Overview
The critical examination of dependence on technical systems has become an important challenge of the constantly digitising 21st century. These normative-technical systems are the results of contingent conditions and authorial decisions. Abstracting and defining is always an interpretative act that is influenced and guided by one's own cultural resources, situational discourses, morals and aesthetics and always involves intended and unintended decisions. However, the majority of designers — who are looking for the best solutions to specific, well-defined problems — and users do not perceive them as such; instead, they believe in technical rationality and objectivity.
In an equal interplay between written theory production and artistic creation, I ask myself how artistic practices open up levels of reflection on normative-technical design practices and how the ethical and moral dimensions of these practices can be negotiated. In a speculative act — in contrast to the search for the best solutions to specific, well-defined problems — I explore irritations in myself and the audience and try to reveal them and make them accessible. I pursue the goal of exploring the consequences and effects of supposedly neutral, normative-technical systems on the people who use them and the practices of their production and to find ways to address them as contingent and culturally situated by means of artistic and media-theoretical processes and to ask how an ethics of design could be constituted in times of digitalisation.
