The World of the
Instinctive Being

In psychoanalysis the labyrinth is a representation of the unconscious. A place where the "monster" lives, the embodiment of our censored thoughts and deepest urges, whether sexual or aggressive. In Anais Nin autobiographical novel Seduction of the Minotaur she refers to the Freudian concept of a confined monster. She suggests that since one should not suppress the mind itself, these repressed feelings must be "seduced" through conscious insight. In the novel, the protagonists' move to an almost paradise-like place renders her unable to escape her inner thoughts. People have always been questioning what exactly defines us as us. In Adrian Piper's Escape to Berlin, the "you", as a person, is described by a tiny sprout layered around by multiple protective layers. They hold the sprout in the middle, providing protection, nourishment, and warmth by creating an outer armor around it. We can look at these layers as the bones, flesh, blood, skin from a physical perspective but we can also look at it from a psychological perspective, as layers of personality and character that evolve during your lifetime. In my process of experimenting with various forms of labyrinths, with hand-drawing from classical labyrinths to more complex structured ones, I recognized a similarity. While labyrinths can be built with infinite paths, a classical labyrinth with only one pathway is always drawn from the endpoint, the center, back to the starting point. The center remains fixed, while the path unfolds around it layer by layer similarly to the structure of "you". The layers grow gradually from the personal experience that molds you into a distinctive and unique individual form, one that is impossible to be completely determined and understood by the outside world. What is our mind if it is not a simultaneous home and prison to our consciousness — the labyrinthine and the minotaur in it, hidden from prying eyes? In Greek mythology the Minotaur is a monster with the body of a man and the head of a bull. But while the creature is hidden in a vast labyrinth to conceal and contain its uncontrollable nature, I look at the instinctive being of the mind in a kinder way. It is not a being aggressive by default. Its movement is led by the impulses of the outside world. It is a response. In Borges' short story The House of Asterion the minotaur inhabits a boundless size of labyrinth that can only be filled by his imagination. He wishes to show the labyrinth to the outside world, to invite people in. The labyrinth is his home, but without guests it is a place of loneliness, stuck in time. A place of complete predictability, where the minotaur knows all the shapes of the labyrinth. The infinite gardens and similarly shaped pathways continues endlessly. In his isolation he seems to crave attention, connection or almost anything to give meaning to his existence. Borges' short story projects an outcome where he welcomes the hero Theseus, who goes into the labyrinth to kill the minotaur in order to free him from the repetition.

In the postmodern world, design and technology work together to form a smooth environment, where structures and signs create frictionless communication. Design always brings a message that helps to position yourself, whether it is a street sign or an underground techno party poster. It evokes interest and visualizes the message. A good design does this almost seamlessly. When you enter an airport you do not have to think deeply about the way to the check-in area. It's environment that leads you into a linear pathway, with signs showing what you can bring onto the terminal and what you have to throw away. Where to show your ID and, after the security, which path to follow to get to your departure gate. In this case the smooth order and structured design is used for effectiveness and safety. Modern design here helps the airport to function, from cancelling out everyday annoyance to physical dangers. It is a necessity but also a place where human work tends to reduce to automatic movements. But what happens if we look at IKEA, the Swedish home furnishing store, which actually has a very similar layout offering a single route with no alternative paths and no dead ends. There, the only choices you make are which products to buy at the end of the route. Here the frictionless pathway is not for safety but a conscious design choice to limit your focus to the furniture and objects displayed. The number of display rooms gives you the illusion of variety but the final goal is to organize the furniture in an aesthetically pleasing way in order to sell them. In these environments, perception slowly becomes automatic. Viktor Shklovsky, the Russian formalist, once wrote that habit dulls awareness. In the 1910s, an age where digital technology was completely nonexistent, he observed how because of automation in work we no longer really look, and by extension, no longer really think. This not only applies to that workplace but spreads to other parts of life-we basically stop loving and living. In Shklovsky's words: 'life is lost, disappearing into nothingness. Automation swallows things up, your clothes, your furniture, your wife and your fear of war.' When actions repeat frequently enough, we stop really seeing them. We move along familiar paths. Contemporary digital systems intensify this. Their smoothness removes hesitation, guiding attention step by step. It feels like free movement, but the direction is already set. Images replace one another too quickly for reflection to settle. Much of contemporary digital technology is designed to eliminate friction, striving for seamlessness. Resistance disappears from interaction. Actions that once involved bodies, objects, and other people are compressed into small gestures on a device. Using an interface becomes easier than having an actual conversation with another person. Convenience comes at the cost of genuine connection and understanding. In this frictionless environment movement is reduced while the stream of content continues without pause. Each action leaves traces as data, making behavior increasingly predictable, guiding attention forward along paths that appear open but have already been calculated. New curated content in our preferences mirrors the previous ones. Like the minotaur's labyrinth these systems are an infinite repetition of the same old topics with the illusion of the new. Additionally, nowadays automated content not only shows what you want to see but is also used to generate resentment and fear simply for engagement. One actual political example could be the AI video the current Hungarian government produced and shared in order to incite fear and resentment against Ukraine. A group of blind folded solders waiting for execution with a gun painting at them, edited with a crying little girl looking out a window. It was circulated through official social media channels and suggests that, if the current government were not re-elected, Hungarian men could be sent to the Ukrainian-Russian front line and face death. The scenario presented is hypothetical and has been criticized as a manipulative use of AI in political communication. The too-smooth world of apps needs its own "bad friction," let it be politics or war. It influences our instinct without actual reflection. Does not stop automation but rather fuels it through automatic emotional responses.

I argue that in order to regain our autonomy, we need moments of temporary disorientation that distance us from the smooth current of the digital surface. For this, we need "good friction". But what does friction really mean? Philosopher Miriam Rasch suggests that "frictionlessness can be understood as an elaborate design for the path of least resistance". By contrast, friction becomes resistance. The unpredictable. Something that might disturb the well-crafted, seamless design used by software and hardware development since the 1990s. It is the dynamic between humans and the world. Designing in Friction: A Call for Friction in Digital Culture says "friction is an essential ingredient that makes up our humanness and sparks human connection." It is something that creates engagement and care. Disorientation is a product of friction. It is not a malfunction or a problem to be solved but rather something essential for reflection. With movement comes friction and with the resistance of friction disorientation ought to arise. The important part is that the disorientation does not have to be constant: it can be a temporary state that brings us to a halt and creates distance. From this action comes "defamiliarization": making what we see appear unfamiliar again. Out of this, personal thoughts and unique choices appear reflective, just as much of a person's inner world as the outside world. One way to experience defamiliarization is through the Situationist practice of the derive, or drifting. Moving without a fixed direction or purpose through a city allows one to step outside habitual patterns and navigate space through intuition. The Situationist International was a group of avant-garde artists, writers, and poets who rejected all external control including social and cultural norms. In the book Four Times Through the Labyrinth, Olaf Nicolai and Jan Wenzel write about how they described life often as a labyrinth and Situationist building designs were often seen as labyrinths with their diverse passages and developing spaces. These buildings possessed a conscious attempt to provoke and to invite people for "micro-wanderings". They planned to install a similarly constructed exhibition called The World as Labyrinth (Die Welt als Labyrinth) in the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam as a space for derive: "Visitors were to move without break from the labyrinth of the exhibition to that of the streets and canals outside. This was a space of infinite mutation, a labyrinth with a clear entrance, a clear exit, and many blind alleys in between." An installation to experience disorientation, and to get lost in it.

Art has the capacity to break through the habitual and the seamless. Shklovsky believed that art can stop automatization through defamiliarization. And in our new smooth world of design, I believe that we need to incorporate art more than ever. Even in our technologically fueled media we see how while AI is being used more widely and taking over design skills, art direction and curation are becoming more important. Beauty by itself appears to be not enough, we need people to give meaning to the aesthetics. Artists need to create friction, to stay ambiguous. And modern design should take inspiration from them. One simple example is the poster designs of Laak.Club, a cultural space and musical venue situated in The Hague. They give very limited information about their events, by crossing out the upcoming DJs' names, leaving only a space that indicates there will be people, but you won't necessarily know who. The lack of information might surprise you, make you actually look up their event on their website. While designs like these ultimately can never be free from the end goal of consumption similar to the IKEA example before, artists can. Shklovsky brought the examples of literature for defamiliarization but from a contemporary perspective video can be also a tool to drag you into a labyrinthine story. One great example is Zuza Banasinska's film, created from archival materials of the Educational Film Studio in Lodz. Grandmamauntsistercat is a collection of Polish propaganda films edited and cut up endlessly to distance itself from its original meaning and begin to function as a new auto-fictional memory. It tells a story about a matriarchal family through the eyes of a child, trying to understand identity from a queer perspective. Here the friction comes from the material's original purpose and the new narrative. The originally sexist and anthropocentric material transforms into a form of resistance. Making a connection between images and time. Another example can be Tarkovsky's Mirror and its labyrinthine storytelling with a poet's series of memories from childhood till his 40s in a nonlinear structure connected not by time or place, but by particular individuals and motifs that randomly come to mind. In Mirror everyday things seem unreal, making you question them, to make reality dreamlike and dreams real. The lack of complete understanding propels us forward, tears us from habits, and opens our mind to the new and the unfamiliar. In Mirror it shows that while there is a need for understanding, its absence is also acceptable. If algorithmically seamless design is like a classical labyrinth with a single path leading us without any real choice, disorientation is like a temporary stop at the crossing of multiple pathways. It creates friction, and gives you things to question and to explore your inner self. It helps to create space for people who refuse to be quiet and seamless.