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Lorna Mills and Sally McKay
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You never saw so much hemming and hawing as me trying to decide whether or not to go see the big Bruce Mau induced design show at the Art Gallery of Ontario, MASSIVE CHANGE. The huge lettering on the outside of the building finally wooed me with their promise of spectacle. Paying the fee to get in proved to be an interesting mistake (the website is comprehensive). I previously had no idea that such totalitarian design concepts had taken hold north of the border. Floor-to-ceiling lettering throughout the exhibition made headline pronouncements such as "We will eradicate poverty....We will build intelligence into materials and liberate form from matter...We will design evolution." The first display is about urbanization. Fast-paced video of high density downtowns and satellite images of the earth is accompanied by a sauve, female voice who makes the unnerving claim that "everywhere is city: We still conceive of cities as discrete objects, separate from their surroundings. This is no longer true. There is no exterior to the global city that connects and sustains us all." The display climaxes with gigantic letters that pronounce:
EVERYWHERE=CITY DESIGN=HOPE
Yike, steady on! Some might still say that DESIGN=DECORATION. Yet for all the obnoxious bluster and posturing of this show, I enjoyed its amibitious attempts at categorization. Like Orbis Sensualium Pictus, Bruce Mau and the Institute Without Boundaries have attempted to depict the entire world. The breakdown (scribbled down from the catalogue table of contents) goes like this:
- Urbanization Economies (eg: density, housing)
- Movement Economies (eg: personal freedom, global movement)
- Energy Economies (eg: clean power)
- Information Economies (eg: Lessig on free culture)
- Image Economies (eg: micro and subatomic photography)
- Market Economies (eg: corporate accountability, ecology)
- Material Economies (eg: super hard, super light, bio mimicry)
- Military Economies (eg: conventional war, virtual war, cyberwar, peace)
- Manufacturing Economies (eg: ecology and equity)
- Living Economies (eg: genome, biomedia, drinking water)
- Wealth & Politics (eg: citizen revolution, digital divide, global poverty, women's health, gender power imbalance)