Participants are invited to submit an abstract (max 300
words) addressed to one of the three proposed tracks for scholarly, scientific
and artistic contributions (please see instructions at the end of the section).
OPEN TRACKS.
1. When Tools become Instruments: Masterful Articulations in
Architecture and the Arts
Chair: Michael Doyle, ATTP, TU Wien; Diana Alvarez-Marin,
CAAD, ETH Zürich.
There is something about invention in architecture and art
that cannot be properly willed, cannot be reduced to a minimum effort for a maximum
effect. Almost counter-intuitively, it is through repeated practice that
suddenly something that was not possible suddenly becomes so. Whether it
is addressed in education, practice or research, this poses a particular
challenge, because it precludes recourse to any single normative and
prescriptive design methodology. If future architects and artists are no longer
simply to emulate unquestionably the ‘Geniuses’, how can educators,
practitioners or researchers work with the technics
available today not
as tools to be learned, but as instruments with which
one cultivates, through repeated practice, a literacy or a mastership?
This track seeks contributions looking to address this theme through the
following questions:
1.1 While there is a tendency to associate the
artisanal with the ‘analogue’ and the technologically fabricated with the
‘digital’, this association obscures the fact that any technique (or
technology) always articulates the continuous (technically, the analogue) and
the discrete (technically, the digital). How can we work
analogically with the digital and digitally with the analogue in ways that
foster inventive articulations that are as crafty as they are
computational? How do we articulate machine intelligence and human
intelligence without entirely subjecting one to the other?
1.2 Invention does not necessarily
require the computer, nor does it require a radical break with the past or with
what is already there. How can forms of externalization (drawings, paintings,
texts, etc.), either fabricated with or without the computer benefit from the
plenty of data available today? How can the increasing availability of
data be instrumentalized towards a literacy in the modes of construction,
fabrication and dwelling? If such a gesture would be less about
analytically identifying the elements or logics of that which has been
‘rendered’ (geometrically, visually, with ‘tools’ in two or three dimensions)
than about indexing a milieu of potentiality (the n-dimensional domain of the
instruments), how can such a literacy be employed to create the meaningful, the
unexpected, the carefully crafted?
2. City, Civility and Post-Political. Models of Freedom and
Conflict
Chair: Selena Savic ATTP, TU Wien
City and Civility share the etymological root *kei- also
common to civic and civilization, pointing back to the act of “lying” with a
secondary sense of “beloved, dear”. We lie our cities with love and reason, we
inhabit them, imbue them with lawfulness and order, we struggle in them,
redesign and rebuild them, take stances, challenge governments, and meat each
other. Contemporary city, with all its faces, is the world we have created, yet
we struggle to find room for participation and engagement – how can we
articulate inventive models for addressing civility, rather than remaining
entrenched in oppositional sovereignties?
Civility relies on an articulation of trust, freedom and
conflict. The suggestion with the ‘post-political’ is that it comes at a time
of a perceived alienation from politics, and it takes up the debate on the end
of history that can be traced back to Hegel. Throughout different articulations
of post-history, post-political, and post-democracy, it appears that in some
way, we have eradicated the real conflict for the sake of liberal ideology,
which in turn has evacuated courage, imagination and idealism. Besides
inequality, this has brought about a transformation of politics into a
technocratic apparatus of automated counting and ordering.
In this panel, we propose to address the questions of
technocracy and post-political with projective models that characterize
lawfulness freedom and contradiction constitutive of civility. The rise of
urban civic movements worldwide and the active involvement of architects,
researchers and artists therein testifies to the importance of this new ground
of scientific and artistic engagement. Such requests for a deepened and
improved democracy also reach the studio, the atelier and the laboratory, and
reunite with the recent rise in architectural and scientific attention to
societal issues, as well as with the foregrounding of citizens as co-creators.
The panel invites contributors interested in inventing ways to position within
these topic that make the city and civility.
2.1. If the resolution of conflict between alternative
socio-economic movements lends itself to technocracy, how can we articulate our
relationship to technics and to civility in novel, augmenting ways without
falling into technocratic traps?
2.2 What kind of persona is the architect-citizen? When we
speak of participation and responsibility, particularly that of an architect
(planner) that has high stakes in a city space-making and decision-making, we
tend to see the citizens on one and the city-makers on opposing sides of
spatial involvement. Increasingly, thought, it becomes evident that the
separating line does not hold and that we need to theorize new forms of spatial
engagement and responsibility.
2.3 How could we (re)articulate lawfulness freedom and
contradictions so that we respond more accurately to the conditions of
contemporary city?
3. Cognitive and sensory strategies for understanding and
shaping our environment, from the room to the territory.
Chair: Darío Negueruela ALICE, EPFL, Julien Lafontaine
ALICE, EPFL, Leonardo Impett Max-Planck Institut für Kunstgeschichte
Human capacities to modify our environment largely depend on
our engagement with others and with space. Such engagement, in turn, deploys
different cognitive and affective strategies that have an influence in the
kinds of spaces conceived and constructed. In this respect, active involvement
in space and with others can be said to bear consequences for how and what we
learn. Gestures, figurations and attitudes perform thus a mise en espace,
transcribing social phenomena onto space with the help of specific physical and
conceptual supports, or scaffolds, highlighting how space is operational to the
reflection on living together (vivre ensemble).
This track aims at addressing the combined and
interdependent role of the physical and space making implications of emotions
and the cognitive consequences of spatial conditions in forms of sociality. The
consideration of the epistemic capacities of the body in space invites us to
move from a more abstract, computational and individualist model of knowing
towards a more situated, collaborative and enactive framework. Moreover, if we
consider knowledge not to simply be a “cold” understanding, but to invest a
crucial bodily dimension, we begin to understand how different modalities of
engagement with others and with space give way to the birth of constellations
of meaning. This interdependent and non-deterministic stance to space making
through physical conceptual, sensory and social scaffolding elicits the
following questions:
3.1 If basic spatial figurations and gestures contain and
give shape to our world, how can rearrangements of our imaginaries, ideas and
emotions give form to novel spaces? What is the unnoticed relevance of everyday
physical actions for imagining a different future? How can they perform as
foundational acts capable of breaking with spatial and social inertias?
3.2 To what extent or in which manner these proto-spatial
gestures, figures and attitudes help us articulate alterity in our increasingly
segregated contemporary urban contexts? How do they enact spatial conditions of
encounter and avoidance upon which urbanity is based?
3.3 If our experiential and situated perspective reunites
our appraisals of diverse scaled phenomena in one continuous thread of embodied
experience, where space plays a non-trivial role,; In which ways actively
working with such affective and cognitive strategies can provide us with a
capacity to address the conception and construction of our cities in a
trans-scalar way? And what would be the tools to translate into physical space
concepts that are derived from these strategies ?.
Contributions to this track may address the effects of
spatial arrangements in the modes of social interaction, compare the effects of
the eventful on the formation of cognitive frameworks in contrast to everyday
actions and practices, or focus on the consequences of an epistemological
approach to space through attention to the sensory, atmospheric experimentation
or philosophies of practice. This track particularly welcomes critical
reflections on the crossing between epistemology of space and the nature of
human agency that emerge from these above-mentioned issues. Moreover, attention
to reflective narratives dealing with the bodily dimension in spaces of
conflict or cooperation is encouraged.
SUBMISSION INSTRUCTIONS
Please submit your abstract before Sept. 10th 2018
to: alice.lab@epfl.ch
In your submission, please follow the following
instructions:
name the subject of the email: scaffolds_submission_your
name
attach a pdf of your abstract with the name:
scaffolds_submission_accronym of your abstract title.
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