Beyond Hybridity

It took several decades for people to realize the impact that the industrial revolution had on art and design. The absorption was too heavy, and speed slowly erased the time to stop; to realize, to consider. Machinery took place, with automatization promoting passiveness. This same passiveness rapidly generated alienation, elevating temporariness to a permanent state. As result, it was possible to see, only decades after, that the temporary delays the now and ultimately, tomorrow. Today, yet again – almost like a Plato’s Allegory of the cave – people are failing to question the implication of a new revolution in progress: the hybridity revolution.

Presently, in art and design, everything is trendily about merging, simultaneity and joining forces: welcome to the beginning of the 21st century.
Having as true that the designer should always be flexible and eclectic, the reality presented to us is totally different. Design is subversively divided into total blurriness or absolutely obsessive specialization. In the middle, we find the quest to “be” these two at the same time.
Nevertheless, it is possible to circumscribe some rules: multiplication of skills, of knowledge, division of tasks, sum of areas of expertise and a gigantic subtraction of time and space. This is a reality in which the distance between individuality and collectivity is very short, provoking a lack of identity, a crusade for an answer to a question that emerges in front of us: is the designer evolving to a neo-renaissance-man?

Looking back, it’s easy to remember the rise of this era, where not too many years ago, art galleries started to push architects to be painters, painters to be designers and designers to be something else – often having curators (and educators) as puppeteers. It was (and is?) hip, an alternative way of being, well accepted and new. Long gone are the days when designers massively challenged not only the audience but also other designers, and the same is valid for all the other artistic categorizations. Passiveness and the self (disguised under “co-operativeness”) have now a comfortable throne. The blogosphere is the remaining floating mote.

By making the artist and the designer an amphibian-chameleon practitioner, there are no categories, no classifications. Curiously (many times almost comically), the opposite is also true, as every second opens a window for a new denomination. Implosion. What remains, is a foggy cloud without identity, pushing designers (and by consequence, the audience) into an incessant ride of instantaneity, of searching for a guideline, delivering shallow ephemeral manifestos at the speed of light.

Multiplicity, hyper-diversity, confusion, diffusion and an in extremis way of inhabiting time, have been pushing the boundaries of specialization within the practice, range of attributes, of elasticity in the approach. This vast field is mined and the social, political and the cultural walk holding hands, day by day, every hour, each second, with strong wind on their back. This wind whispers, this wind pushes and pulls, rushes, this wind takes the artist and designer to an unstoppable journey, to everywhere, to everything.

If it’s true that all the soldiers of time mentioned above, along with economics, science and art haven’t been so intimately connected, it is also undeniable that they have never been so dependent and alone at the same time. Walk, run, fast, faster!
Multi it’s such a mandatory prefix before every word, as the spheres that embrace each discipline have been growing exponentially almost every year. And that generates and inflates the idea that now is never enough. Graphic arts, graphic design, visual arts, communication design, communication art and design, multi-something, inter-media art. The designer as an all-department-person (renaissance-man). The present as the future and not as a beginning of it.

The question of identity and connection is more than ever a continuous road for the designer to walk. The frontiers have disappeared a long time ago and the sense of belonging is now not even something pursuable. Tradition has become absurdly repulsive, something not up for consideration. There are far more forces urging for stepping into tomorrow than learning from yesterday.
This living on the verge of something else, on the edge of tomorrow creates an ambiguity that causes a delicate sensation of discomfort. Easily, everything is a burden, irritating, too long. That is why hybridity is such a common answer. It is an escape at the same time it is an undeniably good (and only?) solution. A solution to a problem, the problem of today. Today is tomorrow. This is where it all shifts, turns and implodes. This is where now is not today anymore.

Let’s rewind. Since the 90’s, we live in a time where everything has to be sold, communicated and produced in a “pack”, a bag full of everything – the more, the better (or the more, the more). Industry holds hands with culture on the battle to augment and fill what they have to offer with as many diversity as possible, almost like a “3 in 1″ (or everything in one) kind of bundle. The crucial reality is that this new space-time frame surrounds people in a suffocating way, naturally catching art and design on an unbearable gluey net. Everything is a train ride without time or space between the stops; everything is hyper-stops, everything is fast or slow, everything is contradicting. Blurring matter and data, synonyms with antonyms, blurring the you, me and us, this continuous journey dislocates design from the moment, from now, or today. A new paradigm regarding proximity and temporality is emerging, dictating indeed a new geographical distance and positioning for design.

The designer always had to be absorbent in the sense of having to know a bit of everything in order to interpret, translate and communicate in response to an initial impulse or urge. Now, the borders of specialization are incredibly impossible to maintain, both as a student and as a practitioner. Three-dimensional projects merge with film, that asks for a presentation, which has to have a poster to relate to a website. This last one is born of a book, which refers to an animation about a building. These are questions which art and design push the designer to answer, more than ever in a solitary scenario. Pluralism is the only ism that still lives in very windy corridors that separate departments, areas and fields within design. At the same time, this pluralism generates a great amount of solitude when this very same denomination is constrained to a single person. Are we evolving into the old saying of “knowing a bit of everything, being good at nothing”? Do art and design colleges educate their students in this direction? Are they hybridizing designers? Is it possible, when increasingly there’s no direction? Do students require teaching from a wide range of specialists or a good quantity of hybrid educators? The attempt to make design a discipline without labels is a label of its own already. Stop.

Everyone is reborn and inflated/ deflated, both sociologically, culturally or even religiously, everyone is either crossed or quasi-crossed. The culture of improvisation is the ethos of the contemporary designer; instantaneity is at the same distance for the emitter and for the receiver. And in the air, the fear of being associated with something, of being put inside of a “basket”, alongside with the mind-distracting incapability of mapping ourselves: geographically and psychologically. This brings us back to the loss of sense of belonging as a result of this revolution.

All of this inquietude is provoked by the ambiguity of what surrounds us. Information, communication and publicity melt into landscape and the celebration of a “no more rules” state in art and design generates disorientation.
The implosion mentioned above refers to the fact that misunderstanding leads to individual questioning and ultimately to a generalized sense of going nowhere; everyone, at the same time. Inevitably, the human brain requires categories, organization and “patterns” so it can make relations and correlations. What is truly happening is contre-nature, it’s a dive into a tendency ruled by a technological-economical dictatorship. With fluxes of time, the implosion will soon transform itself into explosion and probably hyper-specialization will take place.

Velocity and a condensed world, where identity is lost, can create a stage where only contrasts can happen, full or empty, black or white, run or fall. Can we still have the luxury to stop and sit?
The answer is no, we can just discover other ways of running, of bending time, of condensing information and thus generating a different (better?) paradigm in art and design.
This contrasted world is also a paradoxical one: the more the artist and designer hybridize, the more the audience is specialized, in what they request, refining this particularity exponentially. In this sense, the loss of identity can be easily explainable: the more the audience focuses on singularity, the more the designer has to multiply himself.
This contrasted world urges the providers and mediators to bend, to stretch and the user to accommodate, to be in a more vegetative state. More and more, more is more.
Again, at the same time, this contrasted world makes the designers slow down due to so many constraints and conditioning, turning the audience into a chameleon puppet, ultra-absorbent, having to adapt, every second, to a reality which is impossible to grasp. There is talk, there are words, we hear screams, we hear whispering, but there is no communication.

Everything flows – melodiously – to an inevitable creation of ephemeral manifestos. And these are the pseudo-manifestos attempting to build tomorrow, as a game, a contest, a rule, a race against speed, with time being the endless field and space personified by the audience.
On this rush, on this territory, everything belongs to everything, everyone, everywhere; belonging is a word out of the dictionary, it’s repulsive, a taboo.
What truly remains – right in front of us and at this very moment – is that this word that is being erased is a natural and fundamental rosebud to every designer, to every Human Being.

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References
DeLanda, Manuel, A New Philosophy of Society – Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity, Continuum, London, 2006
Emigre No. 67, Graphic Design vs. style, globalism, criticism, science, authenticity and humanism, Émigré/ Princeton Architectural Press, New York, 2004
Kern, Stephen, The Culture of Time and Space, Harvard University, 2003
Virilio, Paul, La Vitesse de libération (tr. eng. Open Sky), Verso, London, 1997
Zellner, Peter, Hybrid Space – New forms in digital architecture, Thames & Hudson, London, 1999