels were underway. By using the Dialectics of Liberation Congress as a focus point, we will discuss multiple ways Bateson’s ideas, such as the ‘double bind’ started to resonate with broader explorations in art such as in the work of Allen Ginsberg, as well as other cultural discussions related to concepts such as catch-22 or the absurd. Another point of focus would be the ways in which Bateson’s approach to addressing change set him apart from how the ‘culturalists’ and ‘structuralists’ of the period approached the topic. The double bind is one way of understanding the destructive relationship between design activities and the environment in which they are embedded, explaining the ongoing impasse where progress remains piecemeal despite broad agreement on the urgency of environmental action. We will see how Bateson’s explorations around the double bind and change in the 60s can inform these discussions. This research is supported by the DFG (German Research Foundation) grant number 508363000 and the AHRC (United Kingdom).

Gregory Bateson, Applied Anthropology, Design

David H. Price in conversation with Dulmini Perera In this conversation, we look at Gregory Bateson’s intelligence work at the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in the 1940s, a moment when military uses of anthropology left Bateson facing an ethical dilemma and influenced his lifelong scepticism of applied science. Bateson’s later writings often highlight the problematic relationship between ‘conscious purpose’ and ‘action’. By looking at the broader socio-political context that anthropology was embedded in during WWII, we will look at how Bateson and Margaret Mead’s anthropological research on ideas of ‘cultural order’ and ‘stability’ were reflexively informed by their engagement with multiple sites and intelligence projects that had a relation to design decisions made at the broader level of governance and policy. The divergences that happened towards the end of this period between Mead’s and Bateson’s thinking on the notions of ‘culture’ and ‘applied anthropology’ would also be a focus. At a moment when different versions of ‘anthropological intelligence’ are still used to aid various forms of colonisation, the ethical quandaries that emerge in Bateson’s story during WWII have much to offer contemporary efforts that call for taking multiple cosmologies and different worlds seriously within various processes of design. This research is supported by the DFG (German Research Foundation) grant number 508363000 and the AHRC (United Kingdom).