ThinkArchitecture

NEWS ARCHIVE 2008 2007 2006 2005

	RESEARCH PRESENTATION Networked Cultures 95th CAA Annual Conference, New York 15/02/2007 4th MSE-Meeting, Prishtina, Kosovo 25/11/2006 Theory Forum 2006, University of Sheffield 20/11/2005 AA School of Architecture, London 03/11/2006 www.networkedcultures.org

24-26 November 2006
4th MSE Meeting / Prishtina

Middle-South-East Meeting

at the National Art Gallery in Prishtina, Kosovo

More than 30 art initiatives from Central and South-Eastern Europe have met in Prishtina, Kosova at the 4th MSE - Meeting to exchange information and experience, to discuss current issues and the development of future collaborations.

The MSE network was established in 2000 in Ljubljana.

The following two MSE - Meetings were organized by < rotor > and took place in 2002 and 2004 in Graz. For 2006, the Contemporary Art Institute EXIT in Peje invited < rotor > to co-organize the 4th MSE - Meeting in Prishtina.

20-21 November 2006
Architecture and Indeterminacy / Sheffield

Theory Forum 06

School of Architecture, University of Sheffield

Indeterminacy (in architecture) could be physical, formal, material but also social and political; it could be both theoretical and pragmatic, cognitive and experiential. The Forum proposes to investigate those moments when there is a questioning of the disciplinary limits, and of ways of theorising and practising architecture.

The Theory Forum series has included in the past: 'Architecture and Participation', 'Architecture and Space', 'Architecture and the Body', 'Architecture and Representation'; some of which have already been published (ie. Architecture and Participation, Spon 2005)

Forum organizers: Dr. Doina Petrescu, Dr. Renata Tyszczuk, Prof. Jeremy Till, Prof. Peter Blundell Jones.

architecture and indeterminacy

3 November 2006
Relational Architecture / London

inter10 fridays

Architectural Association London

Friday, 3 November 2006, 2:30pm
Morwell Street, Room 2.06

inter10

July 2006
Monu #05 - Magazine on Urbanism

NEW ISSUE OUT NOW!

Brutal Urbanism
Violence and Upheaval in the City

"Roughness, violence, brutality, seediness, ghettoization– all these are words that we associate much more readily with the city than with a suburb or the bucolic countryside. It seems even drug related crime develops a different character depending on whether it is in the city or the suburb. As the NYTimes reported in early July, identity theft is the crime of choice for meth addicts and both are flourishing in suburban regions of the US. In contrast crack cocaine or heroin dealers, are supported by heavily armed gangs usually set up in higher density urban zones. These high density areas are suited to ‘urban’ crimes like, prostitution, carjacking and robbery. So the suburban habitat seems perfectly suited for the sleepless methaddict roaming through the internet, garbage cans and outdoor mailboxes in a quest to gather identities, while the density and proximity of a city is more fertile soil for the impulsiveness and raw brutally that is typical for crack and cocaine criminality. In a similar direction one of the directors of the World Cup 2006 security in our interview echoed some thoughts that also show the relationships between spatial configuration and the art of preventing urban brutality. The entanglements of brutality and urbanism are even more extensive than we had anticipated when announcing our call for submissions this January. The contributions we publish in this issue do a great job describing some of the most salient linkages between urban life and violence.

These are just some of the topics that this issue of Monu presents: Media representation and context of brutality is one key aspect as our contributors show. Be it the possibility to easily record and distribute via cell-phone cameras as Peter Moertenboeck and Helge Mooshammer describe in their article. Or the impossibility to censor images of resistance as Austin Arensberg describes. In our leading article Loic Wacquant analyzes the intensifying of structural brutality in the city: economic, social and political exclusion and the backlashes that inevitably follow. But brutality can also be an almost integral part of the history of development, in some cities as articles about places as different as Jerusalem and Seoul by Tim Rieniets and Baruch Gottlieb respectively show. In this issue for the first time we also have a continuation of a topic from a previous issue of monu. Alex Schafran responded to an article by Michael Thompson from our 4th issue, which we present here together with a rejoinder. We encourage interested readers to follow along and engage the ideas presented in this issue."

The Editors
Bernd Upmeyer and Thomas Soehl

30 June 2006
Photography & The City, Dublin

PHOTOGRAPHY & THE CITY
International conference

29June – 1 July 2006

University College Dublin
Clinton Institute for American Studies

Friday, 30 June 2006, 3 – 4:30 pm
SPACE 1:
Ignaz Cassar (University of Leeds), Suspended Zones - Around London Prisons
Peter Mörtenböck (Goldsmith College London), Free Running: The City Between Image and Imagination
Gerard Smulevich (Woodbury University), The Reconfigured Frame

excerpt from the conference report:
[…]
The panel presentations provided rich comparative perspective on urban and visual issues, displaying a broad concern with the heterogeneity of urban visual culture. Together we explored multiple roles photography has taken on in relation to the city - as document, witness, survey, archive, ethnography, advertisement, artifact, and more. A key theme was the relationship between photography and urban change and many papers examined how photography contributes to the production of urban space, documents the emergent morphologies of urban development (including the indeterminate spaces that lack morphological definition, so called non places or terrain vague) and refers to broader shifts in the visual economy of the city. The affinity between photography and urban change has as much to do with time as space, for it foregrounds the temporality of modernity as a process of creative destruction and a number of papers addressed the visual dialectics of urban change (decline/regeneration) and the aesthetics or urban ruin.

Issues of urban identity and community were also paramount and there were many contributions exploring the role of photography in the mediation of the relationship between urban form and social value - these drew attention to how photography shapes issues of identity, place and citizenship within the city; how it documents urban otherness (that of homelessness, or of tourism, for example); and how it archives urban memory- this is also to say that these contributions drew attention to the aesthetic, ethical and socio-political issues compacted in the act of 'photographic seeing'

These issues were also present in the papers that paid close critical attention to the aesthetics of urbanity, especially to the erotic and spectacular variety of street life but also to the technical and ideological forms of urban surveillance that shadow the desire to make the city legible.
[…]

13-16 June 2006
Networked Cultures Panel Presentation / Moscow

Fourth International Conference

‘Hierarchy and Power in the History of Civilizations’

Russian Academy of Sciences
Moscow

Panel VIII: Networked Cultures – Negotiating Cultural Difference in Contested Spaces
Speakers: David Dibosa, Roxanne Easley, Cordula Gdaniec, Petra Gemeinböck, Andreas Kofler, Helge Mooshammer, Peter Mörtenböck, Lee Rodney

Panel convenor: Peter Mörtenböck (Goldsmiths, London)

This panel aims to discuss the dynamics and potentials of newly emerging socio-political networkstructures and the ways in which they re-conceptualise socio-political organisation through innovative forms of spatial practice. It looks at contemporary spatial practices characterised by a dislocation and dispersion of contributors, participants and spectators, by processes of fragmentation and multiplication, by a shifting of perspectives from dominant centralities to networked peripheries, clandestine economies and virtual sites. In doing so, this panel intends to question the ways in which the local is reinstalled as a new sphere of activities which can only be understood through its network of relationships with other localities.

Albeit an increasingly fictitious construct, urban space continues to be a central site of negotiation between conflicting cultural histories, narratives and values in Europe and between Europe and other world regions. Call centres, for instance, create the illusion of speaking to someone geographically close to the location of the client, they create a sense of ‘hereness’, whereas for economic reasons more and more call centres of the Western world are relocated to Asia. Territorial boundaries are both being undermined and upheld as is the case in the recently proposed building of Austrian prisons in Rumania or the British border controls on French territory. Both the contested geography and the contested imaginary described in these and in many other instances are indicative of a rapidly growing fragmentation and attempted re-stabilisation of space formed in and by the projection of dominant cultural narratives. These power moves challenge our traditional understanding of cities as sites of actual exchange: The exchange between communities is not bound to a material site any longer, it rather develops into a site of migratory co-existence and cross-cultural networking. What is at stake in these newly emerging communities of fleeting identifications and chance encounters is a new way of thinking through the problematics of an illusory ‘hereness’ in relation to an illusory ‘thereness’.

A crucial question addressed here is the extent to which we actually participate in these complexities of socio-political organisation and how we relate to concepts and images produced by culturally specific groups to which we belong or to which we do not belong. As participation can no longer be restricted to instruments such as memberships, polls and questionnaires, we have to look at new modes in which collectivities (contact zones, nodes of intensities and communities) are developed. How do new forms of communication and representation, in particular virtual-spatial ones, change the social spaces where different cultures meet? How do public fantasies interact with the actual living conditions of citizens? How do constructions of an illusory ‘hereness’ relate to constructions of a similarly illusory ‘thereness? Contributions to this panel consider different spaces of contested nature: spaces which exhibit or call for the potentiality of new forms of cohabitation and cross-cultural fertilisation. The panel investigates how such networked cultures reflect and generate new epistemological models and intends to critically assess their potential for cultural dialogue.

for more information on the conference see announcement on H-Soz-u-Kult

9 June - 9 July 2006
You'll Never Walk Alone / O.K Center for Contemporary Art Linz

'You'll Never Walk Alone'
Football and Fan Culture

Starting June 9th there will be excitement and prayers, tears and shouts of jubilation, fist fights and dancing, racist jibes and anti-racist agitation: The World Cup inflames the passions of millions. The O.K Center for Contemporary Art traces the enormous emotional impact of fandom and positions art, film, documentation, the self-aestheticization of fans and fan commerce in a highly charged relationship.

You‘ll never walk alone - the exhibition named after the legendary battle hymn from Liverpool additionally seeks to reconstruct changes in the concept of fans through a reflection on the space of the stadium: from the everyday cultural rituals of the crowd, through hooligan branding and all the way to domestication in the "disneyfied" and rigidly monitored entertainment arenas of the present.

9 June - 9 July 2006

O.K Center for Contemporary Art - Linz

Group Exhibition

Works by Stephen Dean FR/US, Josef Dabernig /AT, Massimo Furlan /CH, Julie Henry /GB, Peter Hörmanseder /AT, Kurt Lackner /AT, Peter Mörtenböck & Helge Mooshammer /AT, Antoni Muntadas /ES, Grazia Toderi /IT Auftragsarbeiten von: Wolfgang Dorninger /AT, Barbara Musil & Gunda Wiesner/AT, Antonio Ortega /ES.
Objects and photographs from "Progetto Ultra", IT fan archive, Gerd Dembowski’s /DE and Dieter Brasch’s /AT privat archives, the collection Klaus Littmann /CH and Claude Pascal‘s /CH record collection.

Curators: Thomas Edlinger & Martin Sturm

more...

16 March 2006
Border Culture / Windsor-Detroit

Border Culture

is a collaborative project between the University of Windsor (CAN) and the University of Detroit Mercy (USA).

The cities of Detroit and Windsor are situated on either side of one of the busiest international borders in the world. Border Cultures is a project lead by Lee Rodney and Marcel O’Gorman.

www.borderculture.org

9 February 2006
CRUISING / Berlin

	BOOK LAUNCH / BUCHPRÄSENTATION Helge Mooshammer Cruising - Architektur, Psychoanalyse und Queer Cultures Donnerstag 9. Februar 2006, 20.30 Uhr Buchhandlung Pro qm 10119 Berlin - Alte Schönhauser Straße 48

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