Produktdetaljer
Biografisk notat
Tony Fry is Principal of The Studio at the Edge of the World, Tasmania, Adjunct Professor at the University of Tasmania, Australia and Visiting Professor at Universidad de Ibagué, Colombia. He is an award-winning designer, cultural theorist, educator and author. He has held academic positions in Australia and internationally and is the author of sixteen books, including Design Futuring (Bloomsbury, 2009); Design as Politics (Bloomsbury, 2011), Becoming Human By Design (Bloomsbury, 2012), Remaking Cities (Bloomsbury, 2017), Defuturing (Bloomsbury, 2020) and Writing Design Fiction (Bloomsbury, 2021).
Dulmini Perera is Lecturer and Researcher at Bauhaus University, Weimar, Germany. She works at the intersection of critical theory, design theory and systems/cybernetics research, and is the recipient of the Heinz von Foerster award (2021). She has written and edited a number of publications including the co-edited book The Space of Technicity (forthcoming, 2023) and the co-edited Footprint journal volume Engaging Cosmotechnical Difference in Architecture and Urbanism (forthcoming, 2024). She is a member of award-winning design and research teams in Sri Lanka and internationally.
Tony Fry’s latest book is nothing other than revolutionary: a call to reorientate all our knowledge and all our actions (even beliefs) to the sole task of futuring. Rather than letting the world's fate to be determined by the new nihilisms of extreme capitalism, anti-democratic politics, and climate denial, Fry proposes a concrete mission, enjoining us to engage, individually and collectively, in <i>Contrapractice</i>—actions that negate destructive practices and which instead release the potential to redirect action towards futuring. Is there a more important set of connected tasks today?
Matthew Holt, Applied Cybernetics Lead and Deputy Director, Australian National University, Australia
In their clear-eyed dialogue in <i>Contrapractice</i>, Fry and Perera construct a new theory of practice for our times of accelerating climate change, population unsettlement, techno-colonization, and geopolitical uncertainty. What is different from Fry’s previous works and cannot be missed is that ‘contrapractice’ needs a community. It’s a call for practitioners of all stripes to take a stand against defuturing in ways that can be started today, amid complex and compounding crises and against worsening conditions. In this sense, <i>Contrapractice</i> offers a new political imagination for a world irrevocably changed by the inhuman and nonhuman of human design.
Abby Melick Lopes, Professor of Social Design, University of Technology Sydney, Australia
Building on his foundational work on ‘defuturing,’ a deconstructive method that exposes historically the unsustainability of a great deal of design practice and its products, Tony Fry now offers a powerful response.
There is no shortage of analysis of the current state of the world. Climate change impacts are increasing, environmental destruction will follow, populations and settlements will be displaced, food security will become critical, geopolitical instability and escalating dangers of conflict will grow. Such an entangled complexity threatens life itself more seriously than at any time since the Ice Age. Against the real threats to life on Earth, what are the world’s political leaders doing? The answers sit between nothing and very little.
So, what is to be done? There is no immediate or simple answer. But what Contrapractice acknowledges is that nothing changes unless practices change. The intent is for the process to take on a life of its own by the many people who care about securing a viable future. It does not provide template solutions, but the ability to act. Every reader is viewed as a communicator of its message and a change agent of their own practice. Fry’s dialogue in the book with Dulmini Perera is a prompt for the book to be an object of discussion.
Preface
Acknowledgements
Opening Dialogue, Tony Fry and Dulmini Perera
Introduction: Defuturing, Practice, Contrapractice, Tony Fry
1. Defuturing Now, Tony Fry
2. On Practice, Tony Fry
3. Contrapractice in the End Times, Tony Fry
4. Reflections and Projections, Tony Fry
Closing Conversation, Tony Fry and Dulmini Perera
Appendices, Tony Fry
Appendix 1. On an elaboration on Bourdieu’s understanding of habitus
Appendix 2. Michel de Certeau and Practices of Everyday Life
Appendix 3. Peter Sloterdijk’s Theory of Practice
Appendix 4. Technology revealed and cybernetics stripped bare
Appendix 5. Degrowth/Regrowth
Glossary
References
Index
To contend with the scale and intractability of the multiple and interacting crises that are threatening to engulf us is to have to change how we think of both thought and acting. The separation of critical thought and technological and economic acting-in-the-world has eviscerated the ability to bring together theory and practice for anything other than merely instrumental.
At the same time, neither the human sciences—which historically have feared intervention—nor models of acting that eschew depth understanding can alone suffice to redirect disaster. One consequence of these failures is that they cause us to lose sight of other objective possibilities for the world. Envisioning the latter must be the real subject of thought and practice today.
Working at the intersections of designing-acting, the arts and cultural observation, politics-philosophy and the biological and technical-economic sciences, books in the Beyond the Modern series explore configurations of thought, material practices and politics that can potentially realize transformative possibilities in the world.
Recognizing that a key challenge of our time is to invent new alternatives to modernity that can effectively redress capitalism’s blind march toward greater social and natural disasters they focus on teasing out what is immanently possible within what-now-is. In so doing they help lay the groundwork for an ontological shift toward the commons, and for the new imagination(s), desires, capacities and forms of politics—the egalitarian configurations, at once material, collective and symbolic—necessary for beginning to control our own destiny.
Produktdetaljer
Biografisk notat
Tony Fry is Principal of The Studio at the Edge of the World, Tasmania, Adjunct Professor at the University of Tasmania, Australia and Visiting Professor at Universidad de Ibagué, Colombia. He is an award-winning designer, cultural theorist, educator and author. He has held academic positions in Australia and internationally and is the author of sixteen books, including Design Futuring (Bloomsbury, 2009); Design as Politics (Bloomsbury, 2011), Becoming Human By Design (Bloomsbury, 2012), Remaking Cities (Bloomsbury, 2017), Defuturing (Bloomsbury, 2020) and Writing Design Fiction (Bloomsbury, 2021).
Dulmini Perera is Lecturer and Researcher at Bauhaus University, Weimar, Germany. She works at the intersection of critical theory, design theory and systems/cybernetics research, and is the recipient of the Heinz von Foerster award (2021). She has written and edited a number of publications including the co-edited book The Space of Technicity (forthcoming, 2023) and the co-edited Footprint journal volume Engaging Cosmotechnical Difference in Architecture and Urbanism (forthcoming, 2024). She is a member of award-winning design and research teams in Sri Lanka and internationally.