| ARCHITECTURE
+ PHILOSOPHY 2006 PROGRAM [top] MARCH:
CLEAN Artist Nicolas Low discusses his latest project: providing street-level insight into how our local urban spaces are transformed by an international event. CLEAN is an sensor-driven, ambush-style audio installation which explores the cleanup of Melbourne for the 2006 Commonwealth Games. CLEAN looks at what it means to scrub up a city in the name of sport and nationalism. We'll be taking the sparkling rhetoric of the Games and hiding it amongst the bins and cobbles of one of Melbourne's best known laneways - Hosier Lane. It's a celebration of the laughing, singing, whispering and shouting of the city's 'undesireable' elements alongside all the flag-waving, anthems and fanfare. Built from recordings taken over the last two months with homeless people, injecting drug users, skaters, buskers, graff artists and other members of Melbourne's invisible communities, CLEAN will bring the dirty side of the city to life in the midst of the Commonwealth Games' urban polish. Originally from New Zealand, Nicolas Low works in a wide variety of creative fields, spanning writing, new media design and art direction. He has worked as the Artistic Director of the Sustainable Living Foundation's annual Future Cities Project in 2004 and 2005, an arts/science collaboration which takes place at the Melbourne Museum and is exhibited in Federation Square. Nic is co-creator of the Nomadology project, an online blogging journal of travellers' tales and their relationships to space which has recently received funding from the Australia Council (Literature Board). He does poetry readings in laundromats, featured in the 2005 Melbourne Fringe show 'Weapons of Mass Creation', and has had writing published in Voiceworks magazine, Undergrowth magazine, IsNot Magazine, and Strange Shapes, MUP's anthology of new Melbourne writing. Nic is currently an MA (Creative Writing) candidate at the University of Melbourne. Experience CLEAN at Hosier Lane (opposite Federation Square / ACMI), March 15 - April 2, 12 noon - 10pm. Opening Wednesday March 15, 6pm featuring Spoonbill with Bulb on live visuals. CLEAN is part of the Next Wave Festival 2006 - Empire Games. PROJECT PRESENTED AS PART OF THE NEXT WAVE "EMPIRE GAMES" FESTIVAL. DEVELOPED AND SUPPORTED BY NEXT WAVE KICKSTART. [top] APRIL:
GHOSTS OF SELF AND STATE To what degree do the state and self mirror each other in their construction? Ghosts of self and state is a reflection on the construction of history, and the potential for agency in contemporary society. If the soul is the ghost in the machine that is the individual, is there an elusive soul-like space within the mechanism of the state? Artists Moataz Nasr (Cairo), Tom Nicholson (Melbourne) and Markus Schinwald (Berlin/Vienna) consider the relationship between the personal and the political, between autonomy and group identification, as well as the persistence of memory – its fragility, recurrence, and passage into myth. Through the motifs of the mask, the actor, the storyteller and the puppet the artworks study the public and private faces adopted by citizen and state, individual and body politic. The role of volition, mindfulness and free will is considered in relation to the self – Can the mind direct and create change within the mechanism of the brain? – and also the state – What power does the individual have to create change? Each artist frames an extended moment, beneath which historical trauma drags, like a ghost-net in the ocean depths – the impact of war, of colonial authority, and a community’s loss of its children. In each of these works, the artists offer visions of possible ghosts of self, of the selves we might be or become. Such echoes gather the past before us, and ask what our role will be: as an audience, as autonomous reflective beings and as agents in the world. Geraldine Kirrihi Barlow is Curator / Collection Manager at the Monash University Museum of Art. She recently co-curated the exhibition "Pavilions for new architecture" with Max Delany and previously exhibitions such as "Before Night – After Nature" and "NEW04". Geraldine has worked with Australian and international artists in roles at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, The Melbourne International Festival of the Arts - Visual Arts Program; The Melbourne International Biennial, "Signs of Life" in 1999 and Heide Museum of Modern Art. Tom Nicholson currently lives and works in Melbourne. Nicholson’s practice engages cultural and political realms through a variety of ‘actions’, which appropriate the idioms of protest, propaganda and art history. Recent solo exhibitions include "Flag Time: Marat at his last breath", Ocular Lab, Melbourne, 2006; and "22.06.1911/30.10.2004:Documents after Marching Season", The Aurora Project, Regent Theatre / IASKA, Kellerberrin, 2004. In 2005 he was a finalist in the Melbourne Prize for Urban Sculpture. Nicholson’s work will also feature in the forthcoming 15th Biennale of Sydney 2006. [top]
MAY:
SUBJECTIVITY BETWEEN ART AND PHILOSOPHY Felix Guattari developed his unique conception of subjectivity through a meditation on its place between art and ecology. This lecture provides a detailed reading of his book The Three Ecologies and uses visual art and architectural examples to contextualise his thought. Dr Gary Genosko is Canada Research Chair in Technoculture at Lakehead University, Canada. He is Visiting Scholar at the Power Institute, University of Sydney, and Visiting Fellow in the School of Philosophy, UNSW.
[top] JUNE:
ON THE MATERIALITY OF THE TRACE Why does the discourse of architecture often seem to wish to give itself a philosophical supplement? It is perhaps a symptom of the essential technicity of the practice of architecture, a practice itself tightly inscribed within and determined by economics, that is, capitalism. But if so, the flight from technicity to philosophy reproduces, in fact, the original philosophical gesture, which defines philosophy by opposing it as discourse of truth to sophistry as discourse of power, that is, technics. This gesture has both granted philosophy its positive possibility for the last twenty-five centuries, and constituted its most fundamental limitation. At the end of that period a thought emerged which re-composed these oppositions, that is, which considered together the co-implicated potential for language and technics. This thought drew on both paleontology and cybernetics to think the relation of gramme and programme. Différance and the trace are essentially life, naming the fact that life is the history of the inscription of the living onto matter, whether as DNA, writing, or digital networks. The future of philosophical thought, however, may depend not only on grasping this fact but also on interpreting it, and on projecting it onto the question of the future of what, until now, has been known as the human. Dr Daniel Ross lectures in the school of Political and Social Inquiry at Monash University. [top] JULY:
LOST GARDEN FOUND It seems that a focus on temporality and ‘events’ has taken priority in how cultural investigation, development and production is approached in contemporary cities. What effect does this have on the exploration of the spatial possibilities of emerging technology and culture? Do contemporary urban spatial models provide an adequate interface to explore these possibilities? Anna Tweeddale discusses the role of particular models in the spatial exploration of new media and culture in contemporary cities through addressing a number of examples, from institutions such as galleries and museums to festivals and ‘guerrilla’ approaches to the use of urban space. Included amongst these will be the recent inter-media art project Lost Garden Found, which references historical garden typologies as a model to re-investigate the role of spatial relationships in the individual’s engagement with technology and culture. Lost Garden Found was an inter-media project presented at the 2006 Next Wave Festival in Melbourne that consisted of artificial garden spaces and an illustrated book. The project created an immersive audio-visual garden environment (The Lost Gardens) as well as the illustrated book (Lost Garden Found: The Sampler) which created a narrative context to the gardens place in the city of Melbourne. Through these mechanisms Lost Garden Found sought to reinvent the conventions of audience interaction with inter-media art and installations. Co-curators and artists Louise Terry and Anna Tweeddale gathered 12 other artists across the fields of architecture, installation, soft sculpture, animation, video art, kinetic sound sculpture, illustration, graphic design and printmaking. Anna Tweeddale is an architect and artist based in Melbourne. Anna has also lived, worked and/or studied in Brisbane, London, Berlin and most recently Barcelona where she is currently a master’s candidate at the Metropolis Postgraduate Program in Architecture and Urban Culture. As well as creating the project Lost Garden Found as a part of the 2006 Next Wave Festival program, Anna has been involved in a number of art and culture projects, most notably the Straight Out of Brisbane Festival where she founded and curated the Urban Theory content program in 2003-2004. Anna has also been working with LAB architecture studio on projects in China and the Middle East over the last two years. [top] AUGUST:
[top] SEPTEMBER:
STELARC
and SEPTEMBER:
UN/WRAPPING SHIBUYA: THE CHANGING TEXTURE OF PLACE Among the most
striking urbanscapes of Tokyo featuring in the film Lost in
Translation (2003) are those of Shibuya, an area famous in
Japan and abroad for being a centre of contemporary youth cultures.
The giant building-cum-television-screens that face on to the hub
of this district, Hachiko Crossing, provide an arresting site/sight
of urban spectacle for one of the film's protagonists, Charlotte
(Scarlett Johansson). Hypnotic media images simultaneously play
on the screen surfaces of several buildings while at the same time
enveloping those passing by in a noisy and dissonant mash-up of
competing soundtracks. Down at street level, one of the first things
that a visitor to contemporary Shibuya might also observe is the
equally striking ubiquitous presence of the rather smaller screens
of mobile telephones in the hands of individuals in the crowd. While
such a sight is now common in urban centres around the globe it
has a special resonance here, because, as a number of critics have
observed (Rheingold 2002, Ito 2005), Shibuya is globally synonymous
with a high-tech, keitai (mobile [top] OCTOBER:
MAKING CREATIVE PLACES
Consider a circumstance in which a ‘creative thought’ is one that heals the wounds of a distressed youth, or which yields advertising dollars. Such situations are easy enough to find, as are members of Florida’s (2002) ‘creative class’: those who profit financially from the cultural capital of minoritarian communities. If creativity as the differential becoming of the world (Deleuze 1994) is to be nurtured through social formations, then new distinctions and connections must be made between artistic technique, innovation, cultural capital, and social and economic value. Via Deleuzian notions of creativity and territory/territorialization, striation (Deleuze & Guattari 1987) and spatial folding (Deleuze 1993), I look to open up conceptualizations of such politico-aesthetic assemblages. I begin this trajectory with the work of Creative Partnerships; an initiative that brokers placements for arts practitioners in socially and economically disadvantaged schools. I focus on a site in Margate, a coastal town in Kent: a place with an ethnically diverse population. The neighboring town of Dover is a primary entry point for asylum seekers and illegal immigrants to the UK. Creative Partnerships explore issues of identity, tolerance and ‘social equality’ as articulated in the social fabric of Margate. The text I examine is one in which the public art organization Artangel collaborated with filmmaker Penny Woolcock in staging ‘The Margate Exodus’. As a contemporary re-working of the Biblical tale, this film explores a community’s search for a ‘Promised Land’ and the social pressures that such journeys can produce. The work offers a mediation of macro and micro social movements, as biographies, landscape, culture and traditions are pleated into one text through filming live performance. ‘The Margate Exodus’ was made in conjunction with the display of a photography project called ‘Towards a Promised Land’, in which banner photographs hung across the centre of Margate. This involved twenty-two young people who migrated to the UK from places affected by war, poverty or political unrest. With photographer Wendy Ewald, the children re-conceptualized their diverse experiences of moving. The photographs produced were shown on the walls of buildings in public spaces across the city, re-territorializing the de-industrializing architectural space of the town. Buildings became canvasses, and the faces of minoritarian children were accorded new levels of visibility. Folding this re-inscription of town space into the social politics surrounding migration in Margate, ‘The Margate Exodus’ is a now a major feature film created with, and featuring, the people of Margate. Across the film text, the contention that social policy on immigration needs to be rethought is articulated through the moving image and community involvement. I move on to discuss an institutionalized example of macro and micro scales of social value being re-imagined through a place-based aesthetic politic. Here, I turn to the ‘NewVIc’, Newham Sixth Form Arts College at Stratford Circus. The Circus is a centre for the performing arts and moving image, managed by NewVIc in collaboration with five professional arts organizations . The Circus is a thoughtfully deigned, well-equipped building in East London. It is run by an education provider (NewVIc) as a site of arts education, yet also houses professional dance, music, theatre and new media studios, and facilitates a range of adult education programs. Through the Circus, local community members, artists and educators are supported in becoming a creative community. I examine how social policy and political climate has striated, and been folded in to, aspects of the Arts Centre at Stratford Circus. NewVIc’s work at Stratford and Creative Partnership’s ‘Margate Exodus’ project might respectively be considered forms of, what I term, ‘making creative places’. ABOUT
THE PRESENTER This lecture is an early consideration of research interviews conducted as part of a collaborative research project titled ‘MAKING CREATIVE PLACES: Geographical places in North America, Australia and the UK that foster creativity in young people’. PROJECT BRIEF: There is a notable lack of scholarly investigation into the pedagogical strategies needed for young people to enter into, and contribute to, Florida’s ‘creative class’. This research engagement addresses a specific aspect of this gap in knowledge by investigating the relationship between place, young people and the ‘creative class’. With a focus on youth, and the knowledges produced through place, we investigate how knowledges of innovation are constructed and shared. Given the extent to which Florida’s concepts of the ‘creative class’ and creative cities have informed cultural development and city planning across North America, Europe and Australia, the critical application of his thought to young people will have significant benefits in the fields of Education, Youth Studies, Cultural Policy and Urban and Regional Planning. Our approach is significant because of our focus on interdisciplinary places of learning that cross boundaries between informal educational sites, communities and creative industries and will provide a significant contribution to understandings of the types of educational, social and economic benefits associated with different places. OTHER RESEARCH
TEAM MEMBERS: [top] NOVEMBER:
(MY) CITIES MOVEMENTS AND INTERSECTIONS: NEW INTERVALS FOR CITY
LIFE YEAR-END DRINKS FROM 6:30pm This lecture underlines the importance of understanding the complexities of “city life” and reflecting that knowledge onto “architectural design”. Thus it indicates the importance of acquiring that knowledge and its tools and techniques. Within that perspective, “critical-cultural attitude” and “cinematography” referred to as “critical-cultural and cinematographic ‘city’ conceptions” are introduced and presented as a very essential and creative design approach (tools and techniques) to acquire, to simulate, and to transform that kind of knowledge. It brings the possibility of converting the existing relationships into new forms of space-time-life interactions, which will in turn open up new possibilities for city life. Moreover, those
ideas are delivered throughout the lecturer’s own journey
of becoming an architect, academic, and design studio critic and
which brings several cities into the spotlight, such as Istanbul,
and some architectural institutions such as Istanbul Technical University,
some architectural milieus such as design studios, and some architectural
discourses such as architecture and philosophy meetings. AYSE
SENTURER is a Professor of Architectural Design at the Istanbul
Technical University (ITU) Faculty of Architecture. She is currently
teaching at the School of Architecture and Design, RMIT University
as a visiting scholar.
Author or co-editor:
Teaches at the
undergraduate, graduate and postgraduate programs in ITU: [top] PAST
YEARS' PROGRAMS |
Architecture + Philosophy series provides a unique opportunity for a space of exchange between the two disciplines. While what we provide is a local space – Melbourne practitioners on Melbourne issues – Architecture + Philosophy welcomes speakers from any discipline to engage with questions of contemporary urbanism, planning, technology, space, system, design, distribution and other issues in the productive overlap between the two disciplines. We curate a diverse range of presentations, from research students and established academics to architecture and planning practitioners, policy makers, public artists and those working in the world between theory, buildings and the city. The program is curated by Esther Anatolitis and Hélène Frichot and presented by RMIT Architecture and Design and Federation Square.
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