In time for 2022 🏕

Mark your calendars, but also throw them away.

The new year is already here—or is it? By the lunar calendar, 2022 actually starts in a little over a week from now, on February 1, beginning the year of the Tiger according to the Chinese zodiac. There is time yet for 2022 to begin!

If we stretch out the end of 2021 just a few more weeks, could we cheat into being what was left to do but not yet done? What possibilities could this parallel reality New Year hold?

Stretching and remaking time is not new, however. The creators of early cinema also experimented with cheating time: techniques like the jump cut allowed editors to stitch together lapses in time, erasing film footage (and in a way, time) that was considered unnecessary to tell a story. In The Emergence of Cinematic Time, Mary Anne Doane discusses that this “time that is excluded is constituted as ‘dead time’—time which, by definition, is outside of the event, ‘uneventful.’..time in which nothing happens, time which is in some sense, ‘wasted,’ expended without product.”  

But there is in fact life in dead time; the time between events and gatherings is when DesignInquiry is arguably the most alive—thinking, collaborating, planning, scheming, dreaming and plotting. This unseen and unaccounted time is central to convening and inquiring. Things are always afoot!

This year, DesignInquiry invites you to mark your calendars in earnest, but also throw them away. Live on alternate timelines, examine the time in between, linger in unmarked days. What might we find that is growing and very much alive in our so-called ‘dead time’?

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Bewilder

Summer 2022 

Mill Run, PA (just outside of Pittsburgh)

Framers: Steve Bowden, Nick Liadis, Kimmie Parker, Addy Smith-Reiman

Join us for a different kind of gathering, one in which DesignInquiry ventures into the dynamic ecosystems of the Appalachian mountains outside of Pittsburgh, PA. We’ll be announcing dates soon for a bewildering duality this summer: in and out, wild and civil, forest and building. We’ll spend three nights tent camping in the Bear Run Nature Preserve, and then move camp to the High Meadow Residences within the Fallingwater campus for another three nights. Kitchen will replace fire pit, studio will replace bare ground—bewilderment, collaboration, and inquiry will continue.

“If a straight line is the shortest distance between two fated and inevitable points, digressions will lengthen it; and if these digressions become so complex, so tangled and tortuous, so rapid as to hide their own tracks, who knows—perhaps death may not find us, perhaps time will lose its way, and perhaps we ourselves can remain concealed in our shifting hiding places.”

–Italo Calvino

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(Non)Instant Cities

Montreal, California, London, + | Spring/Summer 2022 and beyond

What would it mean for DesignInquiry to dematerialize from its known places and reform in multiple places in multiple formats? Archigram imagined their Instant City — a “traveling metropolis” that “superimposes, for a time, new spaces for communication onto an existing city”. DesignInquiry is interested in not just the moment of contact, but also the wrinkles in time, both the instants and (non)instants.

The DesignInquiry ‘21-’22 fellow cohort (Krishna Balakrishnan, Jessica Brier, Andy Campbell, Sarah Elawad, and Samer Fouad) will convene in Montreal in Spring/Summer 2022 for a short residency to collaborate on a publication on the themes of prepostness and points of departure. They will instigate a public event to activate the DesignInquiry universe in Montreal to kick off a series of (Non)Instant Cities programs. Other stops — at home and abroad — are materializing as 2022 unfolds.

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Re/Re/Rewrite

Experiment with writing, remixing, and reimagining! See rewritedi.substack.com for prompts, anecdotes, images or texts that provoke a response — with the caveat that the prompt itself can be rewritten. Responses are sometimes individual, sometimes collaborative, and all are unexpected. Meet-ups to chat and share outcomes happen monthly.

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Three places DI is alive in year-round:

Instagram: Past, present and future —— the DI multiverse in images and prompts. Tag or message us so we can repost.

Discord: Join us for conversation and collaboration on Discord (like Slack, but not)!

Mail: Let’s invest in the joy of snail mail. Update your mailing address for special surprises from the DI multiverse.