The second edition of Bookcloud (available between July and October 2023) focuses on the relationship between utopia and ecology. In this context, the term 'ecology' is to be understood in its broadest sense and in its oldest etymology, that is, from the Greek oikos, 'environment,' and logos, 'study': study of the environment. The relationship between design and ecology in a broad sense underlies every choice that designers make, and in recent years it has been progressively discussed and analyzed by a whole strand of literature concerned with the non-exclusivity of human beings within the environments in which they operate – from the non-human to the digital. In this context, utopia and dystopia are two systems of vision that, due to their imaginative and speculative power, allow for uncomfortable questions to be posed towards the present and the future, trying to predict how humans will interact with a given environment based on the given present.

• Ep. 6 Fosbury Architecture with Il mondo nuovo. Ritorno al mondo nuovo di Aldous Huxley by Aldous Huxley (Mondadori 1989));
• Ep. 7 Davide Tommaso Ferrando with Interregno: Iconografie del XXI secolo by Mattia Salvia (NERO, 2022);
• Ep. 8 Institute for Postnatural Studies with Symbiotic Planet. A New Look at Evolution by Lynn Margulis (Basic Books, 1999);
• Ep. 9 Raimonda Riccini with La speranza progettuale. Ambiente e società by Tomás Maldonado (Einaudi, 1971);

Project by: bruno
Curated by: Noemi Biasetton

Bookcloud is a project that explores the relationship between the contemporary design scenario and literature through a series of conversation with researchers and practitioners from the fields of architecture, design, and arts starting from a book of their choice. The conversations are printed and distributed for free at bruno’s bookshop. The first edition of Bookcloud (distributed between January and February 2023) focuses on seven texts that explore the relationship between politics and design through the topics of participation and architecture, capitalism and graphic design, ecology and anthropology, anarchy and science fiction, wildness and queerness – investigating their current possibilities, past experiences and futurable scenarios.

• Ep. 1 Tommaso Guariento with The Nightmare of Participation (Crossbench Praxis as a Mode of Criticality) by Markus Miessen (Sternberg Press, 2011);
• Ep. 2 Silvio Lorusso with CAPS LOCK. How Capitalism Took Hold of Graphic Design, and How to Escape from It by Ruben Pater (Valiz, 2021);
• Ep. 3 Martina Muzi with The Mushroom at the End of the World by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing (Princeton University press, 2015);
• Ep. 4 Ruben Pater with Two Cheers for Anarchism by James C. Scott (Princeton University Press, 2012) and The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin (Harper & Row, 1974);
• Ep. 5 Annalisa Sacchi with Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire by Jack Halberstam (Duke University Press, 2020) and C’era una volta una bambina by Zoboli and Concejo (Topipittori, 2015)

Project by: bruno
Curated by: Noemi Biasetton

While the Western pre-Information Age’s political space often corresponded to an identifiable, tangible, and social dimensionality, the contemporary space of and for politics is now moving toward an ever-changing, more slippery ground. Clearly, this shift did not result from an unequivocal event, but rather took place over the course of many years, and at pace with technological development. Citizens and politicians went from pursuing their political activities in designated places to pursuing them in 'non-supervised' spaces. They went from living democracy in 'explicit' venues, consisting of floors, walls, and ceilings, to 'implicit' venues – places, like social media, not necessarily thought appropriate for politics, and perhaps not even accordingly policy-equipped. But how, and when, did this shift happen?

La campagna elettorale di Trump, così come quella pro-Brexit nel 2016, ha ribadito il ruolo fondamentale ma ambiguo delle immagini e dei media nella comunicazione politica, accentuando il passaggio da un’età politica ad una post-politica. Questa condizione, in particolare nell’ultimo decennio, ha scosso fortemente i mondi della comunicazione e dell’informazione. Per primo il mondo del giornalismo, che ha dovuto fare i conti con realtà arbitrarie e malleabili. Ma anche quello del design della comunicazione, che affronta non senza fatica la questione della rappresentazione visiva di un sistema in cui personalizzazione e spettacolarizzazione (in senso Debordiano) sembrano dominare le strategie comunicative dellз attorз politicз. Attraverso l’analisi di tre teorie nel campo del design relativo alla politica, l’articolo cerca di indagare il ruolo dellǝ designer all’interno dello storytelling post-politico cercando di prefigurare nuovi orizzonti progettuali.

Co-autore: Gianni Sinni
Pubblicato in: Graphicus, Issue 11, pp. 60 – 63.

In the last 20 years, the industry of sex toys has grown exponentially within the Western online market, giving life to new forms of communication regarding topics such as sex and sexuality. However, if on one hand the online sale of sex toys and its related communication allow (once again) the spread of political narratives, on the other they seem to reinforce an individual and self-determining conception of sex and sexuality which preclude its broader understanding within societal norms and omit forms of collective and shared practices related to such topics.
To understand the consequences of this paradox, the paper will focus on sex toys as carriers of political narratives related to sex and sexuality, reflecting especially on the role of that online communication might have on their diffusion. To achieve this, the paper takes into consideration the visual communication of MySecretCase as a case study and analyze it through the visual methodology proposed by Gillian Rose. Through the analysis of the communication design strategies adopted by MySecretCase, we aim at interrogating whether – if confined in the virtual space – sex toys can still be considered as carriers of political and collective values, reflecting on the role of communication design in shaping the symbolic narrative around these objects.

Co-author: Silvia Biasetton
Published in: Series in Design and Innovation, Springer

At present, populism is best understood as a combination of contextual issues (demand side) and the availability of successful parties (supply side). This article queries the impact of the new media factor as a third component for the fortune of contemporary populism, with the aim of clarifying how the features of new media communication can reflect or enhance the characteristics proper of populism. In order to do this, three aspects of the new media factor will be taken into account, hence the mediatization of politics, the process of disintermediation, and visual storytelling.
Specifically, the paper will analyze a controversial video posted on Facebook by the Minister of Justice Alfonso Bonafede in 2019, displaying the arrival at Ciampino Airport of the ex-terrorist Cesare Battisti. The latter will be used to explicit a coincidence of visual elements on digital media that can help political leaders better engage with their online audience, focusing on the assumptions that images can improve and facilitate the learning process, create identitarian spaces, and facilitate emotional involvement with the audience.

Written by: Noemi Biasetton
Published in: Design Culture(s). Cumulus Conference Proceedings, pp. 992 – 1006.

Da sempre spazio politico e spazio fisico si intrecciano delineando i confini di potere e democrazia. Fino ad oggi questi spazi risultavano “espliciti”: dalla agorà della polis greca fino alle sedi di partito della prima Repubblica, i luoghi della politica sono stati manifestazione fisica dei meccanismi di rappresentanza.
Tuttavia, a partire dal XXI secolo questi meccanismi hanno iniziato a vacillare, con un trasporto dello spazio politico in luoghi “impliciti”. Questo spostamento da uno spazio all’altro avviene all’interno di un contesto globalizzato, un luogo “liquido” (Bauman 1999) nel quale si verifica una scissione tra cittadini e istituzioni che polarizza lo spazio politico tra “noi” e “loro”. Il “noi” dei populisti nasce dal mondo dell’immaginazione e rappresenta un rifugio contro la globalizzazione, un rimedio al complesso mondo moderno. Questo “heartland”, come lo definisce Taggart (2000), è un locus amoenus, un recinto ideale «in cui, nell’immaginazione populista, risiede una popolazione virtuosa e unificata». Lo “heartland” trova la propria volontà di espressione nel web e specialmente nei social media, dove i populisti reinventano il proprio rapporto con la realtà e con il mondo mediante la creazione e la condivisione di segni. In ultimo gli abitanti dello “heartland” ridisegnano lo spazio politico nei confini della piazza, della sagra di paese, della spiaggia: strutture topologiche che reificano l’essenza identitaria del singolo, diventando non-luoghi.

Autrice: Noemi Biasetton
Pubblicato in: OFFICINA Issue 28, pp. 56 – 57.