http://www.forensic-architecture.org/
Existing at the intersection of architecture, history, and the laws of war, Forensic Architecture refers to an analytical method for reconstructing scenes of violence as they are inscribed within spatial artefacts and in built environments.
We live in a world populated by structures --- a complex mixture of geological, biological, social, and linguistic constructions of materials shaped and hardened by history. Immersed as we are in this mixture, we cannot help but interact in a variety of ways with the other historical construction that surround us, and in these interactions we generate novel combinations. In turn, these synergetic combinations, whether of human origin or not, become the raw material for further mixtures. This is how the population of structures inhabiting our planet has acquired its rich variety, as the entry of novel materials into the mix triggers wild proliferations of new forms.
Metaphysics has traditionally represented contingency via the modality of possibility. Contingent being is thought via the different being that it possibly can be. We claim that this mediation is an improper "exchange" of contingency. It collides with what Baudrillard calls the Impossible Exchange Barrier. If contingency is to be thought absolutely, it must be thought independently of the map of possibilities. The notion of possible states must be eradicated throughout and Meillassoux's factual speculation should find its adapted medium instead.
Presented as the Distinguished Lecture at the annual meeting of the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction in Boston, Massachusetts, on August 1, 2008, this article rethinks central assumptions of the interaction order as conceptualized by Goffman and others with respect to global domains of activity. It proposes two new concepts, that of the synthetic situation and that of time transactions.
Recently, economic sociologists have tended to view markets as embedded in social relations and social networks, the structures they see as defining markets and framing economic action. This chapter draws a distinction between two types of markets: those based on a network architecture where social relationships carry much of the burden of specifying market behavior and of explaining some market outcomes, and markets that have become disembedded and decoupled from networks and exhibit what I shall call a flow architecture.
What the practice of the heterolingual address evoked in me was not the sense of the peculiarity of writing for two linguistically different readerships/ rather, it made me aware of other social and even political issues involved in translation, and it illuminated what I had long suspected about the assumptions of the nonheterolingual address, namely, the homolingual address. In this respect, the practice of writing these essays confirmed what I had expected when 1 analyzed the conceptions and regimes of translation in eighteenth-century discourse in what is referred to as Japan today.
Etymologically, translation evokes an act of moving or carrying across from one place or position to another, or of changing from one state of things to another. This does not apply only to the words of different languages, but also to human beings and their most important properties. They too can be moved across all sorts of differences and borders and so translated from one place to another, for instance from one cultural and political condition to another. Thus, one can culturally translate people - for a political purpose and with existential consequences.
The title of this text is a hybrid of two existing titles. “Architecture without Architects” was the name of an influential exhibition by the architect Bernard Rudofsky at the MoMA in 1964; “Housing: An Anarchist Approach” was the name of a famous book by the English architect and anarchist Colin Ward in which the author proclaims the rights and productivity of self-built housing and squatting in postwar Europe.
Among the most provocative theoretical developments in the con- temporary humanities is what has recently been called “critical cli- mate change.”1 At once an institutional initiative and a concept- metaphor, this phrase speaks to two overlapping concerns. The first concern is the so-called anthropogenic or man-made crisis of the planetary climate system resulting inadvertently from the residual carbon footprint of two centuries of fossil-fuel capitalism centered in the Global North.
'Gone but not forgotten: Archaeological approaches to the site of the former Treblinka Extermination Camp in Poland'.
Lecture by Dr Caroline Sturdy Colls, followed by presentation by Eyal Weizman and Susan Schuppli on the field-work of Forensic Architecture in Serbia and Bosnia.
Tuesday - 28 FEB - CRA Studio, 2pm.
GERALD NESTLER: ON PURPOSE -The New Derivative Order
KUNSTRAUM, BERNSTEINER
Schiffamtsgasse 11, 1020 Wien
Opening address: Eva Blimlinger
Rector, academy of fine arts vienna
Special feature in the Basement
Crystal Math. Video installation: Sylvia Eckermann, Lyrics: Gerald Nestler
Duration: February 29 – April 14, 2012
Opening hours: Thursday – Saturday, 4–8 pm, March 1 – 3 and March 8 – 10
and by appointment: +43 699 152 48 623 / mail@geraldnestler.net
Events
Sun March 11 - 5 pm : Performance
In cooperation with Europe in Motion and imagetanz/brut Vienna
Sun March 18 - 6 pm : Agency and the politics of financial derivatives and
algorithmic decision-making. A discussion with Elie Ayache, Thomas Feuerstein, Stefano Harney, Karin Knorr Cetina and Gerald Nestler
Sound performance: Szely.
Sat March 14 - 6 pm : Technopolitics und Technofinance
Brian Holmes, Armin Medosch, Gerald Nestler and other members of the research project Technopolitics
www.friendsandart.at
mail@friendsandart.at
www.geraldnestler.net
Interview with Peter Galison by Smudge Studio:
Peter L. Galison is a historian, writer, award winning filmmaker and the Pellegrino University Professor in History of Science and Physics at Harvard University. He was appointed a Guggenheim Fellow in 2009, he won the Max Planck Prize in 1999, and was named a MacArthur Foundation Fellow in 1997.
Haus der Kulturen der Welt, opening March 15, 19hs - curated by Anselm Franke
Animism is a multi-faceted exhibition project that addresses the reevaluation of modernity currently taking place along the lines of Bruno Latour’s “We Have Never Been Modern“. The exhibition’s starting point is the artistic-aesthetic process of animation, best known from cartoons and animation films, and examines its relationship with the categorial definitions and limits of the modern world-view.The attraction of animation, namely, is that it transcends borders: the difference between life and non-life, stasis and movement, the human and the animal, reality and imagination are systematically destabilized by animation.
The Exhibition places these phenomena in the context of the term ‘animism’, which stems from 19th-century ethnology. Animism is generally understood to be a religious practice, which, in contrast to the objectivizing standpoint of modern rationality views objects and nature as living things, which possess different forms of subjectivity. The project asks questions about the borders between objects and subjects, between nature and culture, between the psyche and the material world. The term ‘animism’ becomes that starting point of an inquiry into these borders – not least because they have become more fluid through the global and technological developments of recent years and are therefore being reevaluated. The exhibition, with works by about 30 international artists, creates an Ethnological Museum of Modernity in Haus der Kulturen der Welt.
The accompanying conference (15 – 17 March) brings together a range of theorists and artists who have played an essential role in the revision of the modern view of animism and thus open up new forms of access to our concept of “modernity". In cooperation with the publishing house diaphanes, the project in Berlin is accompanied by a publication with theoretical texts on the central topic of the exhibition. “Animismus – Revisionen der Moderne”, edited by Irene Albers and Anselm Franke, is the first German-language discussion of central positions in the international debate.
With the artists: Adam Avikainen, Agentur/Agency, Marcel Broodthaers, Didier Demorcy, Walt Disney, Jimmie Durham, León Ferrari, J.J. Grandville, Victor Grippo, Candida Höfer, Tom Holert, Ken Jacobs, Yayoi Kusama, Lars Laumann, Len Lye, Daria Martin, Angela Melitopoulos und Maurizio Lazzarato, Vincent Monnikendam, Istvan Orosz, Roee Rosen, Dierk Schmidt, Erik Steinbrecher, Paulo Tavares, Rosemarie Trockel, Martin Zillinger u.a.Mit den Konferenzteilnehmern: David Abrams, Heike Behrend, Cornelius Borck, Diedrich Diederichsen, Masao Fukushima, Harry Garuba, Hiromi Ito, Esther Leslie, Thomas Macho, Spyros Papapetros, Elisabeth von Samsonow, Erhard Schüttpelz, Isabelle Stengers, Michael Taussig
The project in Berlin is supported by the Kulturstiftung des Bundes.
"If nature is no longer a mere background for human activities, what change does it entail for the arts and the social sciences?" --- Roundtable Seminar - Bruno Latour and The Programme for Experimentation in Art and Politics - SPEAP (SciencesPo) together with the Centre for Research Architecture.
Monday March 5th 2012, 10:00 for a 10:30 start, in our studio/ RHB 312
The day is open to all members of the Centre for Research Architecture (MAs, PhD and CRA staff and FA fellows).
10:30 -- INTRO - CRA + SCIENCES PO
Eyal Weizman: brief intro to the Centre
Susan Schuppli Forensic Architecture.
Bruno Latour introduced the theme/question he proposed for the seminar:
"If nature is no longer a mere background for human activities, what change does it entail for the arts and the social sciences?"
11:20 > Paulo Tavares (an architect undertaking PhD at the Centre for Research Architecture and MARA coordinator)
Murky Evidence: Because nature has become a fundamental space to which cultural and political rights are bound, with increasing frequency and relevance, ecological systems tend to inhabit the courtrooms of national and trans-national forums as potential witness of legal violations. As the Earth enters the legal arena, the scientific and documentary techniques employed to mediate its testimony appear as sites through which the construction of historical-political narratives are disputed. Following the histories inscribed in murky earth-samples extracted from the soils of an environmental disaster zone in the Amazon, this presentation attempt to map out the messy assemblages of scientific practices, ngo-advocay, international law and global geopolitics that gathers around nature. Shattering the limits of pre-defined forums, nature participates in a scale-less political construct that connects the particular and the universal by articulating ethical engagements on behalf of humanity with the contingency of political-material histories. Animated by a legal court, organic-matter becomes vibrant and talkative entities whose opaque speech calls for a "radical universality" according to which human and non-human rights are mutually constitutive and interdependent.
11:40 > Nabil Ahmed (an artist undertaking PhD at the Centre for research architecture)
Radical Meteorology: The contemporary history of Bangladesh is one of the starkest examples of the politicization of natural disasters. The devastating 1970 Bhola cyclone, for example, had a direct impact on its war for independence from Pakistan. Coastal zones on the Bay of Bengal that form part of the Indian Ocean rupture nature and the political in a way where geologic, atmospheric and oceanologic forces resist and collide with human populations in dramatic fashion. At the same time recent discovery of oil and gas deposits is transforming the disaster zone into an area of renewed interest for global capital. Entangled within this calculus of risk, giant brown clouds, cyclones, the supreme terror from the sea and the dead buried there speak for a new political ecology in the age of man.
12:00 > Discussion
1:00-2:00pm > LUNCH
2:00 >Presentation by a group of 3 SPEAP students
3:00 > discussion
3:20 >John Palmesino, (architect, principle of Territorial Agency, MA lecturer, undertaking PhD at the centre)
NORTH: The architecture of a territory open on all sides: Today a number of surveying practices are reshaping the relation between contemporary polities and their spaces of operation. At the higher latitudes remote sensing, satellite imagery, multispectrum scans, biological prospecting, seismic analysis are being combined to present a set of images of possible industrial, geopolitical, logistic, and military reorganization. The North presents architecture with an escalating demand to re-conceptualise change and transformation: to what degree of magnitude can architecture operate? Can architecture supplement the grid of rules, criteria, laws that characterise the showcasing of human intervention at the higher latitudes by integrating spatial analysis with image making, geographic knowledge, remote sensing? How to think new processes and processions where knowledge production is intertwined with the forming of inhabited territories? Can architecture rethink its agency?
3:40 >general discussion followed on from John's presentation
4:00 > END of Seminar
Workshop with Lonnie Van Brummelen, 21 FEB - CRA – RHB 312 – 13:30 hs
http://www.mara-stream.org/events/drifting-studio-practice/
