Lost In Connotation
Seminar at University of the Arts Berlin (UdK). Special Tag: Lost in Connotation
"[...] How can we produce singularity and meaning from this chaotic mass of objects, names, and references that constitutes our daily life?" asks Nicolas Bourriaud in Postproduction (2002). The seminar "Lost In Connotation" focuses on referential methods in communication design and how this challenges the process of "making sense". Aside from common visual grammar, the seminar encourages students to develop dazzling and strange visual directions based on an intense hike through today's referencejungle, appropriating bits and pieces to create new narratives. Ideally this leads to an emancipatory design practice where ambiguities live on and on by shifting meanings and contexts back and forth – involving the reader by challenging his intellect, questioning form and content continuously.
The presentation of the seminar was given by two proper promotional workers of "Potential Allstars" Berlin: Dominika and Konstantin.
Where magic happend
The publication offers an insight into the theory framework of the seminar (texts by Thomas Jeppe, Nicholas Bourriaud, Klaus Krippendorf and Sytze Steenstra), different outcome of design exercises, and a short presentation of student's work (colored pages):
Explaining "Lost In Connotation"
Expanding use of the term: Exhibition title of Thomas Jeppe's show
at Gallery Conradi, Hamburg. Introducing also the Bench Theory...
LIC in Slippery Design
3. Lost in Connotation – Between Fields of Meaning and Building Lines, Great Narratives and Intertwined Ambiguities
Lost in Connotation: when semionauts orbit blank spaces and leave traces, when not-knowing and the search for meaning lead to connecting communications – that’s when Slippery Design acts out its discursive quality, elevating the state of being lost to a desirable goal, a constant challenge.
-- Manuel Buerger, Slippery Design
Excerpt of Nicolas Bourriaud, Altermodern explained: manifesto
A new modernity is emerging, reconfigured to an age of globalisation – understood in its economic, political and cultural aspects: an altermodern culture
Increased communication, travel and migration are affecting the way we live. Our daily lives consist of journeys in a chaotic and teeming universe. Multiculturalism and identity is being overtaken by creolisation: Artists are now starting from a globalised state of culture.
This new universalism is based on translations, subtitling and generalised dubbing.Today’s art explores the bonds that text and image, time and space, weave between themselves.
[...]
-- Bourriaud, Nicholas. Altermodern explained: manifesto, 2019, Link
