Thoughts on Porous Skins: A Matter of Design

Thinking about this piece, I allowed myself to look at “design” through new eyes, in a way, growing new eyes, as to map some of the things that have been on my mind for a while now.¹ Far from being confined to an artificial aesthetic autonomy, fashion studies assemble together around new affordances, affects and ethical challenges – a matter of (future) design, as well as a more fine-grained description of (current) affordances. Designing bodily assemblages is no longer a luxury. Rather, it has become a necessity that renders the future as a confrontational cultural object. 

We cannot afford the pre-modern innocence of non-design, and, at the same time, we cannot afford a modern, hubristic sense of design. The question of what comes next is on my mind, as well as yours, I dare say, since the complexities of being in a mutating and entangled world have vastly entered the public space and consciousness as matters of concern: accelerated climate change effects, an ongoing pandemic, asymmetric distribution of resources in world-systems, incensed social movements. 2020 seems not only a well-rounded number but a real nodal moment when past practices and imageries are no longer satisfactory, while new practices and imageries have yet to come. Matters of design.
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Some matters of design are bound to technology. Yvonne Förster writes on technology that gets “closer to the body and under skin”, on the ubiquitous network of distributed technology and infrastructural intelligence, from wearables such as smart devices to more futuristic „digital skins” that become part of our sensing bodies. Sensing becomes a way to allude to distributed processes of human and technological agency. Sensing becomes therewith an ecology of relations that would allow for the emergence of a theory of sense-culture, as opposed to a culture organised around meaning.²

There is a fundamental shift here. The culture of meaning, of origin, has already had its ill-design exposed through the practice and theory of deconstruction. This is a twofold overthrow: of an ideal culture of meaning, and that of the Derridean text-culture, namely the culture of signifying free play. We ask, again, what comes next? Yvonne Förster, drawing on the writings of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Luciana Parisi and Erich Horl, hints at a future of materialist, phenomenological, distributed and corporeal embedment – yes, a sense-culture – through technological means. Technology encompasses here ground-breaking fashion and art projections such as in Nobumichi Asai’s Omote (which beautifully means both “face” and a kind of mask in Japanese), along with the oldest techne: language and the power of collective virtual articulations.

Nonetheless, some matters of design require a further attentiveness to embodiment. If Yvonne Förster focuses on this accelerated, experienced continuum between human and artificial sensing, on “digital skin” (and “digital flesh”), we might forget for a moment that the non-digital skin is just as intricate and just as much a matter of design. Nobumichi Asai’s Omote uses real-time face tracking and projection mapping to morph the face and allow it to become mirror or liquid-like. Omote is a site that renders visible and enacts/ projects/ performs the volatility of the skin; yet, this volatility of life-forms is exactly what Maurice Merleau-Ponty was beginning to glimpse at: “My body is made of the same flesh as the world (it is perceived), and moreover […] this flesh of my body is shared by the world, the world reflects it, encroaches upon it and it encroaches upon the world (the felt [senti] at the same time the culmination of subjectivity and the culmination of materiality), they are in a relation of transgression or of overlapping.”³ 

Art has ways to perceive and render the invisible. What becomes visible through artistic intention (an important enterprise!) was, arguably, already there. So how does this constitute a matter of design? Where lies the freedom to occupy the future as a confrontational object or a swarm of fighting virtualities? 

As my idea unfolds, this “occupy” has to do with a specific “weird” branch of ecology, linked to modes of embodiment specific to our times. The times become ours through the working artifice of a “we.” This localized and situated “we” is made of the living bodies of the Anthropocene. This “we” should not, however, efface the unequal access to environmental goods and the unequal distribution of social responsibility and climate change consequences that are already at work. Asymmetries among humans about nature produce a certain kind of “second” discourse on bodies that is necessarily bound to the geopolitical relations and social realities of how “we” experience nature. The “anthropos” of some Anthropocene studies, as a massive opaque block of people, as species, does seem to efface the harsh social stratified reality of the human impact on Earth. However, the “anthropos” that I am referring here – this “we” that I dare bring into discussion – is a necessary lucrative fiction, a placeholder for the sake of design, which does not mean it is less real than, for example, the human of late capitalism, the human that “shops” for a face. Both are fictions that are able to produce real effects.

The body, the face, the skin, have all come into the attention of early and foundational eco-feminist theorists precisely as matters of design – of both recognizing and creating, spotting and envisioning these affordances of life-being. Affordances here mean possibilities of embodiment, so our designing goal is finding and supporting those possibilities that better lead to an experience of being at home in the world. The skin foremost became a privileged site of intervention. As early as 1991, Donna Haraway asked: “Why should bodies end at the skin, or include at best other beings encapsulated by skin?”⁴ In her foundational work, beautifully entitled Volatile Bodies, Elizabeth Grosz also suggests that porosity is an axis through which we are of and in the world:
“The limits or borders of the body image are not fixed by nature or confined to the anatomical ‘container,’ the skin. The body is extremely fluid and dynamic, its borders, edges, and contours are ‘osmotic’ – they have the remarkable power of incorporating and expelling outside and inside in an ongoing exchange” ⁵

‍There is an intricate relation of constant and vital transfer between the inside and outside of the skin. The skin itself is an active site of trans-corporeality. That this vital openness is sometimes lethal is something that we recently became awfully aware on an unexpected large scale. The skin pertains to the material reality as much as it pertains to a symbolic imagery of artificial separation. This is a matter of design – one that has been designed on scraps of habits and prejudices of old philosophies.

Is then the Anthropocene a tactile experience? Inasmuch as the skin is this active, “osmotic” site through the body’s enmeshment with the world, then, yes, the Anthropocene is an epidermal matter of concern and design. Rosemary Garland-Thomson, feminist theorist writing on disability studies, offers us a suitable way of thinking about corporeality in the Anthropocene, as an ecology of relations. As she notes: “all bodies are shaped by their environments from the moment of conception. We transform constantly in response to our surroundings and register history on our bodies. The changes that occur when body encounters world are what we call disability.”⁶

The skin is embroiled in climate change as a relational form of eco-sickness. This is a sickness that inhabits both human and non-human bodies, revealing their entanglement and co-dependency. We inhale the world; from the oxygen we need to survive mixed with other chemical parts that might hurt us, to numerous shed fragments of skin, as well as a multitude of micro-organisms.

There are ways to acknowledge, design, and perform the richness of the shared body experience in the Anthropocene, to expose the uneasiness in this discovery as well as to find potentialities in the unknown. Take for instance the literature of Jeff VanderMeer, especially Annihilation, the first book from The Southern Reach trilogy.⁷ Here, the sickness of the Anthropocene is experienced as a shared sickness, inside as well as on the outside of the skin. Area X is a site contaminated by an unknown source that, while expanding, is causing bodies, human and non-human, to entangle, mirror, and refract each other. An ecological “prism”, Area X is both terrifying and, at times, beautiful. In an article for Electric Lit, Jeff VanderMeer writes: “In a microbial sense, “contamination” is the condition of all living things  – and occurs to all of us on an hourly basis, with invisible actions and reactions taking place that demonstrate there is less difference between outside and inside, between our bodies and the world they move through.”⁸

‍Moreover, this movement is depicted time and again in Acceptance ⁹ (the last in the trilogy) as an epidermal phenomenon; felt as a “second skin” on the inside, “sliding into place”, whereas on the outside manifesting at first as a subtle glowing on the skin. “[T]he brightness had gathered to form a hushed second skin over me,” narrates the Biologist in VanderMeer’s novel. Yet, this is only the passage to the more-than-human mutations that the bodies go through, a merging point, the site of contamination. What is first felt as a “second skin” soon becomes first nature, and the character would either transform into non-human assemblages or have to fight (in a dance-like movement) with “versions” of their multiplying self (an otherwise breathtaking scene, especially with the set design and CGI technology employed in the film adaptation). During this profound mutation, the trilogy, more than the film, focuses on the enhanced sensing its protagonist experiences: she feels as if the brightness expands with her to enhance her senses. Despite manifesting signs of illness, and potentially being deadly, this heightened perceiving ability will ultimately save her life, reformulating her body in co-relation to the changing world.

Designing fictional bodies, VanderMeer manages to speak, firstly, about a shared materiality of life-forms that is the neutral state of our existence; then, secondly, of haunting ecological sickness pertaining to the Anthropocene condition of our times; and, thirdly, of possibilities to marvel at these newly revealed intricacies. A threat to humanity, sickness allows for imbricate emergencies, both in the sense of what is yet to come and what is already emerging, as well as in terms of lived crisis. The eco-sickness exhibits a heightened relational sensibility, hard to diagnose, treat or even explain, that alludes to the volatility and porosity of the body.

Contamination, co-mutation, and prismatic design are also at the heart of the music video “The Gate”, where Icelandic musician Björk worked with long-time visual collaborators, Andrew Thomas Huang and James Merry. Here, design takes a more approachable, visceral, sensing dimension. In a way, art is the way to touch upon the sense-culture of relational ecology. “The Gate” is the first single from Björk’s album Utopia (2017), which continues themes from Vulnicura and Biophilia, such as emotion, idyllic or destructive nature, imbricating the human and non-human relationality. The music video is a masterpiece of design, from set, costumes and masks, to post-processing effects, and, in a broader sense, design of sensibility. The musician’s artistic perspective is building towards a utopia as a world assembled around matters of care: “I care for you/ If you care for me” - the lyrics go, over and over, though in slightly different arrangements. Surprisingly, the visuals and choreography are similar to the final ”dance” the protagonist from Annihilation performs. The lyrics envision a world echoing that of Area X: “Split into many parts/ Splattered light beams into prisms/ That will reunite.” The “beam of light” shifts from the musician to its double and they mirror each other, much like the final encounter of Annihilation shows the protagonist faced with the otherworldly familiar: her double, mirroring her in movements and intentions. It is the permeance of the barrier of skin that carries the utopic, a healed chest wound, a “gate” through which care is received and given.

In other videos illustrating the album, Björk is swallowing or spitting bits of flowers and other environmental parts, co-mutating herself with the environment. This imbricate spatiality is also erotically charged. It brings ahead the sensuality of the porous skin, consistently supported by the imagery of the masks. For instance, in the beginning of “The Gate,” the mask designed by James Merry (Picture 6), resembles an open orchid and/or a vulva. The mask enables and concentrates this openness to the outside that, simultaneously, becomes sensual.

In Queer Phenomenology, Sara Ahmed underlines that “spaces are not external to bodies; instead, spaces are like a second skin that unfolds in the folds of the body.”¹⁰ In Strange Encounters, she further depicts how
“locality intrudes into the senses: it defines what one smells, hears, touches, feels, remembers... being-at-home suggests that the subject and space leak into each other, inhabit each other. We can think of the lived experience of being-at-home in terms of inhabiting a second skin, a skin which does not simply contain the homely subject, but which allows the subject to be touched and touch the world.” ¹¹

Written in the context of postcolonial phenomenology, this “second skin” is nevertheless useful when thinking and designing ecologically. Yes, locality intrudes into the senses, although here “intrusion” might not be the most telling word since this “intrusion” is precisely the condition of being-at-home. What does it mean to be at home in the world? For Sara Ahmed, it means “to be touched and touch the world”, to have this co-mutating process, this porosity that allows one to be vulnerable and grow. The digital skin, the mask, or the “second skin,” all carry the agential factor of the lived experience, the creative processes that allow oneself to be at home in the world. At the same time, these processes account for the experience of sharing the world with other human and non-human agents via what I have called “porous skins”, an unsettling – yet not entirely unpleasant – ecological relationality in Annihilation, or a sensual ecological relationality in Utopia. These are matters of design in a deeper sense, namely of reimagining, acknowledging, visualising, and performing corporeal possibilities.