Call for Papers

Dune Vol. 003 n. 001

Shortcuts

Dune welcomes ideas and proposals from scholars, whose contributions are subjected to a process of double-blind peer review before selection for publication. For its fourth issue, the journal is looking at the concept of the shortcut.

A shortcut only happens by chance, you can’t bank on it. But that’s sort of how life works.

There are shortcuts for everyone. It all just depends on whether you can recognise it enough. I believe that coincidence is key, but coincidence is energies coming towards each other. You have to be moving to meet it. There’s a natural coincidence of life. But I think that all things help; I think the only factor is that when you work hard, things naturally advance. Of course, it becomes a traffic jam at points, but I think that’s when I operate at my best. Under a deadline, or under the pressure to complete, or to come up with a narrative.

(Interview published in Mr Porter, Jan 24, 2019. https://www.mrporter.com/en-us/journal/lifestyle/career-advice-from-off-whites-mr-virgil-abloh-388524)

In his lecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design in 2017, Virgil Abloh shared with his audience the cheat codes – the strategies, which he called shortcuts – that form his “personal design language.”

Insert Complicated Title Here, the publication that followed the lecture, bought out as part of the series “The Incidents” by Sternberg Press / MIT, captures Abloh’s methodology and documents a contemporary mode of creativity. It updates the parameters of the role of the creative director – a role to which Abloh himself gave the title TBD. It describes and celebrates the application of practices of sampling and curating to design, put into effect by those who move with agility between different disciplines, seeking the quickest and smartest way of hitting the mark.

Mental flexibility, versatility, perspicacity and the ability to “embrace chaos” were, for Abloh, true ways of being in the world, of exploring territories that differ in their paradigms and configurations: a mode of behavior, a way of being attentive and in tune with the world, anticipating the directions it is going to take, or even guiding their course.

If considered from the perspective of the relationship between past and present, which to a great extent shapes creativity in fashion and its presentation in contemporary life, the shortcut is also a technique of survival. It is a way of managing the exchange of ideas, of reestablishing balances of power and recognizability, of looking ahead without being tied to what has been decided, chosen or said in the past: the generative potential of contradiction.

Shortcuts are a design methodology, but also an attitude of resistance to a system governed by precise, and sometimes stale, rules that therefore makes it possible to push limits and stereotypes and subvert them. Like unique characteristics, fundamental data of the design identikit, shortcuts become part of a creator’s work and situate his or her authoriality; they permit a critical evaluation of how modes of design have changed, between consolidated codes and new keywords, individuality and collective debate, solipsism and co-creation. Given the conceptual horizon outlined above, the proposals for this issue do not necessarily have to refer to the figure and work of Virgil Abloh.