Social Media Superhumanity: Redesigning the Human at 2018 Madrid Design Festival

This two day international event will bring together a galaxy of architects, artists, performers, designers, and philosophers to explore the radical redesign of the human and its environments with Social Media. Social Media has become the ultimate design platform, putting the very idea of design on steroids. A whole new conversation for a whole new species is needed.

This event brings together the curators of the Superhumanity project with an array of brilliant experts on social media based in Spain. The speakers include: Beatriz Colomina, architectural historian working on the urbanism of social media; Eloy Fernandez-Porta, a philosopher specializing in after-pop; Uriel Fogue, architect that works in the dialogue between philosophy and design; FruFru, architects and performers; Juan Herreros, architect working on new species of architect; Nikolaus Hirsch, architect, curator, and editor of e-flux Architecture; Andres Jaque, architect working on new forms of architectural politics; Maria Jerez, a performer who explores the representation in the age of social media; Amparo Lasen, sociologist whose research is focused in the politics of everyday; Ivan Lopez Munuera, co-curator of this event and researcher working in the intersection of art and architecture with musical practices; Ingo Niermann, novelist, writer, and artist; Cristina Lucas, transdiciplinar artist; Nick Axel, deputy editor of e-flux Architecture; Manuel Segade, writer and curator, director of CA2M; Mark Wigley, architectural theorist working on the question of the Human Insect; and José María Lasalle, Secretary of State for the Information Society and Digital Agenda of Spain.

DAY 1: Yellow Fever
5 to 7:30pm, February 19

The first day of the event will be devoted to presenting and exploring two yellow books on the question of designing the human:

–Are We Human? Notes on an Archeology of Design (Lars Müller) by Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley
–Superhumanity: Design of the Self  (University of Minnesota Press), edited by Nick Axel, Beatriz Colomina, Nikolaus Hirsch, Anton Vidokle, and Mark Wigley

DAY 2: SM Humans
10am to 7:30pm, February 20

The second day will be a full day series of three intense panels on the social media themes of Share, Selfie, and Like. 

This event is the fourth in a series of Superhumanity events following the ones in Havana, Seoul and Princeton that were dedicated to the themes of Artist X Artista, Post-Labor, Psycho-Pathology, Plasticity and Russian Cosmism.

The Superhumanity project grew out of the 3rd Istanbul Design Biennial of 2016 curated by Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley on the theme Are We Human? The Design of the Species. Colomina and Wigley captured their reflections on the subject in the little yellow book Are We Human? Notes Towards an Archeology of Design (Lars Müller, 2016) that will be presented at this event in Madrid. They wanted to challenge conventional norms of a Design Biennial by expanding this ambitious interdisciplinary conversation beyond the time and space of that event and partnered with Anton Vidokle and Nikolaus Hirsch to inaugurate the e-flux architecture platform with the Superhumanity project. 50 writers from scientists, artists, architects, designers, philosophers, historians, archeologists and anthropologists were invited to address the theme of the Biennial by focusing on the question of “Self-Design” in a series of on-line postings that appeared every two or three days for several months. All these postings have just been published in a not so little yellow book edited by Axel, Colomina, Hirsch, Vidokle and Wigley entitled Superhumanity: Design of the Self (University of Minnesota Press, 2017) that will also be presented in Madrid.