IPL-00 Introduction
Disegno Lectures
by Tomaso Carnetto
Formative Design / Coincidental Aesthetics /
Introduction
What Disegno is
Disegno was founded in the Renaissance by artists such as Michelangelo Bunaretti, Leonardo Da Vinci, Jocopo Pontormo and others.
1 Learning to draw in the tension between manual work and artificial intelligence
To draw according to the practice of Disegno is to be actively drawn into the world in such a way that the world changes.
Designing the world according to the needs and dimensions of human beings has been the declared goal of Disegno since its beginnings in the Renaissance.
Today we certainly have a very different idea of what is meant by designing the world - if it is a good idea to strive for design at all - but drawing, in its poetic, social, and scientific dimensions, is still one of the most appropriate tools for finding out.
The aim of the Renaissance was to bring the Divina Commedia from heaven to earth, to equip each scenery with the heavy weight of the human body.
The idea of placing the human being in a framework that can be understood as stages of our daily life is present in all works of art, from Giotto to Leonardo, Michelangelo and Pontormo.
The attempt to place the Divine Commedia on earthly stages must be taken literally. This is the birth of the Commedia dell’Arte.
During the Renaissance (14th to 17th centuries), the Commedia dell'Arte emerged as a revolutionary form of theater that both reflected and shaped the cultural, social, and artistic trends of the time.
It broke away from the rigid literary structures of the theatrical tradition with its classical forms by emphasizing improvisation, physical comedy, and dynamic audience interaction.
If you want to study drawing according to the practice of Disegno as the basis for any kind of aesthetic outcome, you will involuntarily find yourself in the tension between image and performance.
The term image is understood here primarily as an image of thought, executed as a drawing (or painting, also as a sculpture or installation), the term performance as a social interaction based on a choreography.
Based on a specific kind of coding, image and performance are inextricably linked, aesthetically graspable as a score from which - by running through it - the physical entities emerge.
The question of how thought, on the one hand, and performance, on the other, are to be carried out today as tools for shaping our existential coordinates, will open up the whole space of tension between the act of drawing (in the sense of a performance) and the aesthetic output of artificial intelligence. In this case, AI is to be seen more as an image of the unthinking but numerating subconscious.
2 Compagnia dell Imbuto Confuso
2.1 Figuration of the scenery /
on the relationship between drawing and the collective subconscious that we call artificial intelligence
As the stages of our daily lives are increasingly located in the digital space we call social media, these courses themselves are performances on the media stages of the 21st century.
I am one of the protagonists, a member of a company in the living tradition known as “Commedia dell’Arte”.
We call ourselves “Compagnia dell Imbuto Confuso” and consider our group to be agents of anarchy or saints, depending on your preference.
We are here to guide you through the courses, especially the theoretical and methodological parts.
2.2 A brief explanation of the relationship between the stage, drawing and writing:
The stage is the place where the concomitance is exposed.
The tool for this is drawing in the sense of tracing the involuntary movements that aim at nothing.
The involuntary movements can be measured by the coordinates that mark the change of direction.
The trace of an undirected movement is autonomously directed toward drawing and writing (in other words, toward encoding) the sequences of concomitance that relate to the unintentional subject - that is, to the draughtsman or writer.
The event of autonomous direction is what we call chance operation.
This concomitance is inhabited by faces, bodies, animals and plants. Depending on their interaction (or inactivity), the scenery turns into nature or is equipped with all the spaces and artifacts of urbanity.
2.3 Ridiculous
You may find it ridiculous to be guided through the program by artificial figures dressed in grotesque costumes and masks, but don't mess it up: We are more real than you can imagine; hyperreal as each actor to whom you lose your heart, with whom you suffer, laugh, and love.
Furthermore, you don't have to be afraid, the un-masked, mortal humans, ordinary dressed, always tired and always a little over-satiated, are still with you.
The practical part will be explained by Mr. Tomaso Carnetto here on the digital stage and on site at the Academy of Visual Arts, Frankfurt. So everything is well balanced between the artificial or virtual world and the physical world, which seems to be the real world...
3 This is how we generally proceed:
Start with Objectification, continue with Deconstruction, from which we extract the elements for our
Formalization, which we use for Composition.
a) Objectification
The object – a face, a body, an animal, a plant, a landscape, an urbanity – is not simply the innocent object of our perception, but the objectification of claims, rules, doctrines, values, and ideas.
Since the act of drawing is first and foremost a deconstruction of what is objectified by an object (at least if we follow Jean-Luc Nancy's statement that “drawing is the opening of form”), an indispensable part of our work is to ask: what is objectified by the object?
The question of what an object objectifies (you can also say what the object embodies) can be answered from different perspectives.
Let's take the most concrete example at hand:
What am I objectifying as a member of the Compagnia dell Imbuto Confuso, wearing this strange animal mask?
One possible answer is that, as an object created with the little help of AI, I am objectifying a kind of digital reality that offers the possibility of blurring the boundaries between human and avatar, allowing a new kind of social species to emerge.
The definition of what I am objectifying is not a matter of right or wrong, but is given by the relationship between the viewer and myself as the object of the viewer's perception.
The socially and philosophically interesting aspect is that by perceiving the objects around us, by our immediate relationship to them, we adopt them as parts of ourselves. Just as we become an object for others.
That is, we become a part of the other. Those parts we strive for or try to avoid.
Here we are touching upon the highly complex phenomenon of the interconnected tension between what we might call the inner and outer worlds.
Drawing, in the sense of Disegno, is first of all tracing the lines of this interconnectedness and actualizing them in poetry.
In this sense, it is to be understood that drawing, as a poetic act, deconstructs the object in order to open up the form, that is, to reformalize the inherent elements as sequences that will form a new composition.
In philosophical considerations, the object is already part of a composed scenery, within which the object is to be isolated from its objectification in order to formulate a potentially self-multiplying perspective on the unfixable truth of the object.
To understand the character of the object's unfixable truth, drawing asks philosophy.
To perceive the unfixable truth in the multidimensional texture of lively compositions, philosophy needs drawing (which is recognized as the origin of poetic unfolding in all disciplines).
The Draughtsman's Contract does not provide for the reading of philosophy; it is the contract itself. The contract does not come into effect until the draughtsman begins the philosophical reading.
This contract is not made with just any client. The draughtsman has only one unconditional obligation: to the object (of his drawing).
He must study the contract as carefully as possible in order to identify his work within the texture of the self-multiplying perspective on the unfixable truth.
In other words, without reading philosophical texts related to the respective object, the draughtsman (artist, designer, architect, choreographer, etc.) has no idea how to work on the compositions so that they become true.
Only philosophy makes it possible to formulate (through artistic means) one's individual relationship to the object and the scenery in which this relation is embedded.
Oh yeah, we know, that was some tough stuff!
But don't worry, by the time you finish the first or second course, you'll have experienced what we're talking about in a physical way - that is, you'll understand it as an inseparable part of learning to draw.
b) Deconstruction
Deconstructing what we perceive is identical to drawing. For deconstruction, we can use different drawing techniques:
Coordinates
Movements
Chance Operations
Each of these techniques is to be seen as the practical elaboration of a specific grammatical structure that is typical of the object in question. Concrete examples will be shown.
c) Formalization
The term formalization should be understood in its double meaning:
- the form, that is the formal technique (which we also used to deconstruct our object) that we now use to create the elements, and
- the form of the respective element.
Concrete examples will be shown.
d) Composition
Composing takes place on two levels. The level of the isolated figuration, that is, the individual face, body, animal, plant, or urban artifact, and the level of the scene-or stage-where the various figurations interact.
The only exception is the landscape, whether it is the external space of nature or the internal space we might call the inner landscape.
Concrete examples will be shown.
We begin with the scene / a poetic consideration
We begin with the scene.
In the scene, everything converges—
space, objects, figures.
No matter where—
within a room or across an open landscape—
a face will always appear,
even if only one’s own,
in whose expression the scene finds its mirror,
where the scene first becomes real:
as eyes take in,
ears listen,
the nose catches the scent drifting in from the sea,
cheeks feel the wind,
and the tongue, grazing the lips,
tastes the trace of salt.
There is always a body,
claimed as possession: my body.
Others may enter: your body.
Bodies are clothed,
wrapped in objects, in coverings.
Were they bare,
our animal selves would break through.
Animals are always present,
as are plants—
the smallest of all, the dwarf water lentil,
tinier than a pinhead,
and fungi in endless ranks,
spreading their mycelial threads
from one landscape to the next,
reaching into cities,
into basements,
living rooms / attics /parliaments /
butcher shops / haberdasheries
and bathhouses.
There is nothing more to record.
And that is more than enough—
more than could ever be enough,
across all time.