Exhibition: Design in the Age of Darwin

August 13, 2008 at 10:56 pm · Filed under Design, art, critical theory, interdisciplinary, metaphors, visual culture

Yesterday I made a point of visiting the exhibition “Design in the Age of Darwin” at the Block Museum of Art on Northwestern University’s campus in Evanston, IL. The title of the exhibition caught my attention when I was flipping through a Chicago guide while visiting with some family there. The terms “design” and “Darwin” are usually brought up in a controversial opposition. However, this exhibition promised to take a deeper look at the relationships present in the fundamental orderings of Darwin’s work on natural selection and decorative design.

The exhibition takes a sort of auteur-like approach, focusing on a few men prominent in the decorative arts at th turn of the century and just before the birth of so-called modernism. The title includes the notables William Morris and Frank Lloyd Wright as well as C.F.A. Voysey, Louis Sullivan, and Christopher Dresser, an English botanist turned industrial designer.

I wrote in the comment book that the exhibition was well-presented, but that it lacked an engagement with the discipline of evolution as well as any other social and cultural field beyond traditional notions of design.

The missed opportunity lies in the ability to untangle well-tread debates of form versus function from ideas about natural and sexual selection, the role of mutation as a creative force, and the cultural and social appropriation of “selection” in the burgeoning onslaught of mass production and “upward mobility”.

I would have liked to see, for instance, a more overt discussion of Frank Lloyd Wright’s spandrel and the famous (at least within evolutionary biology) paper “The Spandrels of San Marcos”. In it Gould and Lewontin take on the adaptationist perspective which basically says that form must have function and needs a explanation. The adaptationists neglected the role of happenstance (technically, genetic drift) and frequently created “just so” stories to explain the unexplained. Gould and Lewontin’s view was that evolution is a side-effect of a true adaptation, where some traits arise from correlations between a networked body (i.e. gene networks), rather than arising from natural selection. Admittedly, I haven’t read the catalog for the exhibition, but here was a golden opportunity to flesh out the role that complex dynamism plays in evolution. As it stands, the exhibition just furthers the paradigm of intention and selection in the interplay of form and function.

I would agree with the curator’s thesis that Darwin’s ideas contributed to the design sensibility of the age, but it was probably only the case insofar as both Darwin and these designers relied on the metaphor of selection.

Another missed opportunity was the role that social Darwinism played in the development of modernism. For an excellent paper on the subject, see Christina Cogdell’s “Products and Bodies: Streamline Design and Eugenics as Applied Biology.”

What was there were some fantastic examples of Arts and Crafts and Prairie-style decorative and architectural renderings from Chicagoland area collections. It seems almost like the curator was constrained in the availability of ideas and objects to articulate the thesis, and while the show is a unified presentation, there isn’t anything novel to suggest that accounts of art history haven’t yet “speciated”. For the discipline’s sake, let’s hope it doesn’t go extinct.

Gould, S. J., & Lewontin, R. C. (1979). The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptationist Programme. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences, 205(1161), 581-598. Retrieved August 13, 2008, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/77447

Cogdell, C. (2003). Products or Bodies? Streamline Design and Eugenics as Applied Biology. Design Issues, 19(1), 36-53. Retrieved August 13, 2008, from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/074793603762667683

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On the selection of metaphor

July 25, 2008 at 8:04 pm · Filed under cognitive justice, community interaction design, critical theory, evolution, metaphors, semantics

I’m picky when it comes to using metaphors. They reveal so much about the biases and commitments that underscore our thinking and, more importantly, how that thinking gets translated into physical manifestations and action.

Cathy Davidson at HASTAC has written a sharp brief on the use of the word ’selection’ as it pertains to evolution and natural selection. She writes,

Having spent a day pulling book after book after book off my shelf, and looking at the proforma and obligatory evolutionary argument that almost inevitably comes in the final chapter of an otherwise careful description and discussion of brain functionality, I am convinced that the word “selection” has a lot to answer for.

The point she makes in the article is that the use of the word selection is directly linked to ideology. I think she is right here, and it should have been incumbent on the evolutionary biology community to recognize this and have proffered a solution early in its history. My fear is that, to do so, would be seen as a mocking retort to creationists that so recently cloaked their arguments in the guise of intelligent design. Well, maybe that a good thing.

Expanding on the relationship of the selection metaphor and its connection to ideology, Margret Evans, a psychologist at the University of Michigan, studies some of the ways that children, potential users of evolution, acquire evolutionist and creationist beliefs. Evans describes how Western religious and philosophical traditions emphasize essentialism, teleology, and intention, and in the process limit the cognitive appeal of natural explanations for the origins of species. She argues that because these ideas tend to show up repeatedly in public representations, they constrain the inferential reasoning capacities of the developing mind. It’s an observation that suggests science’s own predilection for categorization is at the root of evolutionary biology’s social friction.

Maybe we ought to have namethis.com come up with a new term.

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Deconstructing the Genome with Cinema

July 24, 2007 at 10:56 pm · Filed under art, biology, complex systems, critical theory, genomics, interdisciplinary, metaphors

Gabriel A. Harp
Leonardo. August 2007, Vol. 40, No. 4, Pages 376-381

Evidence from language, history and form suggest an analogy between the cinema and the genome. The author describes some of the relationships between cinema and the genome and points to opportunities for discovering unmarked categories within the genome and new methods of representation. This is accomplished by evaluating existing metaphors presented for the understanding of genetics and revealing how current scientific understanding and social concerns suggest a cinematic alternative. The formal principles of function, difference and development mediate discussion and serve as heuristics for investigating creative opportunities.

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