Mediumdesign – Keller Easterling

In Medium Design everyone is a designer. But the approach inverts the typical focus on object over field to work on the medium—the matrix space between objects, events and ideological declarations. And it disrupts some habitual modern approaches to the world’s intractable dilemmas—a spectrum of dangers from capitalism, racism, whiteness, fascism, and xenophobia. From this perspective, solutions are mistakes and ideologies are unreliable markers. Rather than the modern desire for the new, there may be more sophistication in relationships between emergent and incumbent technologies. Encouraging entanglement, medium design does not try to eliminate problems but rather put them together in productive combinations. Rehearsing alternative approaches, case studies consider alternative land-holding organs, reverse-engineering sprawl, technological interdependencies in transportation, and political diasporas with capacities for planetary solidarity. Throughout, spatial tools for innovation and global decision-making are given as much authority as culture’s anointed digital, legal, and econometric assessments. Special interludes puzzle over the additional activist techniques needed to outwit bullet-proof political superbugs. The activist espousing singular evils and singular solutions is an easy target for these powers. The activist maintaining a less predictable but no less resolute dissensus can keep power disoriented. They can begin immediately to deploy the most productive aspects of culture—the live community economies that do not respond to homo economicus—to overwhelm capital with spatial and dispositional forms of direct action.