Silvio Lorusso
Silvio Lorusso’s work focuses on the cultures and rhetorical regimes embedded in techno-social systems. He is concerned with the narratives and counter-narratives that define platforms, devices and interfaces. In doing so, he engages with the tensions surrounding notions of labour, productivity, autonomy, self-design, entrepreneurship, precarity and failure. Lorusso's practice combines various media such as video, website, artist's book, installation and lecture. He also writes essays, curates exhibitions and organises public programmes. He published Entreprecariat (Onomatopee) in 2018 and What Design Can't Do (Set Margins') in 2023.
Currently, Silvio Lorusso is an assistant professor and co-director of the Centre for Other Worlds at Lusófona University in Lisbon, and a tutor at the Information Design department of the Design Academy Eindhoven. He has been a member of the Varia centre for everyday technology and part of the editorial board of the Italian graphic design magazine Progetto Grafico. Between 2018 and 2023 he was a coding tutor at the Graphic Design BA of the Royal Academy of Art of The Hague. His work has been presented at MaXXI, Rome; Transmediale, Berlin; The Photographers' Gallery, London; Kunsthalle Wien; NRW-Forum, Düsseldorf. He holds a PhD in Design Sciences from the School of Doctorate Studies of the IUAV University of Venice. His writing has appeared in various magazines and publications, including Volume, Real Life Magazine, Minima&Moralia, Not, Modes of Criticism, Printed Web 3, Metropolis M, Ludica, Digicult. Since 2013 he runs the Post-Digital Publishing Archive. He lives in Lisbon. (2024)
Publications[edit]
- Entreprecariat: Siamo tutti imprenditori. Nessuno è al sicuro, forew. Geert Lovink, afterw. Raffaele Alberto Ventura, Brescia: Krisis, 2018, 228 pp. [1] (Italian)
- Entreprecariat: Everyone Is an Entrepreneur. Nobody Is Safe, Eindhoven: Onomatopee, 2019, 257 pp. [2] (English)
- Emprecariado — Todo mundo é empreendedor. Ninguém está a salvo, intro. Tulio Custódio, postf. Raffaele Alberto Ventura, trans. Eduardo Souza, São Paulo: Clube do Livro do Design, 2023, 288 pp. Publisher. [3] (Brazilian Portuguese)
- editor, with Pia Pol and Miriam Rasch, Here and Now? Explorations in Urgent Publishing, Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2020, 141 pp. [4] (English)
- editor, Other Worlds, newsletter journal on design, 2021ff.
- What Design Can’t Do: Essays on Design and Disillusion, Eindhoven: Set Margins', 2023, 352 pp. Author. Publisher.
- What Design Can't Do [デザインにできないこと], trans. Haruki Makio (牧尾晴喜), Tokyo: BNN, 2024, 352 pp. Publisher. (Japanese)