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Research
Alex Liebergesell is a Professor with Pratt Institute's Graduate Communications and Packaging, Identities and Systems Design Department. Current design and academic research centers on issues of technology's impact on cultural identities and personal narrative, the formation of favored representations in history and their impact on perception of current events, morphologies of design practices and concepts, AI, autonomous machines and human behavior, and sound as communicative object.  SubductJapan traces the development and direction of modern Japan from the early 1960s and into the near future, using the 1964 Tokyo Summer Olympics and the upcoming Games in 2020 as historical benchmarks. Equal parts artistic exploration, social critique and personal remembrance, the research and design response draws on Arto Laitinen and Paul Ricoeur's concepts of narrative and identity formation, and Hiroki Azuma's post-modern analysis of Otaku culture. SubductJapan seeks to excavate the hidden fault lines and tensions in contemporary Japanese society that are often overlooked. The visual response invites audiences to ponder social and cultural dialectics through a unique, insider/outsider perspective.  Worldlager investigates the converging factors which allow particular locations and artifacts to become emblems for cataclysmic historical events, and the role that language, physical embodiment and narrative have on the reification of historical facts. Worldlager, through a multi-dimensional analysis of wartime prison camps, examines the ideological, social and economic forces that influence our understanding of history, and how they impact our perceptions and responses to contemporary events. As systems of coercion, control and punishment become more progressively hidden, language, symbols and gestures that favor mono-causal, one-dimensional explanations continue to limit our awareness and complicity.  Design Morph is an initiative to integrate taxonomical and typological classification concepts as part of a systematic design research and development methodology. The spatial-temporal distortion of our information era challenges the fundamental terms of design’s value, our notions of hierarchy and our relationships to knowledge and artifacts. Experimentations with classification schema — and the new representations that they can engender — help us construct new orders which reflect and communicate the values and ideologies of modern society. Through reimagined clusetrs, sequences, structures, stories and symbols, we can pose questions such as: what kinds of things exist and can exist in a future world? What relationships can those things have with each other? Classifications can aid us in assigning values, recovering points of differentiation, and organizing both functional and virtual spaces.  The chronicle of AI and robotics research over the last fifty years reveals some of the unique dilemmas inherent in complex human-computer interactions, and suggests a mode of engagement with automated systems for designers and engineers centered on communication, behavior, and interdisciplinary knowledge. In particular, designers’ various expertise in articulating tools, expressing meaning, and shaping user experiences present as essential ingredients for cultivating effective interactions between humans and machines. Moreover, by modeling inclusivity, dialogue, and positive social behaviors, designers can encourage people to recognize and safeguard human capacities for learning, reciprocity, civility, and labor as long-term advantages.  Because of its immanence, sound offers an opportunity for visual designers to dispense with their logocentric, visual orientation, while providing an object with powerful affective, communicative potential. When released from the visual regime, designers can experiment with pure experience and reaction, and gain new critical insights into their own methodologies and enhance their overall creative praxeology. The entry points are many. The field of sound studies span historical and contemporary scholarship on the phenomenology of sound, definitions of affect, attributes of music, and influence on artistic operations. This congregation populates a dynamic transdisciplinary space endowed with the capacity to readily absorb and metabolize scholarship in art and design: Thework of fine artists and designers, curators and critics, technology and media theorists are complementary and axiomatic.
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