Bøker av Nicolas Nova

Now back in print, this field guide to our new world of hybrid specimens--gorgeously printed in silver ink on black paper--catalogs the conflation of the technosphere and the biospherePlastiglomerates, surveillance robot dogs, fordite, artificial grass, antenna trees, Covid, decapitated mountains, drone-fighting eagles, standardized bananas: all of these specimens--some more familiar than others--are examples of the hybridity that shapes the current landscapes of science, technology and everyday life. Inspired by medieval bestiaries and the increasingly visible effects of climate change on the planet, French researcher Nicolas Nova & art collective DISNOVATION.ORG provide an ethnographic guide to the "post-natural" era in which we live, highlighting the amalgamations of nature and artifice that already co-exist in the 21st century.A sort of field handbook, A Bestiary of the Anthropocene aims to help us orient ourselves within the technosphere and the biosphere. What happens when technologies and their unintended consequences become so ubiquitous that it is difficult to define what is "natural" or not? What does it mean to live in a hybrid environment made of organic and synthetic matter? In order to answer such questions, Nova & DISNOVATION.ORG bring their own research together with contributions from collectives such as the Center for Genomic Gastronomy and Aliens in Green as well as text by scholars and researchers from around the world. Polish graphic designer Maria Roszkowska provides illustrations.

While the overhaul of higher education linked to the Bologna process encouraged the development of design research in art schools, this interest pre-existed in design agencies which were quick to produce surveys in various forms. In this essay, Nicolas Nova synthesises the main specificities of this type of approach and demonstrates how it escapes the academic canon. Indeed, design research is an expanding field, which produces knowledge in a wide variety of forms: texts, drawings, prototypes, interfaces, etc. The author analyses the format of the survey as being at the centre of many approaches to design research - a survey that draws on the methods of social sciences and journalism, but is not confined to the disciplinary framework, gathering and re-appropriating notions from a wide range of fields. More than by a single method, it is by questions relating to specifically invented processes, devices and tools that these surveys in design set themselves apart from those in the social sciences. Thus,this research is often based on the creation of material objects, likely to shed light on phenomena, of which the author presents a series of recent and original examples. Nicolas Nova considers that these approaches to design research radiate beyond their chosen field. Indeed, they influence the "creative social sciences", which seek to broaden their range of research and restitution processes and open the way to research in contemporary art, which is also in a booming phase.