Aguilera + Guerrero / AGUA arquitectos

Información generál

Unface Book is an experimental publishing project aimed at using Facebook's tools to generate an evolutive book. This book unfolds inside an album of 'Photos of You' as a collection of intertwined thoughts exploring the resonances between physical and digital interfaces. An unwanted layer of meaning and utility is added to Facebook to suggest other possible and non-regular digital "uses", still supported by Facebook technologies.

What / The topic: Unface Book's contributions explore the meaning of design as part of the poetics (and politics) of being-in-space, wether we are talking about digital or physical spaces. We have invited almost one hundred contributors to compose a piece around this topic focusing on design elements such as walls, windows or floors, which you can find in the design of architectural interfaces and digital social spaces as well, like Facebook itself. As Unface Book's fill-ins (design elements) mirror their support (the social networks' design), everything in play opens out to an inmersive game of dualities and ambivalent meaning. The density and the conflicts of meanings provoke the emergence of blanks for readers.

How / The protocol: Every contributor associates an image and a quote from different authors under a tittle that expresses its relation. Pieces would be designed as a reaction on the precedent material, so that they build up an on-going conversation. The accidental book that stems from this process is a composite of tangible and spectral content. As long as it makes sense, we will regularly upload received contributions to Unfacebook's page 'photos of you' album. Every two years we will publish a printed edition under a collective license. All the additional actions involved in the process such as mailing or encounters are also potential content. As a subject of design, the process becomes the form.

Why/ Concerns: Unface Book explores the productive use of social networks as both a space for freedom and as post-industrial commodities. It helps visualize the crossover nature of intellectual property, the limitations of the legal definition of authorship, and the restrictions of the conventional management of authors’ rights in relation to current technological capabilities. Ultimately, Unfacebook seeks to test actions usually blocked by new media's logic, such as intersubjectivity, opacity, detournement or excorporation. Our main drive is to explore the possibility to overcome confinement and individuality through intersubjective constructs.

"The only resources and commodities from which the subordinate can make their own subcultures are those provided by the system that subordinates them."

—John Fiske, 1989.