ADS5 was founded and has been led by Dr Jon Goodbun since 2011. The studio took on the name DOT: Department of Ontological Theatre in 2012, and was joined by Dr Victoria Watson that year and Dr Benedict Singleton in 2014.
The studio’s work explores the tensions between the planetary and the personal, between geo-ecological politics and neuro-ecological aesthetics.
DOT POSTCAPITALIST POTENTIALS:
PLATFORMS, STRUCTURES AND SPACES
Global capitalism is haunted by a spectre, the spectre of post-scarcity society. All human society to date has been organised around an over-arching logic of scarcity – around the need to socially, economically and spatially manage the production and distribution of a surplus within the context of an overarching condition of ‘natural’ scarcity. That is to say, resources (money, goods, services etc) have always been limited and finite in their supply, whilst demand has been potentially infinite. But today we find ourselves in a deeply paradoxical condition. In order to perpetuate the social forms of contemporary society, it can be easily shown how contemporary ‘markets’ artificially create scarcities. This might be at a micro-level, where commodities of all kinds are designed to need replacing after an artificially short life, or at a systemic level, where the mis-managment of our ecological condition is objectively returning us to a context of absolute scarcity (in for example the collapse of fish stocks, or any number of other examples of ecological collapse). Yet as some of the more optimistic commentators have observed, we are today actually within reach of a post-scarcity condition, of – as at least one set of post-capitalist theorists hope – cyclical and managed resource flows combined with large sections of the industrial economy moving to near full automation.
Bubbling away within capitalism there have always been enclaves of other futures, short-lived spaces of radical imagination. Technology, science and the arts have always had a complex degree of at least partial autonomy from their economic conditions of existence. Indeed the technological development of industry, in particular when overlaid with the logic of the network as an organisational form mediating information technologies and communications, has reduced the need for human labour and work as traditionally understood. A post-scarcity society of abundant goods and services, managed by new forms of democratic and techno-ecological management which transcend old models of top-down planning or market driven emergence is a real near-future possibility, and would be based upon massively increased leisure time as the basis of new human social and aesthetic reality.
However, whilst capitalism has never existed in the pure abstract forms described those who saw its inner workings most clearly (as described in Marx’s Capital for example), but has rather always grown within specific historical and geographical realities which have shaped its uneven development, the pure abstract model does nonetheless describe a typological strange attractor of sorts. Similarly, it is inevitable that post-capitalist potential futures will unfold in a similarly uneven manner. Nonetheless, the articulation of the logical possibility of the kind of typological post-capitalist ideal (even if in no simple way achievable) condition briefly outlined above remains an important political task facing our age.
However, we are living through an historical moment that might take take many different routes into the future. In fact maximising, as far as it is possible to simulate and predict, the future possibility spaces available to us is itself an important political imperative. There is a strong structural tendency within the capitalist system of production to perpetuate and create scarcity and crisis, environmental destruction and social inequality, mental illness and cultural banality. It is inevitable that we are facing a future of resource wars, terrorism, mass migrations and both regional and, at least in part, systemic ecological collapse. As such post-capitalist potentials are co-evolving within a field occupied by other embryonic geopolitical forms already appearing within the collapsing order: the guns, dollars and drugs ‘post-misery’ doctrine of South American narcomarxist cartels, the engagement (if not yet the marriage) of liberalism with violent neoluddism, the fascist mutations of nazbol in Russia and Islamic State’s digital medievalism… In such a situation we need new means of making sense of things: new paradises and hells; new mythologies and archetypes to populate them; new tools, physical and cognitive; and new ways of understanding what architecture and urbanism can be and do in these scenarios.
DOT is a post-capitalist research lab. We take post-capitalism to refer to the conjunction of full automation with universal basic income in a generalised disappearance of obligations to work––and its implications (not least for design and architecture)
DOT researches and engages with realities, problems and opportunities that can be found within contemporary capitalist global economic order.
DOT researches the transformational effects that contemporary economic and technological developments have upon the human body and mind, perceptual faculties and imagination
DOT is oriented towards near futures that are very different to our recent pasts
DOT is researching potential transition routes and platforms of change which are open to a post-capitalist future
DOT believes that architecture and art schools are well placed to map, visualise and engage with the real inter-disciplinary complexities and abstractions of contemporary society.
We will organise the first semester around a seminar series designed to provide the studio with relevant conceptual equipment to tackle these questions, across contemporary politics, cybernetics, strategy, and aesthetics.
We will organise the first semester around a series of ‘workshops’, tasks, and scheduled research presentations, the most important of which are:
1. pick a contemporary material/technology and research it and its network of relations and flows.
2. pick a contemporary organisation and research it and its network of relations and flows.
3. pick a means of production and master it (learn new software, techniques etc etc)
rheomode 