Design Science Salon: Dissolve & Bloom
An immersive interactive experience that will feature work from the Design Science Studio, an educational incubator for art inspiring a regenerative future that works for 100% of life.
Presented by the Design Science Studio at the Buckminster Fuller Institute in partnership with habRitual.
Saturday, December 19th
RSVP: Design Science Salon: Dissolve & Bloom
Have you heard? Everything is changing and there is no turning back. As we dive deep, the idea of separation from Nature evaporates. Nothing is destroyed, just transformed. Allow yourself to dissolve and bloom, like the mycelial interconnected networks sporing out the process of permanent transformation. The metamorphosis has commenced, and as our friend Bucky said well, “there is nothing in the caterpillar that tells you it’s going to be a butterfly.”
We invite you to journey with us on Saturday, December 19th into the minds and heARts of some of the Design Science Studio’s 144 inspiring international multidisciplinary creators, through an immersive interactive world that will inspire exploration and shift the way you relate to the potential of online events and art.
// WHAT //
An immersive interactive experience that will feature a few dozens of our artists in different shapes and art forms. The main experience lasts a whole day and happens in a virtual world (built on the spatial web platform TOPIA).
Agora (Bauhaus)
We invite you to come explore the many spaces and surprises across the immersive interactive experience of the Design Science Salon. One of those spaces will be the Agora, featuring some influences from the iconic and influential Bauhaus.
A Conversation
Existential questions to be asked during the live stream, you enter the world and reply to a series of existential questions related to the themes of Death, Life, Meaning, Time, Value, Space, Gravity and Love.
We will include quotes, audios and videos of inspiration around these existential questions. It will consist of conversations built around the theme and the questions.
With each speaker answering each of these questions and then we will spiral from question to a string of answers, like seeds that mix together.
The conversation is expected to be built around the space of unknowing and unlearning. It will behave as a fractal conversation where the questions leads to answers, which then leads to more questions, answers and so forth.
Keynotes on Specific Themes
We want to make these topics as accessible to you as possible, so we will make sure that we introduce these themes with quotes and images that may be relevant to your work.
- Space — boundaries within and without, membranes, osmosis, understanding places and context
- Life — understanding processes, relationships between entities, symbiosis, feedback loops
- Death — dissolving and blooming, regeneration and renewal after endings, cycles and grief
- Gravity — understanding the universe, oneness, holisticism, singularities, quantum theory
Other questions we might ask
What does it mean to be divided? What does it mean to be one? What is the source of fear? What is the source of love? How do we engage in the art of gathering? After all, this is the Agora. Outside is the realm of agoraphobia. Inside the Agora, we do not engage in debate. We gather to learn the art of conversation. We gather to listen and to understand. We exercise empathy and authenticity. We offer the gift of being seen.
What is Agora?
A Gathering Space
In a world of agoraphobia, where people are afraid to go outside because of a global pandemic, we must go inside to discover a new way of being. At the center of this experience, we find the Agora, a virtual space, a place of gathering.
The agora (/ˈæɡərə/; Ancient Greek: ἀγορά agorá) was a central public space in ancient Greek city-states. It is the best representation of a city-state’s response to accommodate the social and political order of the polis. The literal meaning of the word “agora” is “gathering place” or “assembly”. The agora was the center of the athletic, artistic, business, spiritual and political life in the city. The Ancient Agora of Athens is the best-known example. (Wikipedia: Agora)
The space will be a way of exploring a generalist perspective, to invite big picture thinking that explores the idea of redesigning education for the 21st century as an opportunity to discover how to become a creative, collaborative, self-organizing learning community.
Context
Agora
The agora (/ˈæɡərə/; Ancient Greek: ἀγορά agorá) was a central public space in ancient Greek city-states. It is the best representation of a city-states response to accommodate the social and political order of the polis. The literal meaning of the word “agora” is “gathering place” or “assembly”. The agora was the center of the athletic, artistic, business, spiritual and political life in the city. The Ancient Agora of Athens is the best-known example.
Agoraphobia
Agoraphobia is an anxiety disorder characterized by symptoms of anxiety in situations where the person perceives their environment to be unsafe with no easy way to escape. These situations can include open spaces, public transit, shopping centers, or simply being outside their home. Being in these situations may result in a panic attack. The symptoms occur nearly every time the situation is encountered and last for more than six months. Those affected will go to great lengths to avoid these situations. In severe cases people may become completely unable to leave their homes.
Ecclesia (ancient Greece)
The ecclesia or ekklesia (Greek: ἐκκλησία) was the assembly of the citizens in the democratic city-states of ancient Greece.
Heraclitus
Heraclitus of Ephesus (/ˌhɛrəˈklaɪtəs/; Greek: Ἡράκλειτος ὁ Ἐφέσιος, translit. Hērákleitos ho Ephésios; c. 535 — c. 475 BC, fl. 500 BC) was an Ancient Greek, pre-Socratic, Ionian philosopher and a native of the city of Ephesus, which was then part of the Persian Empire.
His appreciation for wordplay and oracular expressions, as well as paradoxical elements in his philosophy, earned him the epithet “The Obscure” from antiquity. He wrote a single work, On Nature, only fragments of which have survived, increasing the obscurity associated with his life and philosophy. Heraclitus’s cryptic utterances have been the subject of numerous interpretations. He has been seen as a “material monist or a process philosopher; a scientific cosmologist, a metaphysician and a religious thinker; an empiricist, a rationalist, a mystic; a conventional thinker and a revolutionary; a developer of logic — one who denied the law of non-contradiction; the first genuine philosopher and an anti-intellectual obscurantist.
Walter Gropius
Walter Adolph Georg Gropius (18 May 1883–5 July 1969) was a German architect and founder of the Bauhaus School, who, along with Alvar Aalto, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright, is widely regarded as one of the pioneering masters of modernist architecture. He is a founder of Bauhaus in Weimar (1919). Gropius was also a leading architect of the International Style.
Weimar Republic
The Weimar Republic (German: Weimarer Republik [ˈvaɪmaʁɐ ʁepuˈbliːk]), officially the German Reich (Deutsches Reich), also referred to as the German Republic (Deutsche Republik), was the German federal state from 1918 to 1933. As a term, it is an unofficial historical designation that derives its name from the city of Weimar, where its constituent assembly first took place. The official name of the republic remained the German Reich as it had been during the German Empire because of the German tradition of substates.
Bauhaus
The Staatliches Bauhaus (German: [ˈʃtaːtlɪçəs ˈbaʊˌhaʊs]), commonly known as the Bauhaus (German: “building house”), was a German art school operational from 1919 to 1933 that combined crafts and the fine arts. The school became famous for its approach to design, which attempted to unify the principles of mass production with individual artistic vision and strove to combine aesthetics with everyday function.
The Bauhaus was founded by architect Walter Gropius in Weimar. It was grounded in the idea of creating a Gesamtkunstwerk (“comprehensive artwork”) in which all the arts would eventually be brought together. The Bauhaus style later became one of the most influential currents in modern design, modernist architecture and art, design, and architectural education. The Bauhaus movement had a profound influence upon subsequent developments in art, architecture, graphic design, interior design, industrial design, and typography. Staff at the Bauhaus included prominent artists such as Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, and László Moholy-Nagy at various points.
The school existed in three German cities — Weimar, from 1919 to 1925; Dessau, from 1925 to 1932; and Berlin, from 1932 to 1933 — under three different architect-directors: Walter Gropius from 1919 to 1928; Hannes Meyer from 1928 to 1930; and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe from 1930 until 1933, when the school was closed by its own leadership under pressure from the Nazi regime, having been painted as a centre of communist intellectualism. Although the school was closed, the staff continued to spread its idealistic precepts as they left Germany and emigrated all over the world.
