ThinkArchitecture

NEWS ARCHIVE 2008 2007 2006 2005

	RESEARCH PRESENTATION Networked Cultures Power & Space, University of Cambridge 06/12/2007 Defining Space, University College Dublin 13/10/2007 Space of Flows, Culture Lab Newcastle 23/06/2007 Inside Out, University of Edinburgh 07/06/2007 Common Work, Tramway Glasgow 19/04/2007 95th CAA Annual Conference, New York 15/02/2007 www.networkedcultures.org

10-14 December 2007
Merz Akademie, Stuttgart

Wahlwoche 2007_2

Kompaktprojekt
Networked Cultures
Gastdozenten: Peter Mörtenböck & Helge Mooshammer

Wagenhallen by spiceweazel

6-8 December 2007
Power & Space / Cambridge

Transforming the Contemporary City:
International Conference, University of Cambridge

The Power & Space conference seeks to investigate how diverse forms of inquiry across different disciplines address issues of power and space in the contemporary urban environment. In studying the contemporary city, as a pluralistic cultural, economic and political system, a variety of interpretive procedures provide insights on how power shapes space and, in reverse, how space reflects power. This conference pursues both approaches: first, from the point of view of the author-designer, it aims to track the conceptualisation, design and construction of space as an expression of multiple power structures, and second, from the point of view of the citizen-user, it aims to capture the experience and reading of space as dynamic power structures. The distribution of power in the contemporary city enables diverse mechanisms to transform the urban space. Studying these transformations offers ways to redefine these relations, especially insofar as it permits a reconsideration of the reasoning and the ideological convictions on which power relations are grounded.

11-13 October 2007
Defining Space / Dublin

Defining Space
International Interdisciplinary Conference, University College Dublin

Often invoked as the key parameter for understanding twentieth-century culture, does space retain this centrality today? Since the 1970s space has been increasingly problematised: imploded through technological acceleration (Virilio), emptied out by the circulation of consumer goods (Baudrillard), transformed into a trap through surveillance (Foucault), or manipulated to conceal profound economic transformations (Fredric Jameson and David Harvey). The once reassuringly neutral category of space has been unmasked as uncanny and warped (Anthony Vidler), distorted by relations of gender (Doreen Massey) and race (Homi Bhabha). After a century largely devoted to thinking and creating in spatial terms, does space remain a viable paradigm or has it reached a point of exhaustion, simultaneously banal and fraught?

definingspace.ie

15 Sep – 18 Nov 2007
Borderline Cases

Build Me Up / Tear Me Down

Provisional Structures and Contested Zones
Art Gallery of Windsor, Canada

As part of Architecture: A Borderline Case, a thematic series of exhibitions, projects and educational programmes, the AGW has organized two major group exhibitions of contemporary art. Build Me Up/Tear Me Down: Provisional Structures and Contested Zones includes the work of twelve international and Canadian artists who examine the city as a constantly changing arena of architectural and social activity. Buildings seem so permanent that we often forget that they are really temporary structures, held together by social, political, and cultural activities.

From photographs of trailers by Windsor-based photographer Brenda Francis Pelkey to the breathtaking image of the World Trade Centre disaster by New York artist Carolee Schneemann, this exhibition provides a range of perspectives on the ephemeral nature of the built environment. Several artists, including Vienna-based Sabine Bitter and Helmut Weber and Helge Mooshammer and Peter Mörtenböck from the UK, came to Windsor earlier in the year to create new work about our region. Other artists, including William Christenberry, who is from Washington D.C., and the mysterious Object Orange, a Detroit collective, photograph abandoned buildings in various states of decay. Botto and Bruno, from Turin, Italy, and Vancouver’s Jayce Salloum, examine the provisional structures of street culture, disaffected youth, and the homeless.

more ...

21-24 June 2007
Architecture in the Space of Flows / Newcastle

Architecture in the Space of Flows
Conference organised by Culture Lab & School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape, Newcastle University

Flows of energy, libido, capital, water and information make our lives possible. The buildings and spaces that support our activities inflect the flows; we tap into them, surf them, block them at our peril, or we may be excluded from them. Flows are global, but have local effects. Buildings are local, but their embodied energies flow from great distances, and their embodiments can cause local or distant turbulences. Everything is moving, intensifying, dispersing; growing, decaying, proliferating, networking, sedimenting, eroding. Understanding ourselves, our buildings, our cities as modulators of flows represents a fundamental shift in sensibility away from the perfect Euclidian geometries of Vitruvian man, to the productive consumer, the desiring subject. Cultures and spaces are fluid and relational, and designers are searching for ways to give expression to these telluric undercurrents that are shaping and re-shaping our worlds. New sensibilities are taking shape, and it is the aim of this conference to explore and gain understanding of emergent possibilities. The conference, or confluence, will be transdisciplinary, bringing together people who are developing ways of thinking about places and our responses to them, making use of ideas of flux.

Conference hosted by: Tectonic Cultures Research Group, School of Architecture, Planning & Landscape and Culture Lab

6-8 June 2007
Density Inside Out / Edinburgh

Density Inside Out
Interdisciplinary Conference, University of Edinburgh, Department of Architecture

To think of the city is always to invoke the question of density. Urban density has been celebrated, cultivated, worried about, managed, shunned. For some density is what makes the city full of promise, for others it is what determines its problems. Derived from the physical science formula for the ratio of mass to volume of inert materials, in urban applications density has operated as a seemingly objective measure of the ratio of people or activity to area. As a diagnostic tool density has been set to work in fields ranging from the pragmatic science of urban planning, to the arts of urban design. But the city is no mere inert material. It incorporates complex and fluid relations between bodies, infrastructures, technologies and built fabric, such that the matter of how density should be best measured - FAR, FSI, persons/ha, dwellings/ha - remains contentious. Indeed, as Kevin Lynch warned, as long ago as 1962, '[m]any tricks can be played with density standards'. Density is imbued with powerful figurative, cultural and ideological associations, connoting everything from the unregulated hyper-density of Kowloon Walled City, to the bureaucratic agrarian utopianism of Soviet 'desuburbism', to the hope of a planet facing environmental crisis. Indeed, density measures may well be a symptom of the struggle to comprehend the complexity of lived socio-material relations, shaped as they are by proximity, mobility, distance, contiguity, congestion, distinction, camouflage, porosity, intensity.

Density Inside Out conceives of density as a symptomatic material trope. It is curious about the way density has been put to use, be it as a defensive measure, a visionary formula, an instrument of governance, or a catalyst for urban innovation. It hopes to elaborate the ways density is a component of the city as a performed event. And it encourages investigations that hold the materialist, figurative and performative dimensions of density in creative tension. This conference offers an opportunity to re-imagine the relationship between conceptions of density and how technology, infrastructure, buildings and bodies are organized on, above, and even without the ground.

Conference Venue:
Architecture, School of Arts Culture & Environment
The University of Edinburgh
20 Chambers Street
Edinburgh EH1 1JZ
United Kingdom

29 April 2007
Radio Talk Resonance 104.4 fm, 18:00 GMT

Eyal Weizman/Centre for Research Architecture with Peter Mortenbock & Helge Mooshammer

'if the route':
the great learning of london

[a taxi opera]

a collaboration between artist beatrice gibson and musician jamie mccarthy

featuring:
the students from knowledge point
celine condorelli
kaffe matthews
tom mccarthy (INS)
simon phillips
eyal weizman with
peter mörtenböck & helge mooshammer

www.thegreatlearning.org

26 April 2007
Video as Urban Condition / Lentos Linz

This is a Simulation

Model cities, wish images and playgrounds
with Sabine Bitter & Helmut Weber, Helge Mooshammer, Sasha Pirker, Axel Stockburger

Thursday 26 April 2007, 7 pm

Lentos Kunstmuseum / Museum of Contemporary Art Linz

Video as urban condition is about the ways in which video has become part of the urban fabric: the omnipresent screen and the watchful eye that inhabits private and public space. Video is the ubiquitous equipment of the home, the street and the work place: the tube, the box, the telly, CCTV, info-screen, electronic billboard, in-store advertising, mobile, terrestrial, cable, satellite, pay-per-view, downloadable, for sale, to rent.

Video as urban condition is about how our knowledge, perception and fantasy of urban environments are mediated by video. Video is the mass medium of innumerable fragments, multi-channel, remote control, camcorder, games console, webcam, public service broadcasting, peer-to-peer, MTV, 24-hour news, reality TV, soap opera, family entertainment, pornography, home video.

The project examines a medium whose most distinctive characteristics are multiplicity and diversity, a form which is not contained by the norms of art institutions or the exclusive domains of professionals. Video is a medium of mass production — that is, mass participation — as well as of mass consumption. The accessibility of video technology has encouraged not only the private interests of home video and independent artistic activity, but has also prompted community and educational initiatives putting the medium in the hands of underprivileged or excluded groups in society. Video technology has moreover become established among the tools of communication and witness at the disposal of activists and campaigners who maintain a position beyond the mainstream. At the same time, the power of video as a means of controlling desire and space continues to grow.

The project recognises the diversity of activity in the field and challenges us to reflect on how the relations of representation in society are mediated by video.

>> video as urban condition

19-20 April 2007
Common Work / Glasgow

Preview of
Networked Cultures

at Tramway (Glasgow): Exploring socially-engaged arts practice

Common Work is a unique conference-event which aims to discuss and challenge some of the issues and tensions surrounding socially engaged arts practice

What is socially engaged arts practice - whose definition counts?
Who benefits?
What difference does it make?

Using Tramway’s world renowned visual art and performance spaces, Common Work will connect a range of people - artists, educators, academics - who share a belief in the power of art to explore issues of social relevance.
Common Work - a collaboration between the Participation Inclusion and Equity Research Network (PIER) and Tramway - promises to inform, challenge, entertain and enlighten

For more information please go to: www.ioe.stir.ac.uk/commonwork/abstract.html
Venue: Tramway, 25 Albert Drive, Glasgow, G41 2PE, Scotland

14-17 February 2007
Going Astray: Network Transformation and the Asymmetries of Globalisation / New York

Research presentation at the 95th CAA Annual Conference in New York

Although we know a great deal about the abstract dynamics of interaction networks and transient aggregations of spatial practices through instruments like social network analyses and actor-network-theories, there is little knowledge about the actual effects and future transformations of the emerging hybrid forms of network movements as they have only very recently started to bring together actors from such diverse fields as migrant communities, art biennials, geocultural production, architectural cartography and a plurality of other collectivities and practices on a global scale. This is in many ways a fragile and multi-compositional formation whose work has begun to counterbalance the homogenising forces of ‘global culture’ and the exclusion of social and cultural actors on both theoretical and practical levels.

The transformation of urban social networks, especially those whose work addresses issues of cultural difference, is a relatively new phenomenon and not much work has been produced which critically examines the interfacing of these networks with mainstream cultural economies defined by the ‘cultural turn’ of late capitalism. Our research looks at the detailed character and the dynamics of the relation between the culturalisation of contemporary global economy and the emergent heterogeneous networked cultures. How do the latter sit amidst a growing complex of media and consumption architectures on the one hand and an equally growing cultural sector funded by private companies and transnational bodies on the other hand? What kind of interfaces are developed between these actors? What are the effects of mutual contaminations between them? And how can the emergent forms of networked cultures retain their transformative potential? We locate these questions through a set of interrelated investigations into the challenges that transformation and relationality pose on networked cultures.

Globalism and Its Discontents

Thursday, February 15, 2:30 PM–5:00 PM
Trianon Ballroom, 3rd Floor, Hilton New York

Chairs: Aruna D’Souza, Binghamton University; Tom McDonough, Binghamton University

Where We Come From: Mobility and Belonging in Contemporary Art
T.J. Demos, University College, London

Going Astray: Network Transformations and the Asymmetries of Globalization
Helge Mooshammer, Thinkarchitecture; Peter Mörtenböck, Goldsmiths College, University of London

Collectivity and Its Discontents: Rethinking the Global and the Local in Current Art Practice
Grant Kester, University of California, San Diego

Discontinuous States: Art on the Border
Krista Geneviève Lynes, San Francisco Art Institute

From Nomadism to Cosmopolitanism
James Meyer, Emory University

CAA - College Art Association / 95th Annual Conference, New York City, 14 - 17 February 2007

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