Chris Sutevski

Working Thesis Title: Second-order Speculative Diagrams for Counter Practices

Speculative and critical design practices have aimed to provide objects, methods and discursive strategies to move beyond the utility and market driven outputs of normative ‘creative’ disciplines. Critical art practices are also engaged in non-market interventions to move beyond the possibilities of capitalist constraints, impositions of labour and ways of reproducing daily life. Against the backdrop of the ‘polycrisis’, the so-called ‘closure of the future’ demands that creative practices re-orient themselves both in understanding their contributions to the problems and to forge an opening for speculating on how they might be otherwise.

This research engages a practice-led diagrammatic approach to find commonality between these various ‘systems practices’. By modelling and diagramming their processes, a ‘speculative diagrams’ method will look to propose their reorientation, potential bifurcations and limitations. It concerns the entanglements between epistemology, modelling and politics across different scales, and how the plastic topology of the diagram might operate as a meta-model. This work sets out to probe new ways of acting and knowing in relation to the artificial, to refuse what-is and attempt to develop new models of the possible.

Supervisors:
Associate Professor Geoff Hinchcliffe, Interim Pro Vice-Chancellor Learning & Teaching (chair and primary supervisor), School of Art & Design
Dr Pia van Gelder, Lecturer, School of Art & Design
Dr Ella Barclay, Senior Lecturer, School of Art & Design