The School for Designing a Society, established in 1991, is a project of teachers, performers, artists, and activists. It is an ongoing experiment in making temporary living environments where the question “What would I consider a desirable society?” is given serious playful thoughtful discussion, and taken as an input to creative projects.
What Happens at this School?
Participants are asked to put their desires into words and their words into actions in design projects. Seminars and workshops meet regularly.
Beginning Participants: are invited to study the ideas and distinctions offered and to learn how to make your own ideas and draw your own distinctions; look systems; desire what is not yet and come to rely on yourself as a desirer; articulate, create your eloquence; compose, design, try things;create support and solidarity with other participants; move back and forth through the domains of cybernetics, social change, desire, design, composition, performance.
Second year participants: are invited to design a project or composition that connects your desires, to social change; study other projects; participate as a humble helper in projects designed by other people; learn how to do the practical work of giving ideas a material life; experience yourself as a fine worker.
Third year participants: are invited to organize and initiate your project, your design, your composition. Keep documenting how you are, how it is.
Fourth year participants: are invited to return to the school as a teacher and organizer of what you now know and care.
Designing a Society is a project that intersects the formats of classroom, commune, performance ensemble, activist group. Designing a Society requires classrooms to be places of solidarity among students, so that friction, conflict, and uncertainty can flourish and be distinguished from contexts of violence, confusion, and conformity; Designing a Society requires communal living to be intellectual, so that being an individual is valued and distinct from being individualistic; is a project that requires performance ensembles to have the experience of coordinating with one another rather than competing; is a project that asks activists to protest old forms of protest, so that messages and methods of contemporary relevance can be created.