EMILY KING
I wanted to begin by talking about the values that the International Design Conference in Aspen was aspiring to when it began in 1951: the idea, promoted by its founder, Walter Paepcke, that the captains of industry were responsible for the cultural life of the USA. These were then pretty comprehensively rejected at the conference in 1970. But how do they sound to you now?
PREM KRISHNAMURTHY
There’s something idealistic and utopian about them. That moment of 1950s America—the belief that there’s no contradiction between capitalism and consumption and environmental questions. It was of course a very, very different moment from 1970. In the ’70s and ’80s—that’s when the financialization of the world blew up.
Reading Alice Twemlow’s essay in Martin Beck’s book about the 1970 Aspen conference, it’s interesting to see how that event prefigures ideas that later end up in culture at large and in the art world in particular. The conflict that happened there between different modes of presentation and participation—between a frontal, lecture-heavy, informational mode, and a more experimental, relational, participatory mode that involved games and workshops—it took a while for those ideas to make it into the art world, for example. Design is often a bit ahead of the curve.
EK Having had a conventional history of design education, initially I bought into Aspen just as it was sold—a glorious bringing of good design to commercial corporate activity. When you look at that era of graphic design, it’s very stylish, which seduces you into buying the idea that design could improve corporate America in a really straightforward way.
PK I found it really fascinating that the talks delivered at the Aspen conference were published as texts for distribution to attendees beforehand. It’s harder to critique a presentation when you hear it in real time than when you have the chance to review it at your own pace. It takes more presence to be responsive to what’s happening in the room, responsive to what’s happening in the world in the moment. Now, even though you can often read a transcript of a conversation, it seems we’re becoming an oral culture again. We listen to podcasts, to books.
EK We were meant to have been a visual culture, but do you think that has shifted?
PK I think it’s happening. You still have a lot of visuality—TikTok, Instagram—but life now has become about multitasking. We are so used to trying to compress our time doing multiple things. Listening to a podcast while we run, for example. I’ve been trying to go back to monotasking and spending less time distracted.
I’m actually really optimistic about how the pandemic has shifted our modes of interacting with other people. A 50-minute frontal lecture with five minutes for questions at the end already feels like old technology and a format that should be relegated to the past.
EK There was also that high point in recent times when suddenly TED Talks were absolutely venerated, but I think everyone’s a little bit over them now. There was even a time when Davos seemed exciting. It’s true for all these modes and then everyone reacts against them and just wants the exact opposite.
PK The TED Talk seems a great example to bring up because it’s the apogee of the lecture form: the pitch-perfect, smoothed-out 15-minute talk. Of course, it’s useful because it can spread important ideas and go viral. But the presentation is so standardized, so unidirectional. This smoothness characterizes so many of our interactions today. It’s about fast consumption of ideas.
EK Is there a need for a reaction, something that moves us away from that?
PK The pandemic made it clear that bumpiness is part of life. In terms of formats: I imagine that a similar conversation was happening 50 years ago, and probably, a similar one in the Bauhaus in the 1920s, and in Black Mountain College in the 1930s. There is a constant cycle of modes.
EK Thinking about the IDC in Aspen, if we imagine the model to be a speaker, an audience, and the community at large, is there something in that model that’s worth reviving? Could you recast all the agents and somehow revive the conference?
PK The question that immediately comes up is: would it be specifically a design conference, given the ways in which art and design are so entwined with each other now?
EK But, in fact, even by the end of the 1950s it was already becoming much broader, including philosophers and sociologists and the like, and later members of the avant-garde—people like John Cage who appeared in 1966. They’d already pushed that boundary.
PK You’re right. Maybe that boundary was more porous in the 1950s and became less so in the ’70s or ’80s.
EK That also makes you think about cycles, because people talk now about blurring the boundaries as if that’s something new. I always think that boundaries are hardened by capitalism. If people are buying stuff, they want to know what it is and suddenly the boundary hardens somehow.
But let’s try and imagine what Aspen would ideally be if it were revived now. What format would it take for you?
PK An example close at hand is the experimental symposium in Washington DC called “How Can We Gather Now?”, for which Asad Raza and I served as co-artistic directors. The question that it posed came out of the work I was doing during the pandemic to try and create experimental participatory Zoom events juxtaposing multiple modes—conversations, seminars and readings, but also movement, mindfulness, dance and karaoke.
In Washington, I brought an interest in different modes of communication and scales of interaction—the individual, two people, the small group, the whole conference, to create intimacy, belonging and connection in community. Asad brought the idea of activating all of the senses.
EK Was the aim just to gather?
PK It was to learn about gathering and to practice forms of gathering. A generous exchange between strangers. And that seems to have been a motivation behind the original design conference too. Conferences are places where there is “content”—people are sharing specific ideas—but they’re also as much about the participants just being there, together.
EK In a way, it’s almost the opposite of a meeting in that there is no agenda.
PK The goal is that people meet each other and develop an agenda or purpose together through that encounter. At a conference, relationships are formed and continue to develop. The symposium becomes a proxy for creating more diverse forms of community moving forward. It’s important to hit different modes of presentation or interaction to engage with a broader constituency. It’s not a one-size-fits-all format.
EK In Aspen in 1970, they swapped their name badges, which actually looked quite interesting. I thought it was weirdly simple and great.
PK A lot of the things they were doing resonate so strongly now. And in fact if you did them at a conference today, they might still seem out of the ordinary. These activities have become the province of corporate team building exercises where you have specific formats for interacting, but actually, I think that sometimes we do need to introduce protocols like this. Otherwise there’s a tyranny of structurelessness, to use the phrase from ’70s feminism. It’s really important to have structures that can open up different kinds of dialogue or dialogue between people who wouldn’t talk otherwise.
EK Can we discuss the fascinating section at the end of Eli Noyes and Claudia Weill’s short film about the conference when Reyner Banham, as chair of the closing session, tries to rally the attendees into a consensus. Presumably that was a conference tradition to conclude with consensus and a set of action points shared by all. I was wondering how you feel about that, because that obviously was not what the 1970 participants wanted, and I don’t think we’d look for that in a conference today.
PK Conflict is important. It’s necessary to be able to sit with discomfort, particularly at the moment we’re in now, politically, socially—thinking about racial inequality and injustice. In 1970 they expected everybody to agree instead of accepting that given the range of people in the room, disagreement was a given. Having multiple opinions being heard, and not trying to streamline it to a single solution is sometimes the most meaningful approach—keeping contradictory ideas in a container at the same time.
EK I guess the idea is you need consensus to create a solution. They clearly believed that you cannot move forward without that. Can the conference achieve anything if the members remain fundamentally opposed?
Students from Northern Illinois University create a “sculpture” of wrecked cars near the Paepcke Amphitheatre where the 19th International Design Conference is being held, Aspen, June 1969. Courtesy: Denver Post and Getty Images
PK I think it’s essential that a conference or a gathering makes space for truly different things. It sounds as if in the next edition the organizers took up many demands of the 1970 conference, including more participatory exercises, games and ideas well outside design. As Alice Twemlow points out, the radical challenge of the 1970 conference was absorbed by the next one. In my mind, though, hybrid solutions are almost always more resilient—even in a decision-making process. If one set of people are nominated top-down, other people are nominated by their peers, other people might be nominated from a bottom-up open call, then you end up with a more interesting grouping.
EK How would that manifest itself physically—thinking of a design solution? Was the tent a problem?
PK Yes. I think the tent was trying to make everything happen in one place. We have the designers, we have corporations. We come into a tent, we all come to a shared idea. It’s an optimistic, idealistic mode of democracy that you can debate these things out and you’re all going to agree at the end of the day. I just don’t think that’s the way things work.
Have you read The Extended Mind [2021] by Annie Murphy Paul? Its basic argument is trying to debunk the notion that thinking happens in the brain. It shows how thinking happens in the body, in gestures, in spaces, in objects and in relationships with others. If you took that as a roadmap for how to organize something like this, you’d start to move towards a more interesting place. Just the act of getting up and relocating to another space changes how you interact. It also creates a richer embodied experience.
I recently created a five-day workshop in Austin as part of a performance festival. Each day happened in a different location with a different mode: a participatory talk; a meal where people gathered outside at a restaurant; a walk along the river; a karaoke party; and a cookout where everyone prepared food together.
EK It slightly reminds me of a friend of mine, the brilliant cultural critic Judith Williamson, who had a fantasy about doing a design history conference where you’d arrive at the venue and they would say, “There is no conference. Do exactly as you please.”
But coming back to Aspen, if it were to happen now: what can possibly justify everyone flying in?
PK That’s an even better reason for it not to be frontal presentations because nobody needs to experience that synchronously. Even in teaching since the pandemic, many people I know no longer spend a session delivering a presentation or bringing somebody in to give a guest lecture. They have that presentational part recorded, share it with people beforehand, and then use the time together for discussion.
To justify meeting in person it requires maximizing what can happen in the room that’s unexpected, in the moment, responsive. Bringing different people together is really important. If it’s all going to be the same people who already know each other, it’s not worth it.
At most symposiums or gatherings you sit at lunch and just meet somebody and talk with them. Those things are almost accidental. They’re seen as being positive by-products but they’re not intentionally designed. You’re not maximizing those opportunities.
EK The most successful thing I’ve done on those lines was a conference I attended in Svalbard with a perfumer. We had two scents and we were going to divide the conference in half depending on which they preferred. We had quite preordained ideas about what that would mean. Instead people just gave us extraordinary stories about their memories of smell—long anecdotes about their childhoods. People spoke in a completely different way. It was quite surprising because our whole idea of neatly dividing the conference in two and somehow setting up an opposition just went out the window.
PK That sounds great! What is important there is that you were attuned enough or the organizers left enough space that you could respond. To quote adrienne maree brown in Emergent Strategy [2017], she advises, “Less prep, more presence.” I’m paraphrasing, but she goes onto say something like, “In any group of people in a room, there’s a conversation that can only be had between those people in that room. Your job as a facilitator is to find that conversation.”
Prem Krishnamurthy is a designer, curator, author and educator. He is based in Berlin, Germany, and New York, USA.
Emily King is a writer and curator. She lives in London, UK.
