venerdì 12 aprile 2013

Krisis - Orientation - n.2 - It, 2013



Krisis | Orientation

Krisis | Orientation is the second volume of Krisis Magazine, a publication curated by Unità di crisi, between design, communication, art, visual culture and new languages.
Krisis | Orientation is dedicated to disorientation and to the crisis of orientative models.
Disorientation is today a common experience, affecting people, communities, institutions and entire societies. The most visible effect is a tendency to the fragmentation, to the individualisation, to the selection, to the separation, to the monetisation of the social and environmental context.
The acceleration and the complexity of the phenomena make today difficult to build a personal orientation starting from experience, increasing the need of information and indications coming from the outside. This operation of framing complexity has been carried in time by linear language (such as narrations and myths), by systems of classification (mainly of taxonomical type), by visual representations (atlases, guides and maps), etc. 
These models of orientation have now become confined, limited and unable to build wide and shared visions. 
In this scenario, it becomes crucial to rethink disorientation as an experience that could be a source of renovation for new practices of orientation.
For the volume we have involved international artists, designers, theorists and critics, which have contributed with texts, images or visual essays in order to face the subject from specific point of views.  
The volume will be printed in 500 copies, both in Italian and English, and it will be co-published with Aiap Edizioni, publisher of AIAP, the Italian association for visual communication design.


What is Unità di crisi?

Unità di crisi is a research collective composed of designers and theorists in the field of visual communication.
The collective was born with the objective of developing a practical and theoretical discourse concerning the permanent crisis that, since decades by now, characterises modern societies, and the willing to highlight what it means to operate as a designer within this context.
With permanent crisis we indicate the situation of increasing instability that is typical of the contemporary world.
In the contemporary world, reference points that traditionally founded, supported and justified lifestyles, ideologies, institutions, hierarchies, have gradually crumbled, because of the speed with which changes in the technical-scientific, economic, social and cultural envioronment have occured.
In this "liquid modernity" the experience of the individual, as well as that of a more or less extensive community, is no longer given or based on a stable system of values or on a shared memory, instead it is continously wandering, continuously looking for new reference points.




Within this scenario, the role of the designer has become increasingly important, enough to say that the world we live in today is a world shaped by design: most of the things we do every day (work, move, eat, communicate, have fun) is in fact mediated by design.
Designers are those who in one way or another plan and shape things, both tangible and intangible ones, and thereby create new standards and value systems, they create new guidelines.
For this reason we are convinced of the importance that there is today of investing energy and resources in researching design. Investigating ways that determine relationships between people and between people and things; investigating the possibilities that modern systems of communication open to the people and those that are instead denied; imagining new communication approaches that give way to an idea of participatory and shared democracy; all of this goes through a research and critics of design and communication.

What does Unità di crisi do?

The research activities of Unità di crisi is made public and divulged (as well as on the web, through our website and social networks) through the publication of a non-periodic thematic volume, Krisis magazine. Each volume is dedicated to a subject related to the world of design, which today is in a critical position; around this specific emergency are thus collected documents and reflections.
Krisis magazine is designed in the form of the archive, or a folder that hosts contributions, specific projects, interviews and research. Each publication seeks to create a path and a discourse between heterogeneous and multiform elements in reference to the main topic of the publication, with the aim of building constellations of meaning, starting from a multitude of particular elements, and thus offering new perspectives and possibilities of interpretation.
In addition, each publication maintains a multidisciplinary approach, collecting contributions ranging from communication design to journalism, from art to photography, from architecture and spatial design to the transmission of culture, trying to reach an heterogeneous and diverse audience.
The first volume, Krisis | Identities, was published in October 2010. Subject of the book was the crisis of identity, or rather the crisis of representation models of identity, a vast and complicated subject that sees the participation, among others, of Experimental JetsetMetahavenWu MingEvert YpmaJonmar Van VlijmenYana MilevStewart HomeBrave New AlpsNicolò DegiorgisCollectif_factSosaku Myiazaki.
Krisis | Identities was self-published and partly self-funded. The volume has received excellent feedback both in the academic context and in that of contemporary art.


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