A Will to Experimentation: Ecologies of Practice and the Workings of Design

• Author / Creator

  Walker, Daniel B

• This thesis examines the work of three artists—Beatriz da Costa, Tomás Saraceno, and Andrea Zittel—whose practices engage strategically with design in ways that echo pedagogical developments at the German Bauhaus and later at Black Mountain College. These two, short-lived, schools were known for an integrative approach to art and design that concerned ideas of form, perception, and ecological thinking. I trace the radical potential of form and creative experimentation emphasized by these schools, and that da Costa, Saraceno, and Zittel produce experimental forms that require a slowness of perception to grasp, as they alienate us from social and ecological relations under capitalism. I thus consider the value of form for its capacity to speculatively expand our conception of daily practice beyond these relations by attuning us, however momentarily, to other ways of living and relating.

• Subjects / Keywords

  • participation
  • Buckminster Fuller
  • science
  • housing
  • Black Mountain College
  • capitalism
  • medium design
  • anthropocene
  • death
  • multispecies
  • systems
  • Tomás Saraceno
  • transport
  • counterculture
  • air-travel
  • Helen Mayer Harrison
  • form
  • cancer
  • ecology
  • daily practice
  • Beatriz da Costa
  • institution
  • suburb
  • fossil-fuels
  • more-than-human
  • durational
  • sculpture
  • anti-capitalist
  • situated knowledges
  • pedagogy
  • Newton Harrison
  • politics
  • art
  • design
  • Donna Haraway
  • Andrea Zittel
  • Josef Albers
  • environment
  • perception
  • Bauhaus
  • experimentation
  • artistic research
  • hospital
  • biopolitics

• Graduation date

  Fall 2019

• Type of Item

  Thesis

• Degree

  Master of Arts

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/r3-yd1m-9844

• License

  Permission is hereby granted to the University of Alberta Libraries to reproduce single copies of this thesis and to lend or sell such copies for private, scholarly or scientific research purposes only. Where the thesis is converted to, or otherwise made available in digital form, the University of Alberta will advise potential users of the thesis of these terms. The author reserves all other publication and other rights in association with the copyright in the thesis and, except as herein before provided, neither the thesis nor any substantial portion thereof may be printed or otherwise reproduced in any material form whatsoever without the author's prior written permission.