Foaming relations: The ethico-aesthetics of relationality

The German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk uses the analogy of foam to describe the relations that cohere between one individual and the next, each co-isolated in the context of the modern city. Our habits, in co-production with the framing of our urban habitus, determine that we are arranged as networks of isolated, bubble-like, monadic cells. By effervescent means we nevertheless find ways of communicating across the cell walls that we share, and which divide us, or do we? I will enlist a series of concepts to consider the foaming relations that go toward forming the life of the urban habitus. These will include, relational aesthetics (Nicolas Bourriaud); ethico-aesthetics (Félix Guattari); human and nonhuman relations (Bruno Latour) all of which will help toward articulating a foaming, bubbling mass of relations that are external to their terms. The use of Sloterdijk¿s concept of `foam city¿ will be employed to consider contemporary modes of occupation of the city and how occupation is a processual activity that requires innovative responses to ever-transforming spatio-temporal networks. Following Guattari, this paper will venture an ethico-aesthetic approach to the way problems can be framed by architects and designers toward new modes of occupation of urban fields enlivened by the circulation of human and non-human actors. Practices of occupation accompanied by relations of affect and percept require an ethico-aesthetic rethinking of the design process and its modes of conceptualisation.