Plastics with the Living Voice_The Sea PET

Goldsmiths Postgraduate Research Conference 2019 ‘Futures of the Real’

Plastics with the Living Voice

KraalD praxis continues to nurture a complex metaspace, self-entangled in design research, art and craft-making practice with plastic things exploring ontologies of the “more than human worlds” borrowing the term from the (Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017). My speculative materiality research with plastic things was initially theoretically influenced by Bill Brown’s (2001), “Thing Theory” literal critique that rests upon the “material fetishism” (Brown, 2001, p. 5).  Brown argues that as a society, we confront the thingness of objects only when they stop functioning for us (Brown, 2001, pp.1-22). Ambiguous in its core, the power of the thing is almost always associated as ugly once it has been pulled out of its context, eliminated and exorcised.

In the “Metamorphoses” Braidotti (2002), concludes that “if you don’t like complexities of real life you could not possibly feel at home in the third millennium” and predicts that “non-unitary subjectivity, complexity and multiplicity will be the key terms for the 21 century…as well as the fear, terror, ethical and political panic combined with technological and cultural advances” (Braidotti, 2002, p. 263-264).

The research journey further combined Bill Brown’s theory with the Rosie Braidotti (2006) Nomadic ethics, strongly influenced by the “Transpositions” that justifies my changing order of intent “into bio-centred egalitarianism” (Braidotti, 2006:111), and following the notion of the plastics with nonhuman other material embodiment.