Design is the center of the universe at the 3rd Istanbul Design Biennial, "Are We Human?"

2016-10-26T14:40:00-04:00

The 3rd Istanbul Design Biennial opened to the public this past Saturday, October 22, curated by Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley. The curators' full title, “Biz Inan Miyiz? / Are We Human? The Design Of The Species: 2 Seconds, 2 Days, 2 Years, 200 Years, 200,000 Years,” sets up an ambitious meeting of manifesto and provocation, delving into how the human race has designed our world and how design has impacted it in return. I attended the Biennial's opening as part of the student coalition from GSAPP and Princeton that helped with the curators' research.

At the press opening, Wigley ruminated on the meaning of a biennial itself; “Maybe that’s what a biennale is, it’s just a social gathering, for people to share ideas... in a city in which ideas have been shared maybe more than any other city I know.”

Wigley explained the importance of studying humanity's relationship to design: “We literally live inside design, like the spider lives inside the web constructed from its own body.” Colom...

"Are we human?" Curators Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley announce concept for 2016 Istanbul Design Biennial

2015-12-01T15:05:00-05:00

We live in a time when everything is designed, from our carefully crafted individual looks and online identities, to the surrounding galaxies of personal devices, new materials, interfaces, networks, systems, infrastructures, data, chemicals, organisms, and genetic codes... Even the planet itself has been completely encrusted by design as a geological layer. There is no longer an outside to the world of design. Design has become the world.

Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley, the curators of the 3rd Istanbul Design Biennial, announced the conceptual framework for next year's biennial in a press release held today in a library of the Istanbul Archaeological Museums.

Its overlong title, ARE WE HUMAN?: The Design of the Species: 2 seconds, 2 years, 200 years, 200,000 years, indicates primary conceptual concerns: the omnipresence of design, or the world as a designed object; the category of the human, alongside and contra that of the animal; and an expanded temporal focus that "spans from the last 2 seconds to the last 200,000 years."

"Design always presents itself as serving the human but its real ambition is to redesign the human," the curators state in the press release. "The history of design is therefore a history of evolving conceptions of the human. To talk about design is to talk about the state of our species."

Rather than celebrate particular designers or imagine speculative futures, the biennial will be an "archaeolo...

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Design is the center of the universe at the 3rd Istanbul Design Biennial, "Are We Human?"

"Are we human?" Curators Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley announce concept for 2016 Istanbul Design Biennial