Special Announcement Enacting Gregory Bateson's Ecological Aesthetics in Architecture and Design

We recently announced that Dr Jon Goodbun - theory lead on the MA Environmental Architecture - and the international research team of the two year AHRC-DFG funded research project: 'Enacting Gregory Bateson's Ecological Aesthetics in architecture and design' (@Enact_Bateson), would like to extend invitations to an open lecture in LT1 on Wednesday 8 November at 6pm, and a reading group workshop in the Upper Gulbenkian on the morning of Friday 10 November from 10am-12noon. See below for details.

The Double Bind of Design: An introduction to Gregory Bateson

Public event

Wednesday 8 November 2023, 6pm

Lecture Theatre 1, Royal College of Art, Kensington Campus, Kensington Gore, London

>>>RSVP here (whether online or in person)

Gregory Bateson reading group

Open to RCA students and staff

Friday 10 November 2023, 10.30am –1pm

Upper Gulbenkian Space, Royal College of Art, Kensington Campus, Kensington Gore, London

>>>RSVP here (whether online or in person)

We are happy to extend an public invitation to join the international research team of the joint AHRC-DFG funded 'Enacting Gregory Bateson’s Ecological Aesthetics in Architecture and Design’ research project, for an introduction to the thinking of the ecological anthropologist Gregory Bateson, and a presentation of one of the key research themes of this two year project: The Double Bind of Design.

The evening will include an introductory talk by Dr Jon Goodbun on the thinking of the ecological anthropologist Gregory Bateson, whose colourful practice moved from anthropological field work in the 30s, participation in the foundational Macy conferences on cybernetics in the 40s, working as an ethnologist with patients diagnosed as schizophrenics and their therapists at the Palo Alto VA hospital in the 50s, moving on to the study of animal and ecosystemic communication, learning and evolution in Hawaii in the 60s, and culminating in an ultimately unfinished but incredibly rich project to describe the onto-epistemologcial form and structure of both our fundamental socio-ecological existence, and the pathological ‘epistemological errors’ of western thought which - now amplified by capitalism and advanced technology - are unfolding violently through the wider web of life upon which we ultimately depend. He asked, as we must ask too: How can we approach the possibility of future human adaptation to, and care of, this now severely damaged ecological condition, given that so much of our fundamental thinking and practice around design and the possibility of planning is still so badly damaged? It might be that whatever we do, if based upon a narrow western forms of ‘conscious purpose’, will only make things worse?

Following the introductory talk, the wider international research team of this project will introduce themselves and some of their particular research questions and projects in relation to this three day workshop on ‘The Double Bind of Design’. The team includes the PIs from the two lead institutions: Sri Lankan academic Dr Dulmini Perera from the architectural history and theory department of Bauhaus University Weimar and Dr Ben Sweeting who runs the Radical Methodologies programme in the School of Architecture, University of Brighton. We are also joined by designer Dr Joanna Boehnert, author of the 2018 book ‘Design, Ecology, Politics: Towards the Ecocene’, from Bath Spa University, and Professor Simon Sadler, art and architectural historian and Chair of the Department of Design at University of California Davis (author of Archigram: Architecture without Architecture; Non-Plan: Essays on Freedom, Participation and Change in Modern Architecture and Urbanism, with co-editor Jonathan Hughes; and The Situationist City). Finally from Stuttgart University we have the bio-installation artist-architect Marie Davidova, and the two PhD researchers funded by this project: Stefanie Huthöfer and Claudia Valverdel

In addition to the Wednesday evening public event, we are also hosting working symposium on the same question, where will be joined by anthropologist and former Bateson student Phillip Guddemi, the writer Nora Bateson (GB’s youngest daughter), and the design educators, theorists and Bateson scholars Tim Gasperak and Fred Steier. This session is not open, but will be recorded to be later disseminated.

However, if you want to go deeper into some of the texts of Gregory Bateson, or the research of this project, you are invited to join us on the morning of Friday 10 November, when we will host a reading group from 10.30am to 1pm, open to RCA colleagues and students, in the Upper Gulbenkian Gallery (where we will generally be based from 8–10 November)

Image credit:

Poster for the Dialectics of Liberation Congress, Roundhouse London, 1967: ……. Courtesy of Jon Goodbun

Gregory Bateson’s presentation of ‘Consciousness vs Nature’ at the Dialectics of Liberation Congress where he shared a platform which included Stokely Carmichael, RD Laing, Herbert Marcuse, Allen Ginsberg and others, initiated what we can call Bateson’s ‘Three Ecologies’ period. Remarkably, in his presentation which came only weeks after the height of the Arab-Israeli conflict of that summer, Bateson opened with the Palestinian question, going on to describe the contemporary situation as repeating historical patterns of violence, stating

‘I want to consider the dynamics of the whole traditional pathology in which we are caught, and in which we shall remain as long as we continue to struggle within that old conflict. We just go round and round in terms of the old premises.’