Space design in the context of New Unified Culture:
The activity of Neue Slowenische Kunst
Postgraduate Diploma Thesis
Abstract
The research paper has to do with the search of design tools concerning the modern form of space. The hybrid form of the modern city consists of real space, or what we would recognize as material field, and media space, or what would be created by the complex architecture of informational networks. The instant communication between the two spaces, that compose the subject’s environment, lead him/her to face an information stream organised in a network that expands through all dimensions, with time being the key growth factor. Due to this, experiencing space becomes a constantly mutative process and takes shape from a series of images accompanied by a set meaning, while the subject’s identity is split between two spaces and is multiplied through the digital versions of himself. The fragmented identity leads to annihilation, which means the loss of one’s identity. The constant movement between these two spaces delivers cultural qualities to all the procedures concerning interpretation, signification and intervention in space, since it’s an integral part of modern lifestyle. The total disengagement from territoriality and the simultaneity of events leads us to a New Unified Culture, which acquires features of a form of undeniable power. In the features that form the New Unified Culture we can trace strong elements of religiousness, that can be generalized, using the tool of metaphor, in an authoritarian doctrine. Being faced with the weakness of processing an intervening that is caused by the accelerating ambiguity of the space’s development, we use a simulacrum of New Unified Culture in order to draw design tools. This becomes possible through the analysis of the artistic collective Neue Slowenische Kunst, as the total reenactment of an authoritarian regime.
