Disillusion and Re-enchantment

Ho Mag nvites you to respond to Morton’s article through your practice, research, and situated experience to unfold–challenging dominant imaginaries through decolonial and non-dual approaches. HO_mag is a transdisciplinary platform of deconstructed realities, a space of exchange to weave together practices, and perspectives grounded in situated knowledges, new contaminations and ways to navigate the complexities of our time.

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Since chaos is inevitable, design should not be understood as the conscious and intuitive effort to impose meaningful order (Papanek). Instead, it calls for an ability to dwell within chaos, embracing uncertainty while resisting the slide from disillusionment into resentment. Articulating a new poetics of design practice, not only necessary but urgent.

One way to look at design is by the capacity of its action, that is, the order it imposes. But design is also, more simply and fundamentally, yogurt and onions – what we are left with, the mess we’re in.

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Re-enchantment is framed as a collective and political response to the dominance of control, prediction, and technocratic rationality. If algorithms are the basis for the functioning of the digital machines that crowd our planet alongside us – the esoteric algorithm operates in a contradictory manner: it is rooted in non-Western knowledge and “non-exact” sciences, it operates in a non-neutral way and perpetuates classification systems that have produced exclusion, hierarchy and epistemic violence on the part of the ruling elites.

On other occasions, it revives the counter-hegemonic charge of the witchcraft traditions of the subaltern and the bottom-up agency of otherness. Esoteric algorithms are a way to understand contemporary technologies as opaque systems shaped by power, not neutrality. In the exhibition Esoteric Algorithms and Re-Enchanted Technologies curated by Arianna Forte and Noemi Garey, artistic practices are tools to re-enchant technology and restore imagination, agency, and uncertainty

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