This dissertation explores matters of collectivity, drawing from the experience of working with the Amsterdam-based collective Hackers & Designers (H&D). The main thesis of this research is... Show moreThis dissertation explores matters of collectivity, drawing from the experience of working with the Amsterdam-based collective Hackers & Designers (H&D). The main thesis of this research is that conventional design vocabularies are not capable of sufficiently expressing and accounting for collectivities‘ resistance to fixation and stabilization. Collective design as it is discussed here challenges notions of individual authorship, differentiations between disciplines, between product and process or between the user and maker. While collectives shape particular affiliations and commitments, design approaches and aesthetics, they also require perspectives on working and designing together that resist linearity, and a progress-based understanding of a design process. By means of several case studies, it is argued that the fragmentation of social and work relations is as much a characteristic of collective practice as the effort to sustain long-term relationships.Thus, collective practice is not fully deliberate, at least not in the same way as for instance ‘teamwork’, ‘the commons’, or ‘cooperativism’, are purposeful organizational frameworks for living, working or being together. Collective Collective design processes take part in and are a result of particular (often fragile) socio-economic, socio-technical conditions that pervade and shape the ways collectives function. Show less
This dissertation develops an innovative approach to cultural transformation in the kingdom of Commagene (modern south-east Turkey) during the 1st c. BCE, focusing on a palatial context in the... Show moreThis dissertation develops an innovative approach to cultural transformation in the kingdom of Commagene (modern south-east Turkey) during the 1st c. BCE, focusing on a palatial context in the capital Samosata. It unlocks two corpora of archaeological legacy data, which pertain to salvage excavations undertaken by a team of the Middle East Technical University (Ankara) in the period 1978-1989, in the wake of the site’s flooding by the Euphrates river. The dissertation integrates the excavation documentation with archaeological material nowadays stored at the Archaeological Museum of Adiyaman. In addition to a conventional analysis of the chronology, lay-out and architectural character of the palace, a critique is formulated on the problematic character of acculturative and anthropocentric approaches still characterizing scholarship dealing with ‘Hellenism in the East’. As an alternative, it is proposed to reconceptualize the palace of Samosata as a heterogenous and vibrant assemblage, with objects as historical protagonists rather than passive, representational entities. As such, the palace assemblage becomes a laboratory to study the impact of pre-modern globalization processes, with increased connectivity causing the emergence of new relations. Through an investigation of the genealogical and more-than representational capacities of the palace assemblage, the dissertation arrives at a new understanding of change and innovation in Commagene during the 1st c. BCE. Show less
