This is a recording of a lecture for the Department of Design at Goldsmiths, University of London, presenting a design framework developed to explore the discursive practices of design within educational settings. Special thanks to Tim Miller for the invitation.
Abstract:
Imagine, if you will, a world where the narratives we tell ourselves are not truths etched in the firmament but fabrications—fragile, deliberate, and often cruel. Critical fables are a design practice that lays bare these fabrications, exposing the fragile and constructed nature of the realities we inhabit.
Critical fables use the crafted object, the tangible story, to unravel entrenched assumptions and challenge the arbitrary foundations of what we take for granted. They speak through materiality, insisting that the act of making is itself an act of rethinking. In each artefact lies not only a critique but a confrontation with power, with history, and with possibility.
What emerges is not escape but engagement: the slow, deliberate work of reshaping—not just the future, but the present, here and now. These fables do not seek to escape the world; they aim to reconfigure it, to reassemble its pieces into forms that hold hope, resistance, and possibility. And so, they ask us, the makers and the dreamers: what will you craft from the stories you have inherited?
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This is a recording of a lecture for the Department of Design at Goldsmiths, University of London, presenting a design framework developed to explore the discursive practices of design within educational settings. Special thanks to Tim Miller for the invitation.
Abstract:
Imagine, if you will, a world where the narratives we tell ourselves are not truths etched in the firmament but fabrications—fragile, deliberate, and often cruel. Critical fables are a design practice that lays bare these fabrications, exposing the fragile and constructed nature of the realities we inhabit.
Critical fables use the crafted object, the tangible story, to unravel entrenched assumptions and challenge the arbitrary foundations of what we take for granted. They speak through materiality, insisting that the act of making is itself an act of rethinking. In each artefact lies not only a critique but a confrontation with power, with history, and with possibility.
What emerges is not escape but engagement: the slow, deliberate work of reshaping—not just the future, but the present, here and now. These fables do not seek to escape the world; they aim to reconfigure it, to reassemble its pieces into forms that hold hope, resistance, and possibility. And so, they ask us, the makers and the dreamers: what will you craft from the stories you have inherited?
Live #11 - A reading of "The Ascent" a play by Ilona Gaynor - VVFA at Sugarhouse studios
Very Very Far Away
38 minutes 40 seconds
7 years ago
Live #11 - A reading of "The Ascent" a play by Ilona Gaynor - VVFA at Sugarhouse studios
The Ascent is written as a four act play, centred around a simulated plane crash that takes place as part of a morale boosting training day for the staff of a mid-sized American law firm. It was written as parable comedy about the ecosystems of power, and attempts to examine the nature of class politics; looking through the lens of the contemporary workplace from multiple vantage points. The four acts become increasingly perilous for the passengers inside; leaving them no choice, but to out maneuver one another… and in some case murder one another before they all eventually drown in the conflated margins of time.
This work outside of its text consists of a theatre set designed to spatially represent an American Airlines 747 and it’s interior separations of class; accompanied by the play script and a series of movable platforms that simulated fire and water.
Very Very Far Away
This is a recording of a lecture for the Department of Design at Goldsmiths, University of London, presenting a design framework developed to explore the discursive practices of design within educational settings. Special thanks to Tim Miller for the invitation.
Abstract:
Imagine, if you will, a world where the narratives we tell ourselves are not truths etched in the firmament but fabrications—fragile, deliberate, and often cruel. Critical fables are a design practice that lays bare these fabrications, exposing the fragile and constructed nature of the realities we inhabit.
Critical fables use the crafted object, the tangible story, to unravel entrenched assumptions and challenge the arbitrary foundations of what we take for granted. They speak through materiality, insisting that the act of making is itself an act of rethinking. In each artefact lies not only a critique but a confrontation with power, with history, and with possibility.
What emerges is not escape but engagement: the slow, deliberate work of reshaping—not just the future, but the present, here and now. These fables do not seek to escape the world; they aim to reconfigure it, to reassemble its pieces into forms that hold hope, resistance, and possibility. And so, they ask us, the makers and the dreamers: what will you craft from the stories you have inherited?
