Tony (Anthony) Hart Fry

• PhD
• Professor at University of Tasmania and The Studio at the Edge of the World

The category of violence is not to be taken as self-evident. Rather it needs to be examined as a complexity within and beyond its forms in war. Underscoring discussion of modes of violence are fundamental questions about the relation between ‘the human,’ violence, and nature, as they have been theorised. So posed violence is reviewed with reference...

By consolidating prior thoughts on Unstaging War what is now outlined is a proto-process able to be developed as a theoretically informed critical practice of unstaging framed by the concept of ‘the event.’ The performative dimension of the event will be seen as being philosophically underscored. In total, the objective of the process as it has bee...

Two major factors that have substantially altered the relation between war and law will be examined. One is the rise and scale of asymmetrical warfare and insurgencies. What this development over recent decades has made clear is that the abandonment of the laws of war has been part of a strategy to offset tactical disadvantage. Key to this is the u...

Unstaging War is introduced in the context of a global crisis and challenge that relationally connects geopolitical reconfigurations, the rapid transforming of technology, massive problems gathered under the category of unsustainability as all linked to the current and future impacts of climate change as associated loss of biodiversity and current...

While prior reference has been made to the breakdown of the binary relation between war and peace it is now looked at in some detail. Initially, the problem of the concept of peace in the late modern world, and the nature, hopes, failures and history of peace activism and studies are all considered—this from the perspectives of philosophy and insti...

Acknowledging that Unstaging War does nor exist as a familiar idea, method or practice what is addressed is its creation as process—elemental to it is embracing a more developed and complex comprehension of the concept of ‘proximity,’ this to the ways war is mediated by word, voice, image and sound as they all constitute the content of representati...

What is now brought into question is what, as a fragmenting species, we are and are becoming. In doing so the Eurocentric construction and universalization of the human by modernity is exposed as a problematic imposition on the beings of other cosmologies. The past of the human is exposed as a cultural invention of global export rather than as ‘nat...

There is now a significant gap between common perceptions and representations of war and its actual and emergent actualities. What will now to be presented provides a variety of ways in which the think war that are more appropriate to present times. The overall framing is via the concept of ‘the event’ as it has been theorised by a number of philos...

What this chapter brings together are five key transformative factors that are changing the conditions, form and space of war. Starting with climate change, it is understood historically and futurally as a cause of war as it will increasingly impacts on natural systems and displaces large populations. Many climate-linked associated conflicts are al...

A discussion of peace continues here, but moves from a conjunctural critique of the concept to examine the political and ideological contexts. There will be a critical, historical and contemporary politically framed focus upon nationalism, idealism and cosmopolitism. The argument put forward will acknowledge that geopolitical tensions and climate c...

By establishing the historical and contemporary relation between war and philosophy this chapter makes specific connections to the unbroken history of trauma and theories of warfare. Substantial consideration is then given to rendering a series of key issues of concern, these include: ethics, reason, unreason, epistemology and the ‘un-thought.’ The...

This book presents the concept of ‘unstaging’ war as a strategic response to the failure of the discourse and institutions of peace. This failure is explained by exploring the changing character of conflict in current and emergent global circumstances, such as asymmetrical conflicts, insurgencies, and terrorism. Fry argues that this pluralisation o...

The aim of this essay is to contribute to the development of a paradigmatic shift in how design is understood, transformed and practiced in the Global South. It does this by establishing the case for building a strong contextual relation between design, colonialism, and the mobilised counter-agency of decoloniality. Thereafter, design for/by the Gl...

This ‘The Studio at the Edge of the World’ article addresses the issue and responses to the challenge of ‘engaging unsettlement’ and growing disjuncture between the worlds in which we dwell and act and the modes of representing that are available to us to make sense of these worlds.

Outline the nature and project of the education/think tank studio

This article looks at design education in the context of design’s ontological designing, and how design is positioned in relation to contemporary global challenges. It deploys this perspective to argue for design becoming a redirective practice.

This article takes Martin Heidegger’s well-trammeled essay “The Origin of the Work of Art” as an object of reflection, engagement, and redirective innovation in order to think design now. The approach taken rests upon reading Heidegger from the perspective of a very different context: our present. By implication, engaging his text becomes informed...

Borderlands are places that used to be part of the colonial or developing countries discourse and currently experience the afterlife of their imposed existence. They experience unsustainability as more than the biophysical impacts of the city; they face its modes of defuturing via structures of socioeconomic classification, physical and cognitive d...

The last in Tony Fry’s celebrated trilogy of books continues his radical rethinking of design. Becoming Human by Design’s provocative argument presents a revised reading of human ‘evolution’ centred on ontological design. Examining the relation of design to the nature of the human species - where the species came from, how it was created, what it b...

Rather than appealing to the agency of community and the received discourse of sustainability, this paper offers a critical perspective on both concepts. It puts forward a contextually dynamic view of urban futures – presented at a moment when the continuity of human settlement in its current forms appears as increasingly problematic. Against this...

In Chapter 2, “Getting over Architecture: Thinking, Surmounting and Redirecting”, Tony Fry provokes us to think about what is left “unthought”, or what is thought of in another way. In this essay, trying to think the yet-to-be-thought is not based on conformity to existing modes of scholarship. Fry’s essay places architecture and urban design in a...

This article examined how environmental/social unsettlement impacts on the future of cities

Indivisibly, industrialised western people exist, at best, in inoperative communities – marked by the loss of myth and the sacred (as community). Inoperative co-existence is what they/we share: it is the normative condition of our instrumentalised/functional individual and collective existence. This encompasses a loss of the communal, commonality a...

Since Al Gore's movie, An Inconvenient Truth, climate change has become a figure of popular consciousness, with governments and corporations of the industrialised world feeling increasingly pressured to express concern and take action. However, there is a vast gap between these moderate responses and the radical, immediate action that the problem o...

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One of the expected effects of climate change highlighted by Al Gore's film 'An Inconvenient Truth' is that of growing numbers of environmental refugees. The prospect of whole coastal populations – most dramatically in places like Bangladesh – being displaced by rising sea levels is indeed alarming, nevertheless such a scenario is but the extreme e...

“For design 'redirective practice' has three areas of focus: adaptation in face of what has to change to counter the unsustainable; the elimination of what threatens sustainment by designing 'things' away; and prefiguration, which is designing in order to redirectively deal with what is coming.” [Design Philosophy Politics 1:07 forthcoming]

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As the dynamic of globalisation intensifies the reach of a western model of design, more and more designers and design thinkers around the world are becoming concerned about the relation between design and development. The emergence of this concern is to be welcomed, but at the same time, there are serious deficiencies in the way the issue is being...

Dominantly, designers and architects who are preoccupied with 'sustainability' strive to realise their objective by designing artefacts and built structures with reduced environmental impacts. To a lesser extent they are also a concerned with retrofitting existing products and buildings. One has to see such activity in the context of (i) globalisat...

I am taking ethics to mean the body of values by which a culture understands and interprets itself with regard to what is good and bad.

In an article in a previous issue of DPP 'sustainment' was placed in the context of an epochal shift, which was named as 'The Sustainment'. The magnitude of this shift equates with the move from the ancient to the modern world. Its imperative is to counter the inherent defuturing of the economy, cultures and institutions of the contemporary 'develo...

Unquestionably philosophically rigorous theory is out of fashion, out of favour. This was graphically illustrated on April 11 at a large gathering in Chicago convened by the prestigious journal Critical Inquiry to discuss the future of theory. A dozen star academics faced an audience of over five hundred. Reportedly they expected ideas and strategi...

The essay is introduced with an address to its mode of argument, the defamiliarisation of the still not entirely resolved term—‘sustainability’. It then proceeds through four sections. Section I, visits architecture and design outside their orthodox characterisations. In section 2, connections are made between architecture (as design), anthropocent...

This paper argues that there has to be a far more serious engagement with the ways in which climate change will significantly alter the nature of the environment, along with human rural and urban futures. Historically, and pre-historically, climate change has been a major formative and transformative agent of human culture (Rapoport: 1969, Fagin, 2...

Why Fundamentalism? was an exhibition proposal and critical writing project developed from concept phase through to detailed proposal. It included an edited video document that lay out its core ideas and presented the diverse voices of each collaborator. A number of key themes were engaged around the hot-button (and much misunderstood) concept of F...

Party 25 involved the conception and public launch of a radically new form of political party during that year’s Australian general election. The entire project was also intentioned as a conceptual artwork. Party 25 avoided conventional party-political approaches and was neither a protest group nor an advocacy organisation, but rather a new form of...

Fundamental Sounds was a live, intercultural and multidisciplinary concert that presented a new synthesis of music, performance & visual arts addressing the imperative of sustainability in a new and evocative form. The outcome was a ninety-minute concert, performed at a major concert hall venue, involving four live musicians, numerous performers &...

Thesis (doctoral)--University of Birmingham, 1984.

Design Futuring argues that ethical, political, social and ecological concerns now require a new type of practice which recognises design's importance in overcoming a world made unsustainable. By using case studies in industrial design and architecture, Tony Fry exposes the limitations of existing 'sustainable design' and offers ideas for ethical c...

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Paper delivered at International conference in Dilli, East Timor No Yes