SYNTHESIS
Final Installment of HY/SY/SYN Exhibition
Stills captured from the film, HY/SY/SYN: The Graphic Designer is a 21st Century Architect
(voiceover)
Until finally we achieve synthesis, a total union between independent forms, the complete fusion resulting in an entirely new form, where the origins are assumed no longer recognizable. A posthuman is a hypothetical future being whose capabilities so radically exceed those of present humans as to no longer be human by current standards, it has achieved a complete synthesis between its original human self and its technology. These imagined individuals have undergone a total transformation on a physical, mental and spiritual level. Although there are no public accounts of living posthumans, all of the arts have imagined in hundreds of ways and forms who they are and what they look like from David Bowie's Ziggy Stardust to Chris Cunningham's love-making cyborgs, to Matthew Barney's Character of Positive Restraint to The Pregnant Man. Comparatively, for graphic design to realize the postdesign state, Graphitecture, it must imagine how it can synthesize completely with architecture so that the new forms’ capabilities so radically exceed those of present graphic design and architecture as to no longer be either of which by current standards.
Just as technology is a kind of software applied to the human body to enhance its form and function, graphic design is a software that is applied to architectural bodies for the same purposes. As a vehicle for many things, graphic design preoccupies itself with the business of conversations. Its a medium in the habit of the illustration of ideas, making social commentaries here, defining styles there. Graphitecture will offer a kind of graphic design practice that participates in the construct of the social spaces it earlier only illustrated, commented or lived on. Elevating graphic design to an architectural role will yield new understandings of space and time the way that elevating the human to a streamlined processor has richly yielded new understandings of ourselves.
