Postindustrial Art

I read a really interesting article in the December I.D., which you can probably still pick up if you hurry to your more lethargic neighborhood newsstand. The article was called "A Manifesto for Postindustrial Design," written by Jamer Hunt. Here are some memorable quotes:

"Industrial culture needs to be obsolete not because it is evil, immoral, profligate, toxic, or gluttonous (though it is many of those things), but because it no longer reflects the facts on the ground."

Hunt argues that as opposed to the singular "one-size-fits-all" readymade produced by the modern industrial machine, the "product" of future design will be "a code and a set of parameters" that allows for infinite variety.

Hunt recognizes four loosely connected aspects of postindustrial design:

Formless: "Products will shape-shift internally to the point that we can only celebrate the system of their creation, not the thing itself... Design will evolve from a process of turning natural resources into static shapes into one of distributing codes to be constantly rematerialized."

Free: "Software, soft tooling, robotic manufacturing, and smart databases will draw participation and variation into the old, clandestine fabrication process... Animated by the intelligence of thriving networks of collaborative possibility, designs will also get optimized in the infinitely iterative process of their distributed creation."

Metabolic: "Design and production that are sentient, aware, adaptive, and able to live off their own or others' waste will not only be powerfully efficient, they will be environmentally, culturally, and fiscally sustainable."

Decentralized: "...imagine the possibility of creating design solutions appropriate to you or your family neighborhood, or tribe... new kinds of products, companies, and brands—labile, fluid, and protean—will challenge the hegemony of the global superbrands."


Hunt's thesis, if a bit optimistic, is energizing and exciting to the 21st century designer, and, I'd argue, artist. Though Hunt fails to include fine art with the areas of societal endeavor he sees to already incorporate the methods and ideology of postindustrial design ("fashion, architecture, engineering, software, the Web"), there are obvious parallels between his manifesto and some of the art theoretical and cultural developments that have taken place over the last 40 years. Hunt's dematerialization of the product into sets of "codes" and "parameters" reiterates Sol LeWitt's wall drawings—artworks comprised of a set of directions written on a piece of paper. Maybe postindustrial art will bring 60's conceptualism full circle: after Lucy Lippard's "dematerialization of the art object" comes Hunt's process of generating "rematerialized" product from the ever-adapting, democratically available source code he sees to supplant industry in the not entirely too distant future.

I'm not sure where exactly, if anywhere, this will lead today's fine artist. The fact is that in Hunt's future world, the line separating artmaking from product design itself dematerializes; "fine art," meaning non-utile, non-practical, non-industrial art, becomes an obsolete term. It's a little utopian, but maybe not inconceivable. The close similarities that Hunt's idea of "decentralization" bears with the decades-old indie/DIY aesthetic suggests a good starting point for determining the artist/designer's role in postindustrial society.