Welcome to my Thread Talk - 19 November 2021
WELCOME TO MY THREAD TALK
SILVIO LORUSSO ON DESIGN & DISILLUSION
FRIDAY NOVEMBER 19 2021 @ 5PM GMT / 6PM CET / 8PM MSK / 9AM PST / 12PM EST
NEW DESIGN CONGRESS is thrilled to invite you to Welcome to my Thread Talk, a free livestreamed discussion with SILVIO LORUSSO. Following his 2019 book Entreprecariat: Everyone is an Entrepreneur, Nobody is Safe, Lorusso has maintained a consistent string of discourse on design's exploitation and the disillusionment of creative culture in the face of it's rapidly revealing powerlessness and lock-step servitude to capital.
It sometimes seems that no other field has attempted to justify its existence and practices as hard as the design industry. Yet, the creative disciplines have never truly grappled with either their material limitations nor their nature as conduits for exploitative and extractive structures. These oversights allow designer thought leaders, theorists and hacks to endlessly theorize at the expense of students and workers who experience a fatigue born of the friction between the discursive and the everyday grind.
In conversation with New Design Congress' Benjamin Royer and Cade Diehm, writer, artist and designer Silvio Lorusso mulls over his infamous long-form Twitter thread, between theorisation, shitposting and bons mots, through which we might yet escape design and its disillusions.
About Silvio Lorusso
Silvio Lorusso is a writer, artist and designer based in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. His work focuses on the cultures and rhetorical regimes embedded in techno-social systems. His practice combines various media such as video, website, artist’s book, installation and lecture. This activity is further stimulated by writing essays, curating exhibitions and organizing public programs. In 2018 he published his first book entitled Entreprecariat (Onomatopee, English; Krisis, Italian).
Lorusso is currently an assistant professor and vice-director of the Centre for Other Worlds at the Lusófona University in Lisbon, a creative coding tutor at the Royal Academy of Art in Den Haag and a lecturer at the Design Department of the Sandberg Institute. He is a member of Varia, the Center for Everyday Technology, as well as part of the editorial board of Italian graphic design magazine Progetto Grafico. His work has been presented at, among other venues, MaXXI, Rome; Transmediale, Berlin; The Photographers’ Gallery, London; Kunsthalle Wien. His writing has appeared in several magazines and publications, including Volume, Real Life Magazine, Not, and Modes of Criticism.