Bauspiel: ein Schiff by Alma Siedhoff-Buscher is one of the most important toys of the twentieth century, designed and built in 1923 when the designer was part of the Bauhaus Woodcarving Workshop. Having become an icon of an entire era, a symbol of a design utopia, Siedhoff-Buscher’s Bauspiel remains an object that makes us wonder not only for the fascination it emanates, its perennial aesthetic relevance that still legitimates its production and marketing up until nowadays, but for the strength of (...) its evidencing and its ability to force us questioning ourselves about who a child is, and therefore, obviously about who the man is. Mimesis, game, toy thus become the dimensions that Bauspiel manifests to the highest degree, in which anthropological questioning and aesthetic analysis are intertwined in the same research. (shrink)

The evolution of Interaction Design could be read as a radicalization of the dogma of modern functionalism, Less is More, and a "rediscovery" of certain theories of Minimal Art. This radicalization is reflected in the same evolution that has taken place since the early Nineties within the Human-Computer Interaction, with the gradual replacement of User Experience as a major category of interaction design. Designing the interactive experience becomes more important than Usability. But if the experience becomes the specific object of (...) design, the materiality of the object, its shell, loses its importance. The evolution of design, through the spread of computing, leads to a pervasive dematerialization of everyday objects. (shrink)

Computing has become ubiquitous and organic. The “new” human ecosystem is increasingly composed of "intelligent" objects. Since the Nineties there has been a constant application of the practice of disappearance of everyday objects. The daily experience changes, since the objects we use, in their disappearance and imperceptibility, do not divide us from the Life-World. At the same time, the designer is called to rewrite and amplify human experience, and design reflects a different conception of the aesthetic, which must be intended (...) not only as a theory of the artistic and/or cosmetic beauty, but mainly as a science of the experience as such. The designer is no longer limited to designing objects, but he can also design human beings. (shrink)

One of the most enigmatic and inevitably most suggestive words that Hölderlin’s philosophical work delivers to us is the neologism introduced in the summer of 1799: aorgisch, aorgic. A principle that is both ontological and mimetic, the aorgic undoubtedly represents the presence of the sublime in Hölderlin, albeit concealed terminologically, but also a particular declination that makes it not always easy to assimilate to the theories of the eighteenth-century and romantic sublime. This paper attempts to probe the role played by (...) the aorgic in the configuration of an aesthetics of the tragic by considering two precise moments: the writing, Grund zum Empedokles, which seeks to give speculative legitimacy to the unfinished tragedy on Empedocles, and the notes that accompanied the translations of Sophocles that Hölderlin published in 1804. Interpreted as the dimension of the formless, but also of the possible, the aorgic is necessarily thought by Hölderlin always next to its opposite pole, the organic, that is the dimension of the human in the broad sense (art, culture, history). The relationship between these two poles is not only dialectical, along the lines of Fichte’s Wechselwirkung, but also analogical, recovering that relationship between physis and techne that Aristotle had already indicated in the second book of Physics. The aorgic therefore represents the necessary alienation to which nature is subjected in order to become culture (or art), a passage that, from the point of view of traditional aesthetic categories, could be read as the transition from the (natural) unrepresentability of the sublime to the (cultural) configuration of the beautiful: from chaos to form. (shrink)

The word «fake» and its several synonyms touch on a number of ontological and mimetic issues that since Plato have led directly to contemporary debates. In the present survey we will try to outline a «grammar of fake» through three points: a) the issue of pseudos in Plato and its impact on contemporaneity; b) the notion of hyperreality as absolute fake; c) the dimension of operative fake, grasped in its postmodern enucleation.

The essay has the aim to analyze the brief history of applied aesthetics from the arts and crafts theories to the everyday aestheticization of postmodernism: the key role of form and function, the problem of ornament, the social implications of commodities, the object value system, objects as simulacra. Is it possible to go beyond these categories? Are they conceptual or just historical categories?

The Onion is a 1995 video performance by Marina Abramović. The essay aims at analyzing some central themes of the artist’s path, taking this work as reference text. First of all, by including the artist in the process of dissolution of beauty marking the art of the Twentieth century and regarding performance art as one of the outcomes of this process inaugurated by the avant-gardes. Secondly, by showing the link between the political dimension and an existential reflection focused on the (...) role of the artist and the woman in the contemporary world. (shrink)

Kitsch e neokitsch -- Kitsch antropologico -- Forma, bellezza e godimento nel Kitsch -- Problemi di gusto -- La casa di Ivan Il'ič -- Disgustosamente moderni -- Mangiando una cipolla.

Starting from three works by Ugo Nespolo dedicated to pop and maintaining Warhol as a reference figure, this essay seeks to outline some crucial points of pop aesthetics: the idea of an artificial and constructible aesthetic and the consequent marginalization of nature; the construction of the pop beauty as phenomenology of iconic expendability; the network of media images as the final result of the dialectic between art and industry.

Since the late Eighties, technological change and transition from analog to digital, led to a challenging of the classical categories of modernist design. With the development of Human Computer Interaction and its impact on theories of Functionalist Design, it has begun a process of interrogation – initially in a cognitive sense and then in the more properly aesthetic sense – which, through theories and practices increasingly dependent on computerization , brings modernist theories about functionality to shift their interest on Usability (...) and, then, from Usability to User Experience. (shrink)

El kitsch no es solo una categoría que ha definido una de las posibles gramáticas estéticas de la modernidad, sino también una dimensión antropológica que ha tenido diferentes configuraciones en el curso de los procesos históricos. El ensayo ofrece una mirada histórico-crítica sobre las transformaciones que condujeron desde el kitsch de principios del siglo XX hasta el neokitsch contemporáneo: desde la génesis del kitsch hasta su afirmación como una de las manifestaciones más tangibles de la cultura de masas. Integrándose con (...) la estética posmoderna, el kitsch se transforma en neokitsch, una estética que utiliza el kitsch como su propia sintaxis en el complejo escenario de la estética contemporánea. /// -/- Kitsch is not just a category that has defined one of the possible aesthetic grammars of modernity, but also an anthropological dimension that has had different configurations in the course of historical processes. The essay offers a historical-critical look at the transformations that led from the early twentieth century kitsch to the contemporary neokitsch: from the genesis of kitsch to its affirmation as one of the most tangible manifestations of mass culture. Integrating with postmodern aesthetics, kitsch turns into neokitsch, an aesthetic that deliberately uses kitsch as its own syntax in the complex scenario of contemporary aesthetics. (shrink)