CAMERON TONKINWISE

This article originally appeared in Design and Culture, Volume 1, Number 2, July 2009

“There seems to be only one cause behind all forms of social misery: bigness… Whenever something is wrong, something is too big.”

Leopold Kohr The Breakdown of Nations¹

Flip through any design magazine and you will see singular objects, usually at repose in a minimalist setting, or perhaps even in a disembodied hand with manicured fingers. In all cases, you will only see one object, or perhaps two or three to show color variations.

But this is not design. Design is the applied science of mass, the mechanical engineering of mass production and the social engineering of mass consumption. There is never just one of any design; this distinguishes design from craft. There is not, for instance, one iPhone; there are, or were, six million. Victor Papanek claimed that design is one of the most harmful professions, because design operates at unlicensed volume (Papanek 1971).²

Getting an accurate, or analogical, representation of phenomena is only one dimension of what scale entails. What is at stake in the world today is not just sheer quantity, but the rates and speeds of those quantities. Koyaanisqatsi is a rare display of these collective, and therefore undesigned, consequences design’s impact on human existence.

What makes Koyannisqatisi distinct is its focus on design. An abstract product life cycle is shown: from resource extraction (mining detonations) and processing (a foundry), through testing (military weaponry) and factory manufacturing (textiles), to use (shaking a dysfunctional lighter) and disposal (gutter litter after a fire). Glass curtain wall office buildings are contrasted with the 1972 demolition of the Pruitt-Igoe housing development, an event that Chris Jenks hailed as commencing post-modernity. Design is also apparent in the long sequence of a Boeing-747 taxiing, its flight-defying bulk foregrounded by the heat shimmer coming off the tarmac and the a capella choral accompaniment (Kostelanetz and Flemming 1997: 138).³

Three techniques within the film go toward manifesting the scale that is inherent to designing as a, or at the, whole: the minimalist score, the sped-up time-lapse, and the aerial shot.

Koyannisqatsi’s score alerts us to the quanta differences involved in our experience of mass produced society. Philip Glass’ music is famously repetitive in its overall effect, yet there is much change in time signature and additive melodies. His music comprises fast moving instrumentation, but offers slow moving blocks of sound. Like the music, the sameness that is inherent to design-as-mass-production is not apparent at the more detailed levels of individual households, where interactions with designed products seem unique and changing.

This inability to see the whole because we are within it⁴ is apparent in Reggio’s use of slow and fast motion. Where the slowed sequences allow phenomena to be isolated from their processes,⁵ the sped-up sequences allow us to see processes themselves: flows of vehicles like blood through a city or blockages of commuters at the funnels of escalators . None of these aspects of the ‘much-ness’ our designed societies can be seen without these particular filmic techniques.

The same goes for the film’s numerous fly-overs. The pans through and over cities in Koyaanisqatsi, however, disclose the problematic nature of urban lives. The shots are never of static built forms, like the mausoleums that are architectural models, but of dynamic, diurnal cities, a mess of millions of more-or-less co-ordinated human-object interactions.

With these techniques, Koyannisqatsi reveals the larger, faster ‘mass’ aspect of design that we otherwise miss. It is merely gesturing at its existence and impact, and suggesting our failure to heed such a phenomenon.

Heidegger called this ‘the shadow of the gigantic.’⁶ What can be glimpsed cinematically and musically in Koyannisqatsi, is not overall order, or even orderability, but overall-ness, what could be called globalization – the totalization of existence into a disavowed sameness.⁷ The film does not decry this postmodern mass society that is the spectacular consequence of modernist designing: it merely exposes this world-picture as a picture, an overwhelming mis-seeing of the amassed ways of the world. It is therefore not a call for revolution, as if some other truth of the whole can now be discerned; but instead, an acknowledgement that this is the world in which we exist, one in which we must find a sustainable existence, a way to flourish within its sheer materiality, by designs, plural.⁸

Author’s Bio:

Cameron Tonkinwise is the Chair of Design Thinking and Sustainability at the School of Design Strategies, Parsons New School for Design. He is also Co-Chair of the Tishman Environment and Design Center at the New School. Before this Cameron was executive officer of ‘Change Design,’ formerly known as the EcoDesign Foundation, based in Sydney Australia. Cameron’s current research focus is design-enabled product sharing.

Notes:

1. Kohr, a teacher of E.F.Schumacher (Small is Beautiful), is one of several thinkers critical of large-scale technology cited in the credits as conceptual influences on Koyaanisqatsi – the others being, Guy Debord, Jacques Ellul, Ivan Illich, Lewis Mumfurd and David Monongye, a Hopi spokesperson.
2. See the first page of Design for the Real World, New York: Palladia (1971).
3. Glass draws attention to this aspect of his scoring in an interview Charles Berg (Kostelanetz and Flemming 1997: 138).
4. See Reggio’s comments in a short film accompanying the MGM DVD release of Koyannisqatsi entitled The Essence of Life directed by Greg Carson, 2002: “What I’m trying to show is that the main event today is not seen by those of us that are living it… So it’s not the effect of [technology], it is that everything exists with-in [its milieu]. It’s not that we use technology, we live technology. Technology has become as ubiquitous as the air we breathe, so we are no longer conscious of its presence.” Transcript courtesy of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godfrey_Reggio [accessed Sep.12, 2008].
5. “The function of film is to train human beings in the apperceptions and reactions needed to deal with a vast apparatus whose role in their lives is expanding almost daily.” (Jennings ed. 2002: 108).
6. Heidegger’s famous but cryptic 1936 speech “The Age of the World Picture” concludes with a discussion of the giganticism of modern ways of being, an accelerating encompassing machination of all aspects of the world and our lives that appears so total as to remove the existence of any alternatives – except for that recognition itself, that there are almost no alternatives left. That peripheral sense of disappearing possibility is characterized by Heidegger as a remnant shadow in an all-pervading light: “But as soon as the gigantic in planning and calculating and adjusting and making secure shifts over out of the quantitative and becomes a special quality, then what is gigantic, and what can seemingly always be calculated completely, becomes, precisely through this, incalculable.  This becoming incalculable remains the invisible shadow that is cast around all things everywhere when man has been transformed into subiectum and the world into picture.” (Young and Haynes 2002: 71).
7. I am trying to allude here to a distinction that has motivated Jean-Luc Nancy’s recent thinking in The Creation of the World, or Globalization: “Thus there has been in the English globalization the idea of an integrated totality, appearing for example with the ‘global village’ of McLuhan, while [the French] mondialisation would rather evoke an expanding process throughout the expanse of the world of human beings, cultures and nations… the word mondialisation, by keeping the horizon of a ‘world’ as a space of possible meaning for the whole of human relations (or as a space of possible significance) gives a different indication than that of an enclosure in the undifferentiated sphere of a unitotality… This also means that it is understandable that mondialisation preserves something untranslatable while globalization has already translated everything in a global idiom.” (Nancy 2007: 28).
8. These are further references to the thinking of Jean-Luc Nancy: The Sense of the World, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998; and Being Singular Plural, Standford, Stanford University Press, 2000.

References:

Jennings, Michael, ed. 2002. “The Work of Art in the Age of its Reproducibility (Second 1935/6 Version).” Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings – Volume 3, 1935-38. Cambridge: Belknap.

Kostelanetz, Richard and Robert Flemming. 1997. Writings on Glass: Essays, Interviews, Criticism. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Nancy, Jean-Luc. 2000. Being Singular Plural. Standford: Stanford University Press.

Nancy, Jean-Luc. 2007. The Creation of the World, or Globalization. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Nancy, Jean-Luc. 1998. The Sense of the World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Papanek, Victor J. 1971. Design for the real world, human ecology and social change. New York, Pantheon Books.

Young, Julian and Kenneth Haynes, ed. and translation. 2002. Off the Beaten Track. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.