‘The Immunoids’ by Ignacio Ruiz de Galarreta
Degree
University, City, Country
Key supervisors: Sebastian Tedesco, Mariano Luna, Alan Neukmart.
keywords: speculative design, nostalgic design, critical futurism, neo retro, space opera, scifi, material interfaces, fashion
The Immunoids is a project that arises from a personal research over the construction of individual identity, the diffracted self in the virtuality, the neo-narcissism and self-image design, from the construction of objects/ design.
The C19 pandemic allowed a global context where the mask and other objects emerged as everyday objects, for preventive and isolating use. Faceing this resurgence out of necessity, the opportunity arose to rethink, design and speculate with a potentially massive and then fashionable object.
The project responds to a global problem and proposes a possible path towards this future-present.
With aesthetic references to retro futurism, modern art and nostalgic imaginary, the project also seeks to link art and product design from a critical approach, highlighting issues that inhabit and arise from the interfaces between: body - virtuality, body - machine, body - bodies, and body - world.
The body and virtuality
The intimate show vs. the nullification of identity
The aesthetic experience infiltrated in our intimacy and self-contemplation through social networks today represent an omnipresent spectacle of which we can be protagonists, consumers or both.
Information and entertainment on demand from the mobile device / body extension.
Immediate and fleeting stimuli that feed consumer compulsion and individualism, while our interaction with these devices accumulates our information.
The ethical limits that separate our privacy and freedom of choice, against social control (facial recognition and use of personal data) or consumerism imposed / passive by means of AI and learning algorithms to influence our behaviors.
The body and the machine
An essentially dynamic time, accelerated by the fluidity of the city and propelled by technology. Mobile devices, computers or screens as prosthetic objects and extensions of our body added in relation to the new objects that emerged from the pandemic.
The body and other bodies
A reality where behaviors are altered. A new personal space, new customs and new notions of the macro and the micro biological. Public anonymity. The nullified identity, the rupture of our image. LI as facial override devices or real antiviral filter. What if we are all the same?
The body and the universe
Ethical and political issues around pandemics, their causes and human action. The new prophylaxis and the concept of an insulating screen or field of synthetic materiality. Humanx - virus interfaces, which confront us with the plastic paradox and the use of petroleum derivatives (raw material for human development) to protect ourselves, and the impact it has on the world.
What other perspectives can we acquire when we understand the planet as an extension of our body?
Through a brief futuristic fiction, developed and presented as an experimental record, to generate questions about the role of artificial intelligence in new forms of interaction between human beings and the environment through social metabolism, collective imaginaries, and the individual perception.
The Immunoids its a proactive look at change and the latent threat in a fluid and dynamic world. A critique to a multidimensional and dramatized reality, where identity is multiplied and appearance is aestheticized.
The Immunoids is to design a possible future from a divisive and reflective approach to the present.
The Immunoids is a spec
ulation about our relationship with the micro and macro universe.
The Immunoids is a reflection on the interfaces between body / virtuality and virality / body.
Ignacio Ruiz de Galarreta / ?? / ?? / 20??-??
My name is Nacho Ruiz. I am an artist, designer and architect. I am curious and observant. Freelance world explorer, researcher, and creator. I materialize objects of use, artistic objects and objects of artistic use. I move in the specters of the in-between, in the undefined places where form and function do not yet exist. I aim outside the status quo and challenge structures that uphold common sense. I seek to create meaning by mediating concepts among themselves, rearranging their parts at will and then elaborating a way to make them visible.
