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Becoming regenerative
No full textThrough design, creative practitioners are able to engage and re-vision full systems which produced them— they are able to think about resource extraction, exploitative labour practices, methods of manufacture, global transport chains, marketing narratives, conditions of use, methods of disposal, and materials’ afterlife (Pfeiffer, 2024). Through specific case studies ranging from ecomaterials to regenerative agriculture and services, this paper will highlight how they are both context and content for each other: how systems create the design’s material and relational qualities, and how the object’s qualities define the systems’ relations and outcomes. We will showcase pioneering examples of those aspirations, design interventions and the impact they have through regenerative design principles in connection to the way they engage in thoughtful ways of thinking, caring, relating, and making. This paper also examines the critical role of design institutions in fostering regenerative practices. These institutions provide an environment of unbounded imagination, interdisciplinary, and openness —spaces that are both provocative and exploratory by design. They enable diverse connections, drawing on a wide range of references, including low-tech solutions and Indigenous knowledge systems. We argue that their unique potential lies, in part, in the (relative) absence of conceptual and practical constraints that often inhibit alternative ways of thinking and making. Importantly, this needs to be connected with a curriculum based on a regenerative worldview which treats humans and the environment as fundamentally interrelated. This argument will be further supported by conversations with creative regenerative practitioners and academics actively working at the intersection of design and ecological practices. Finally, we trace how regenerative ideas evolve as they move from educational institutions to market contexts. Regenerative innovators oscillate between different ways of working as they act as designers, technical developers, and entrepreneurs. These roles carry their own priorities and reward mechanisms. For instance, design as a modality prizes originality, functionality and aesthetics. It encourages risk-taking and individual authorship. In contrast, the technical or scientific mode is rooted in precision, replicability, and feasibility. Meanwhile, an entrepreneurial modality is driven by market fit, scalability, and navigating economic constraints—what works as a design project in an art school is very different when it becomes a venture and an economic system far from being regenerative. The paper will explore how in the regenerative entrepreneurial journey designers navigate competing logics and value systems, which often create tensions and lead to difficult decisions and compromises—as economic choices are sometimes at odds with ecological integrity, idealistic design visions or technically superior solutions. As one of the case studies CEO noted “the activation energy needed to get over that initial development hump is the issue”. Our research identifies value-led design clashes that emanate from current economic system(s) and entrepreneurial templates to critically consider present issues and constraints to cast forward into better possible supportive landscapes. In doing so, we aim to contribute to theoretical understandings of regeneration while offering actionable insights for practitioners navigating the complexities of regenerative transitions. The overarching goal is to generate critical knowledge that supports both scholars and practitioners committed to transformative systems change. REFERENCES Fantini van Ditmar, D., and Toivonen, T. 2025. “Cultivating a Regenerative Imagination at Art and Design Universities.” In RSD13: Proceedings of the 13th Relating Systems Thinking and Design Symposium. Pfeiffer, K. 2024. “Seeing ‘the Object as World-Maker’: Prefigurative Materiality, Biodesign, and the Limits of Material Hope.” Etnofoor 36 (2): 91–108
I wanted the queens to be on the cover of Vogue: Nan Goldin’s fashion dreams
No full textNan Goldin was sixteen years old, a stray who’d left home, when she became the ‘unofficial’ school photographer. She was studying at a countercultural free school in Massachusetts. It was here that she enveloped herself with David Armstrong, a beautiful, androgynous artist, who later introduced her to night and day worldings of drag and glamour in Downtown Boston. ‘Nan’ was a hippie who preferred pearls and red lipstick. She shared an apartment with drag queens Ivy and Bea who dressed in the soft silk pleats of vintage designer gowns like Fortuny, sometimes loose-fitting 1970s jersey, often cloche hats outside, and turbans inside, with lace-trimmed slips. It is these garments that feature in Goldin’s intimate black-and-white photographs of her gender-expansive friends, referred to as her “roommates”, beside their “sisters”; she photographed them in the intimate dwellings and textures of their lives as a creative, communing act of devotion. While Goldin also documented the queens performing at beauty parades and bars, it is the ‘fashion-intimate’ images taken in the corners of their collective home across 1972–73, which are my focus in this article: images that hum with quietude, respite, imagination, absorption, and practice. Inside and outside the image, it is a photographic archive that recuperates 1930s fashions and scenes as ‘backwards’, enchanted, cinematic reverie. Shaped by Goldin’s own monochromatic attachments across cinema, fashion, and fashion photography, as well as her ‘adolescent’ methods of research and practice (gossiping, shoplifting, past-decade-dreaming), I argue that this archive of ‘not-quite not-yet’ fashion photographs — encompassing images that are rooms that are studios that are dreams — holds speculative craftings of sensual life that offer reparative resources of political survival in the present. In the early 1970s — ten years before she published subversive fashion editorials in the arts, culture, and fashion magazines of Downtown New York — Goldin “dreamt of putting the queens on the cover of Vogue”. On the surface of such pages, the dream did not come true, but in dialogue with queer theorists of affect and time, including Munoz’s reclaiming of the “not yet queer”, this chapter wonders otherwise; slips into the fugitive spaces and shadows to dream some counter-possibilities
Troubling signs: The aniconic, the asignifying and art in planetary times
Get PDFI consider how Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s theory of signs, particularly their conception of the ‘asignifying’, can prompt new understandings of ‘aniconic’ art. Usually analysed within the context of religious imagery, ‘aniconism’ is a term traditionally used to refer to artefacts, objects and images that withdraw from the conventions of resemblance, including iconic similarity to a thing represented. Today, aniconism demands to be thought of as a transhistorical and transcultural category that can offer a compelling tool for the decolonized thought of art in planetary times. Reading aniconism alongside Deleuze and Guattari’s theorization of the asignifying invites expanded ways of addressing pertinent questions of alterity and the non-representational at the intersections of contemporary art and material culture, world art history and the critical humanities, against a backdrop of intensifying interest in phenomena and objects that exceed or trouble anthropocentric coordinates of thought and perception
Retouching the archive: Gender and class in early photography in Scotland
No full text‘Retouching the Archive’ is a practice-based research project located between the archive, darkroom and studio that explores the role of women in early photography in Scotland between 1780 and 1847. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, women were at the centre of the scientific breakthroughs that would later become known as photography. This project focusses on the contributions of three women who lived and worked in Scotland: Elizabeth Fulhame, Mary Somerville and Elizabeth Johnston Hall. Through archival research and contemporary art practice, it examines their lives and works as they intersect with histories of photography. The project’s contribution lies in its retrieval of their work and its repair of the subsequent, canonical narrative which marginalised their vital contributions to an ‘invention’ of photography dated to 1839. More than this, its significance is in the creative methods of reenactment and retouching, demonstrating how a fine art practice can deepen our understanding of women’s contributions to early photography. Following Lütticken’s theorisation of reenactment as activating ‘a potential waiting’ (Lütticken 2005), the project reenacts the published technical workings of women’s chemical and optical experiments undertaken before and after 1839. Its method of reenactment provides a haptic encounter with the materiality of historical photochemical processes, enabling me to experience, at a distance of over 200 years, these women’s still-thrilling pre-photographic moments of discovery. Reenactment also undertakes a reparative action that allows me to make the invisible labour of these women’s production visible once again. When the limits of the archival case files are breached (Hartman 2019b), I advance a feminist research method called retouching in which non-verbal, non-visible and non-dominant narratives are reactivated, and new knowledge produced. Ultimately, the art practice and archival research presented here attempts to create a space for women’s contributions to early photography to become known again so that a history of photography can be learned anew
The artist as subject-object and the myth of artistic freedom
No full textThe figure of the artist has functioned as a cypher of freedom in modernity. The promise of a creative existence outside wage labour has served as a horizon of emancipation and a justification of exploitation. For Lukács, however, the artist’s freedom is no different to that of any commodity-producer, equally beholden to the rules of the market, which requires at least a semblance of freedom. The artist, is therefore, a kind of manager of their own labour. In this respect, artists are split off from the proletariat, giving rise to the kind of demands made in Walter Benjamin’s “Author as Producer” for a more reflexive engagement with means of production. Within post-Fordism, however, the creative freedom of the artist has been subsumed within labour in general, as workers increasingly become entrepreneurs of the self, managers of their own human capital. A post-Fordist productivism might indicate useful points of solidarity between artworkers and workers in other fields. Instead, we find much contemporary art, depleted of the material foundations that afforded art any special status or exemption, turning inwards. This takes two seemingly opposite forms: asserting incommunicable modes of subjectivity and seeking identification with the non-human. Both, however, reaffirm the artist’s freedom from social constraints, reasserting the subject as the locus of a privileged insight into something otherwise inaccessible. This tendency mirrors the irrationalism described by Lukács as providing comfort through an illusion of personal autonomy, while maintaining subservience to the reactionary bourgeoisie. Unlike the artist who withdraws into the pure subjectivity of intuition, Lukács understands the proletariat as possessing a unique standpoint as subjects whose subjectivity is constituted by their objectification. In this paper, we consider how including artistic labour in this standpoint might form the basis for dismantling the structures through which the artworld reifies the artist’s subservience
Spectral transmissions: Communiqué 12: Broadcasts from the subterranean
No full text(Various summonings at the end of the world.) The lights dim, the music begins, the eyes lower, the microphone is raised and a transformation is enacted. Spirits are raised, the dead walk and secret messages spoken. a sacred profane space where circles of inebriate initiates gather to invoke the dead icons What does a ghost whose meaning is unknown to us mean? Interrupt transmission Enhance experience Create atmosphere: With this insubordinate, unruly Lolling and ranting we invoke the spirit of everyday insurrection; Featuring Tik-tok Witch and Cargo Cult Bingo. Captain Swing, General Neddy, Their Highnesses Ludd & Mob. Join us Ludd Püca, {INSERT NAME OF YOUR MUSIC PERSONA HERE } JohnFrum, Kay Jackson, Dr. Ray Power, EKA-Francium, Dr. Tinkerpaw, Kaspar Brøcken, and of course, our old friend the Coincidence Sprite. BLACK RAM BOOK OF GHOSTS You have been listening to the Spectral Transmissions Research Unit. Make yourselves at home, This is where it all ends
Spectral transmissions research unit - A common treasury
No full textIn the beginning of Time, the great Creator Reason, made the Earth to be a Common Treasury, Amid all our familiar scenes stand memorials of the people who were here before us. In the wild magic of midsummer night's eve, we embark on an hallucinatory journey through weed choked lay-bys where normative logic bends and succumbs to the tangential, the wayward and the transcendental. Here the ether is populated with unruly beasts and revolting peasants, an insolent jumble of noises, fragments and connections, unobserved rites, wild anarchy and the violence that haunts the spectral pastoral
7 yellow jades
Get PDFWhile many researchers have covered the history, culture, geochemistry and archaeology of the neolithic Hongshan culture from northeast China, very little attention has been paid to the design features of Hongshan jades. Controversy still rages around authentication, weathering, and originality however my aim here is to focus specifically on a small range of seven yellow jades that appear to be made from the same material, and possibly the same maker or makers. For readers unfamiliar with Hongshan culture I would recommend reading Sarah M. Nelson, Zhu Da and Guo Dashun and for jade analysis Anderson, Crisci and Qiang. While I may refer to historical, cultural, and archaeological sources my aim is not to make a claim for these pieces in terms of originality or emerging from a particular time but to do the opposite, to focus only on the making and aesthetic factors to try and gain insight into the relations and meanings of forms independent of time. This publication is designed to be read as a series of visual notes alongside a paper I published on ‘Hongshan Culture: Numbers, Controversy and a Proto Industrial Design Society’ at the International Association of Design Research Societies conference in Taipei, 2025
Close writing: Kathy Acker, Cookie Mueller, and love-in-pieces
No full textClose Writing: Kathy Acker, Cookie Mueller, and Love-in-pieces is an interdisciplinary, creative-critical examination of two women writers associated with New York’s Downtown art scene of the 1970s and 1980s, Kathy Acker (1947–1997) and Cookie Mueller (1949–1989). Across theory and practice, the book contributes an original feminist methodology of epistolary writing and love (which it terms ‘close writing’) to revitalize and critically attend to the queer feminist politics of Acker and Mueller’s entangled lives, works, and autofictional archives (publications, images, performances, manuscripts, diaries, letters). Through this framework, the book draws on original archival research to contribute a dialogic ‘correspondence’ with Acker and Mueller’s own interdisciplinary ‘close writing’ of autobiographical disclosure and performance. The book argues that this work shifted the boundaries of sexual desire, the sick body, narratives of illness and love, as well as the line separating art and writing
Gestures: a body of work
No full textCombining creative and critical methods, this cross-disciplinary collection contributes an original feminist investigation of embodied, affective, and political gesture in/as feminist art and writing. It considers and performs how gesture/s and feminism/s have animated one another in feminist and interdisciplinary artistic practices, contributing new theorizations of gesture, gender, sexuality, and embodiment, alongside revised histories of feminist art and literature. The book’s introductory essay “Writing Gesture” argues for a logic of in-betweenness that connects gesture, feminism, and interdisciplinarity. This new articulation of feminist practice is realized in the book’s innovative structure focused on ‘gestural’ stances, which contain transnational readings of artists and writers’ work from the 1960s onwards, as well dialogues between contemporary artists and writers