mahr'svierteljahrsschriftfürästhetik
10 (2007), Nr.3/September
Miszelle
Plasmic design. 2910 Zeichen.
Morphogenesis, modulation and dissimulation – all this is plasma as the
ancient Greek meant it: something
artificial, art in the sense of materializing. For physics today, plasma is the
forth state of matter besides the solid, the fluid, the
gaseous, a state when electrons have become detached
from the atomic kernel, the phenomenon applied technologically to plasma screen display
and visualized in the plasma effect of constantly moving forms on computer screens. Hence plastic, not only
in the sense of the art of Plastik
– formerly the complement of sculpture in the strict sense
in German language – , but
in the sense of 1950es
material as well (Barthes) is now
superseded by plasma and the plasmic. A material state beyond being fluid
and gaseous and at once
transparent like air and yet solid if wanted,
plasma represents permanently being shaped into any
form imaginable. Plasmic thought, this is
design today. In the most comprehensive
sense it takes over what
used to be the domain of the
spatial/visual art of architectural design. Design a building, a plate, a needle! The primary
approach will be glass or any
other of the new materials that
have become fully perspicuous. To be sure, in order to reinforce the construction
finally wanted, you need metal and, for the floor,
some concrete. That’s it. Like the new Berlin central railway station, artistic design has dissolved into the material proper. Vanished has the architect who audaciously
responded to urban challenges
in earlier modernist times as there are no singular architects, sculptors or product designers
anymore. Nowadays glass formations adapt to any situation.
Varying in degrees of transparency they testify to a frozen design-in-actu. The process of plasmic glassy design has become a symbol for an anything goes. Words, numbers, ornaments, surface forms cast, colours
in any depth, you name it. All of them are expressed,
realized and carried by that glass.
The plasma is not so much
akin to water as to fire, as a match inflamed as filmed in by Yoko Ono with a high speed camera and rendered in slow motion. It suggests
a zone of fire that so beautifully occupies a space shown against the
dark ground with sharp borders
not unlike those of a balloon inflated with water
or those of lava lamp bubbles.
Unlike the “design” of inconstant forms as sustained by air or
water, today’s design is digitally
automatic too. Nowadays, large scale glass production companies do it all by themselves. They promise to deliver the whole
thing tomorrow or, even better,
today. Plasma however determines this production in a way that could be scarcely
less aesthetic. What originated from the plasmic
forms of art nouveau and expressionist
architecture has now become boring, meaningless, anti-social and totalitarian. Is this another consequence
of the crisis of foundations by solid givens as deplored twenty years ago?
Is a morphogenetic figural plasma and the corresponding aesthetic susceptibility for the given now
forced to anaesthetically resist the techno-scientific
appropriation of time-space?
It might well be that plasmic
aisthesis, the utmost possibility of purest reflective judgement, opens up to a re-treat into a faculty of synthesizing without laws, as was once the utopian
point of reference beyond the rationality of knowledge and action.
© Peter Mahr 2007
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