Journal Articles by Betti Marenko
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This article puts forward the notion of animistic design as an uncertainty-driven strategy to rei... more This article puts forward the notion of animistic design as an uncertainty-driven strategy to reimagine human-machine interaction as a milieu of human and nonhuman. Animistic design is suggested as capable of fostering affects, sensibilities and thoughts that capitalize on the uncertain, the unpredictable
and the nonlinear, and their capacity to trigger creative pathways. Informed by post-human philosophies, theories of mediation and materiality, as well as by affect, agency and aesthesia, animistic design eschews the anthropomorphic and the cute playfulness often associated with animism. Instead, it proposes a practical–theoretical framework to articulate the nexus of digital innovation, interaction design practices, technical materialities and affective responses already emerging in the digital cohabitation of the human and the nonhuman. Using a ‘research through making’ approach, the article describes in detail a series of animistic design experiments and prototyping methods that explore ways of rethinking interaction as an open-ended and creative enterprise. Animistic design offers an investigative strategy that exploits degrees of collaboratively curated uncertainty and
unpredictability to imagine forms of digital interaction, and to engender creative human–nonhuman relationships within a given digital milieu.
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Design Studies. Special issue on Computational Making edited by Terry Knight and Theodora Vardoulli of the MIT Computational Making Research Group., Sep 2015
This article investigates those aspects of computation that concern uncertainty, contingency and ... more This article investigates those aspects of computation that concern uncertainty, contingency and indeterminacy. Starting from a critique of current dominant models of computation, and drawing on the philosophical notions of the virtual and the event, uncertainty, contingency and indeterminacy are proposed as virtualities that express the ongoing differentiation of digital matter. On these grounds, the glitch is reframed as an event capable of revealing the potential of the digital in processes of computational making. Ideas concerning the incomputable and non-human intelligence of the algorithm underpin this argument. Finally, it is proposed that intuitive and uncognitive modes of apprehending digital making operate as forms of divination that capture the unprogrammed unfolding of matter.
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1984 Bold Ideas, Sep 2015
Have you ever had an inkling that your laptop was having a ditzy day? Or perhaps you’ve found you... more Have you ever had an inkling that your laptop was having a ditzy day? Or perhaps you’ve found yourself speaking in dulcet tones to a smartphone having a particularly tough OS update? Come on, you say softly. Everything’s backed up. Just 300mbs to go. You’re going to be OK.
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Design and Culture, the Journal of the Design Studies Forum, Berg Publishers. Editor Leslie Atzmon. Special issue: Design, Thing Theory, and the Lives of Objects , Jul 2014
Evidence of animistic apprehension of the world we inhabit is increasing. Not only do we talk to ... more Evidence of animistic apprehension of the world we inhabit is increasing. Not only do we talk to our computers, cars and smart phones; not only do they talk back to us. What is more intriguing and worth of critical enquiry is that our expectations from the things that surround us and from the objects that we use daily are increasingly coloured by animistic overtones. Drawing on a Spinozian notion of radical matter and on current ideas on agency and affect, this essay examines instances of contemporary animism in our relationship with objects that are increasingly performing as active agents capable of instigating conversations and triggering consequences. On this ground, it suggests a neo-animist paradigm able to express the complex, relational and negotiated engagement between us and the material world. Animism is taken as a boundary-breaking perspective to rethink our relationship with objects and as the entry point for an investigation into how the meaning of things around us is generated and produces tangible effects in the making (and unmaking) of subjectivities.
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Negotiating Futures – Design Fiction, proceedings from the 6th Swiss Design Network Conference, Basel, Switzerland, 2010
This paper investigates the possible connections among affect, design and late-capitalism strateg... more This paper investigates the possible connections among affect, design and late-capitalism strategies of commodification of experience. Drawing from a Spinozistic-Deleuzian concept of affect I intend to map how the current production of subjectivities is profoundly entangled with capitalist strategies of management and control of the affective sphere. As Deleuze wrote in his prescient Post-Script on the Societies of Control, contemporary capitalism operates by mining and modulating the pathosphere. Value is now extracted from life; a new distribution of the sensible shapes consumption; affects are being co-opted by what I call semio-chemio-affective-neuro capital. The contemporary pathosphere is being designed by interventions that simultaneously indicate capitalism’s capacities for reinvention, as well as the relentless expansion of the signature of the commodity. Specifically, the encounter with designed commodities needs to be probed to address the way in which subjectivities are being produced by, and emerge from, the designing of experience itself as a commodity. What types of subjectivities are required by the current formation of capitalism? Can it be argued that these new affect-literate subjectivities emerge from their relations with designed commodities? How can this encounter with the commodity be reconfigured to account for contagious affective competencies? Are subjectivities increasingly designed and commodified too?
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Objets & Communication. Editors Bernard Darras and Sarah Belkhamsa MEI ‘Mediation and Information’ review n. 30-31, Centre of Image, Research, Culture and Cognition, University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. Paris, Editions de l’Harmattan, pp 239-253, 2009
Our relationship with objects is far less clear-cut than a rational materialism predicated upon a... more Our relationship with objects is far less clear-cut than a rational materialism predicated upon a subject/object distinction would have us believe. On the contrary, it is a messy and unpredictable one, electrified by emotional investments, often anxiety-ridden, never innocent or neutral, and always implicated in powerful identity-forming practices. This essay examines instances of contemporary animism in our relationship with object-relics by mapping the symbolic and affective investments these objects are charged with. The hypothesis is that their borderline ontological status defies simple categorization and that it might be better examined through the lens of a neo-animist paradigm able to express the complex, relational and negotiated engagement between us and the material world. The belief in the thaumaturgical power of object-relics is a persistent if irrational cultural topos that, precisely because it operates transversally and adheres to a wide array of commodities, can be the entry point for an investigation into how the meaning of things around us is generated and produces tangible effects in the making (and unmaking) of subjectivities. It is my intention to question the distinction between animate and inanimate objects, to privilege instead their opaque and enigmatic status, and the way in which they act as clusters of excess of meaning, as strange attractors of a surplus of significance quintessentially irreducible.
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in Marketa Uhlirova ed, If Looks Could Kill Fashion Film Festival Catalogue, London, Koenig Books, 2008
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In Fiona Hackney, Jonathan Glynne and Viv Minton eds (2009), Networks of Design. Proceedings of the 2008 Annual International Conference of the Design History Society, University College Falmouth,, 2009
This paper addresses the visual discourse of psychopharmaceuticals, such as Prozac, in order to i... more This paper addresses the visual discourse of psychopharmaceuticals, such as Prozac, in order to investigate the network of relationships of affects, advertising, design and the production of new identity practices. As psychopharmaceuticals enter the public sphere through television and print advertisements, as well as first person narratives increasingly promoted in the media, the cultural discourse surrounding their use and the identity of the users are also changing. Drawing from a Spinozist notion of affect, ‘the trace of one body upon another’, as well as from a semiotic analysis of advertisements, I intend to examine the identity practices and the type of embodiment emerging in, and envisioned by, the increasingly normalised object ‘psychopharmaceutical’. The centrality of affects in the constitution of subjectivity is increasingly relevant to contemporary critical theory (see the notion of ‘affective turn’, Clough). Addressing the network of affective investments we exchange with objects is crucial for an understanding of how embodied subjectivities mutate accordingly to the objects they interact with. Against the theoretical backdrop provided by what Nikolas Rose calls the ‘pharmaceutical biopolitics of the neurochemical self’, the analysis of packaging, colour, visual and textual language of their advertising suggests how new scripts of selfhood are inscribed in the relationship between users and psychopharmaceuticals. The ensuing dialogue among chemistry, affects and design creates narratives of the self as a myth-making operation in which psychopharmaceuticals perform as objects imbued with magic properties.
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Stimulus Respond, Nov 2008
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Mute. Culture and Politics after the Net., Nov 2007
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This research investigates the practice of tattooing as a material, affective and superficial tec... more This research investigates the practice of tattooing as a material, affective and superficial technology of shifting subjectivity. It argues that tattooing can be considered a micropolitical resource toward the production of experimental, creative and subversive paths of subjectification and against machines of homogenisation and bodily conformity.
Drawing from Spinoza, Deleuze and Guattari, and from personal accounts of body modification, I discuss tattooing as a technology of empowerment and mobilization of subjectivity whose intensity, by way of the dis-organization of the bodily surface it induces, is capable of instigating lines of escape and liberation and entering into the production of new subjectivities.
I have developed my argument by following several lines of investigation: the historical and cultural location of the practice of tattooing; an overview of Spinoza’s philosophy; the production of subjectivity by way of Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari’s thought; and the analysis of the skin as the material site of tattooing and as a contested trope of identity. Finally, by looking at the distinction between skin shedding machines and botox machines, I have claimed tattooing as a micropolitical tool of liberation.
Both the skin and subjectivity have been examined in terms of their production. I have discussed the skin as the site of manoeuvres of dis/organization of corporeal matter. I argue that its continuous unfolding radically questions the polarization surface vs. depth and a notion of identity predicated upon the skin seen as a boundary.
This research aims at being a contribution to current debates on subjectivity and embodiment and, as such, it pertains to the wider project of rethinking the bodily roots of subjectivity. It is concerned, in particular, with how to create, express and sustain new forms of subjectification that resolutely place embodiment, desire and becoming at their core.
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Mute. Culture and Politics after the Net., Aug 2003
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Documenti di lavoro e pre-pubblicazioni. Centro Internazionale di Semiotica e di Linguistica, Jan 2001
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Books by Betti Marenko
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This collection taps into the emerging networks between philosophy as an act of inventing concept... more This collection taps into the emerging networks between philosophy as an act of inventing concepts, and design as the process of inventing the world.
What can Deleuze’s creative, immanent and practical philosophy offer to a field not only concerned with innovation and the creation of possible worlds, but one that is fast becoming a way of thinking and critically responding to current issues and concerns? Is there a Deleuzian way of designing?
Whether we are dealing with product or scenarios, packaging or experiences, objects or digital platforms, services or territories, organizations or strategies, design is never a thing, but a process of change, invention and speculation always with material, tangible implications that affect behaviours and lives.
Drawing on arrange of contributors, case studies and examples, this book examines ways in which we can think about design through Deleuze, and likewise how Deleuze’s thought can be experimented upon and re-designed to produce new concepts. Discussions include materiality, creativity, objects, the future, innovation, the designed environment and the interaction between human and non-human agents.
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Talks by Betti Marenko
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Journal Articles by Betti Marenko
and the nonlinear, and their capacity to trigger creative pathways. Informed by post-human philosophies, theories of mediation and materiality, as well as by affect, agency and aesthesia, animistic design eschews the anthropomorphic and the cute playfulness often associated with animism. Instead, it proposes a practical–theoretical framework to articulate the nexus of digital innovation, interaction design practices, technical materialities and affective responses already emerging in the digital cohabitation of the human and the nonhuman. Using a ‘research through making’ approach, the article describes in detail a series of animistic design experiments and prototyping methods that explore ways of rethinking interaction as an open-ended and creative enterprise. Animistic design offers an investigative strategy that exploits degrees of collaboratively curated uncertainty and
unpredictability to imagine forms of digital interaction, and to engender creative human–nonhuman relationships within a given digital milieu.
Drawing from Spinoza, Deleuze and Guattari, and from personal accounts of body modification, I discuss tattooing as a technology of empowerment and mobilization of subjectivity whose intensity, by way of the dis-organization of the bodily surface it induces, is capable of instigating lines of escape and liberation and entering into the production of new subjectivities.
I have developed my argument by following several lines of investigation: the historical and cultural location of the practice of tattooing; an overview of Spinoza’s philosophy; the production of subjectivity by way of Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari’s thought; and the analysis of the skin as the material site of tattooing and as a contested trope of identity. Finally, by looking at the distinction between skin shedding machines and botox machines, I have claimed tattooing as a micropolitical tool of liberation.
Both the skin and subjectivity have been examined in terms of their production. I have discussed the skin as the site of manoeuvres of dis/organization of corporeal matter. I argue that its continuous unfolding radically questions the polarization surface vs. depth and a notion of identity predicated upon the skin seen as a boundary.
This research aims at being a contribution to current debates on subjectivity and embodiment and, as such, it pertains to the wider project of rethinking the bodily roots of subjectivity. It is concerned, in particular, with how to create, express and sustain new forms of subjectification that resolutely place embodiment, desire and becoming at their core.
Books by Betti Marenko
What can Deleuze’s creative, immanent and practical philosophy offer to a field not only concerned with innovation and the creation of possible worlds, but one that is fast becoming a way of thinking and critically responding to current issues and concerns? Is there a Deleuzian way of designing?
Whether we are dealing with product or scenarios, packaging or experiences, objects or digital platforms, services or territories, organizations or strategies, design is never a thing, but a process of change, invention and speculation always with material, tangible implications that affect behaviours and lives.
Drawing on arrange of contributors, case studies and examples, this book examines ways in which we can think about design through Deleuze, and likewise how Deleuze’s thought can be experimented upon and re-designed to produce new concepts. Discussions include materiality, creativity, objects, the future, innovation, the designed environment and the interaction between human and non-human agents.
Talks by Betti Marenko
and the nonlinear, and their capacity to trigger creative pathways. Informed by post-human philosophies, theories of mediation and materiality, as well as by affect, agency and aesthesia, animistic design eschews the anthropomorphic and the cute playfulness often associated with animism. Instead, it proposes a practical–theoretical framework to articulate the nexus of digital innovation, interaction design practices, technical materialities and affective responses already emerging in the digital cohabitation of the human and the nonhuman. Using a ‘research through making’ approach, the article describes in detail a series of animistic design experiments and prototyping methods that explore ways of rethinking interaction as an open-ended and creative enterprise. Animistic design offers an investigative strategy that exploits degrees of collaboratively curated uncertainty and
unpredictability to imagine forms of digital interaction, and to engender creative human–nonhuman relationships within a given digital milieu.
Drawing from Spinoza, Deleuze and Guattari, and from personal accounts of body modification, I discuss tattooing as a technology of empowerment and mobilization of subjectivity whose intensity, by way of the dis-organization of the bodily surface it induces, is capable of instigating lines of escape and liberation and entering into the production of new subjectivities.
I have developed my argument by following several lines of investigation: the historical and cultural location of the practice of tattooing; an overview of Spinoza’s philosophy; the production of subjectivity by way of Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari’s thought; and the analysis of the skin as the material site of tattooing and as a contested trope of identity. Finally, by looking at the distinction between skin shedding machines and botox machines, I have claimed tattooing as a micropolitical tool of liberation.
Both the skin and subjectivity have been examined in terms of their production. I have discussed the skin as the site of manoeuvres of dis/organization of corporeal matter. I argue that its continuous unfolding radically questions the polarization surface vs. depth and a notion of identity predicated upon the skin seen as a boundary.
This research aims at being a contribution to current debates on subjectivity and embodiment and, as such, it pertains to the wider project of rethinking the bodily roots of subjectivity. It is concerned, in particular, with how to create, express and sustain new forms of subjectification that resolutely place embodiment, desire and becoming at their core.
What can Deleuze’s creative, immanent and practical philosophy offer to a field not only concerned with innovation and the creation of possible worlds, but one that is fast becoming a way of thinking and critically responding to current issues and concerns? Is there a Deleuzian way of designing?
Whether we are dealing with product or scenarios, packaging or experiences, objects or digital platforms, services or territories, organizations or strategies, design is never a thing, but a process of change, invention and speculation always with material, tangible implications that affect behaviours and lives.
Drawing on arrange of contributors, case studies and examples, this book examines ways in which we can think about design through Deleuze, and likewise how Deleuze’s thought can be experimented upon and re-designed to produce new concepts. Discussions include materiality, creativity, objects, the future, innovation, the designed environment and the interaction between human and non-human agents.
Deployed as a research method, animism can foster new myth-making narratives and produce embodied fictions that reveal, and cultivate, alternative modes of interaction. These modes are post-cognitive - because they engage the non-rational, the somatic and the ‘below the radar’. They are post-human - because they give human and nonhuman equal stand. They are post-user - because they are unhinged from user-centeredness.
We believe that at the present stage of human and digital interface it is crucial to imagine new forms of interaction with objects, beyond the constraints of user centred design and, specifically, beyond the orthodoxy of the black box and the omnipresent, dead-end interface. Within this critique, animism becomes an investigative tool to explore and counteract dominant narratives of dematerialization, immediacy and invisibility. Further, this approach seeks to move beyond one-dimensional, object-subject forms of interaction by mobilizing a range of protagonists, each providing different opinions or perspectives, not necessarily aligned, and even in conflict with each other.
If animism can elicit new meanings and provocations in a world populated by smart objects and intelligent things that we use all the time yet barely understand, how can it be evoked in the human’s imagination? How can it be deployed to grasp the materiality of the digital and the experiential, material-affective effects it produces? Can data “things” be processed animistically, or given their own agency? How can animism foster a new type of ecology of actors – where the human and non-human co-participate and co- create? How can it stay away from the anthropomorphic, the cute, and the superficial?
Our Maker/Analyst combination brings together two independent researchers from different disciplines whose ideas have recently converged around animism in a modern context. Philip van Allen has a background in interaction design, technology and tools for designers. Betti Marenko has a background in philosophy, sociology and cultural studies. Each of us has recently published papers on the topic of animism, and these form the foundation of this collaboration.
‘Neo-Animism and Design: A new paradigm in object theory’. Special issue of Design and Culture Journal. Leslie Atzmon ed. Berg. July, 6.2, Betti Marenko
‘AniThings: Animism and Heterogeneous Multiplicity’ CHI ’13 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2013, Philip van Allen, Joshua McVeigh-Schultz
The aim of the chapter is therefore twofold: a) to elucidate on techno-animism and how this framework captures, and gives meaning to, the new types of human-nonhuman encounters occurring in digital landscapes; b) to zoom in on the specific object/event algorithm upon which the digital world is effectively predicated. The chapter builds on and takes further my previous work: on animism and interaction design (Marenko and Van Allen 2016; Marenko 2014), on algorithms and divination practices (Marenko 2015) and on the intelligence of technodigital objects (Marenko 2015a).
to that used in design, especially when its creative influence is articulated in terms of innovation (Flynn and Chatman 2004; Cox 2005). An interesting, important, successful philosophy deals not in truth or falsity, but in engaging with different creative activities in many different registers having multiple layers of affect. This should declare our editorial intentions by providing the overall intellectual framework to which this book intends to abide: that if there is a way of designing that both affects and is affected by Deleuze’s philosophy, it will be found at the intersection of said practices. Design and philosophy, and other creative practices, are massively entangled and it is time, therefore, to investigate some of the ways in which this occurs. This need is driven not only by Deleuze’s intellectual proximity to issues that are relevant to design practice (including its own theoretical and historical contextualisation), but also by the changing nature of design, which as a process enacts a way of thinking and doing philosophy (Giaccardi 2005; Binder et al. 2011; Kimbell 2011, 2012; Tonkinwise 2014). Both design and philosophy are creative practices. The relationship
between them is akin to the relation between theory and practice. Each is a way of doing the other, using particular materials, skills and experiences, as well as engaging with particular discourses. We are interested not only in doing philosophy – as a practical process with which the possibilities of new futures can be thought and materialised – but also in articulating concepts through creative, tangible, embodied, material, designed means.