happenings in space #3: oct. 19-26, 2020
suburbs in the desert, data magic and democracy, visualizing abolition, the weather of art history, Black material culture, the fall of white space, and the future of the commons.
we’re reflecting on the entanglement of Sarah Kanouse’s ecologies of acknowledgement and how mapping practices are contextualizing queer spaces in Puerto Rico as discussed by Regner Ramos, we’re staying vigilant as COVID cases spike in our college town, we’re watching horror movies, new and old, as the veil grows thinner.
Susan Schuppli, 'Atmospheric Feedback Loops' at the opening of Sonic Acts Festival 2017. photo Pieter Kers |Beeld.nu
MONDAY, OCTOBER 19
THE U.S. SUBURB IN THE DESERT — CORNELL — 10–11 AM EST
Dalal Musaed Alsayer’s close reading of the architecture built and the story of Aramco’s Dhahran reveals the environmental and urban ramifications of the world’s largest petrochemical conglomerate and the suburb that restructured society and urbanism. Embodied as Anywhere, U.S.A., company towns such as Aramco created an architecture and urbanism that was all at once everywhere, anywhere, and nowhere.
BAUHAUS NIGHT — COOPER UNION — 6:30 PM EST
Uncover the ideas, the people, and the stuff that blew up the Bauhaus into an outsized legend that will not die. Ellen Lupton shows how Herbert Bayer and László Moholy-Nagy used graphic design to invent an enduring myth that still grips our minds and souls. Elizabeth Otto reveals queer identity, gender fluidity, and occult leanings at a school better known for tubular chairs than alternative living. Greg D'Onofrio discusses the magical art of collecting modernist ephemera, showing how a designer's eye and a historian's heart can yield delightful discoveries.
IN SITE/INSIGHT — UNIV. OF ARKANSAS— 4PM EST
In their lecture, architects Weiss and Manfredi will discuss how their firm is at the forefront of architectural design practices that are redefining the relationship between landscape, architecture, infrastructure and art. The firm's projects are noted for clarity of vision, bold and iconic forms, and material innovation. Weiss/Manfredi is perhaps best known for its expansive landscape projects, such as the Olympic Sculpture Park at the Seattle Art Museum, which joins an outdoor sculpture gallery and a beach across a challenging remediated post-industrial site — a scheme that garnered many awards.
DATA MAGIC AND DEMOCRACY: PRIVACY, POLITICS, AND TRANSMEDIA STORYTELLING — MIT — 5:30 PM - 7:30 PM EST
PANEL: Caroline A. Jones, Daniel J. Weitzner, Patricia Williams, and Ethan Zuckerman — Documentaries and fiction films are among the most powerful cultural tools we have for stimulating important public conversations around data, privacy, and democracy. Urgent concerns with justice intensify the question: who owns our data, what algorithms sift it, and who decides what decisions it drives? This event is made even more timely by recent revelations of the continued harvesting of data and foreign scams on social media, attempting to sway the upcoming US elections and sow doubt in the democratic process. How do we understand the interplay between our data and these social media? The "magic" of data is often evoked in cinema by swirling bits that vent from bodies and machines ("data sweat"), flowing numerals, bodies made of code, or massive diagrams of how it all connects. Are these visual tropes effective for helping the public understand the infrastructures of data gathering, our personal roles as data producers, how industries deploy our data, and the need for privacy controls?
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 20
AUTHORS OF ARCHITECTURE — Paul Mellon Centre — streaming later
The series speaks to many of the new interdisciplinary collaborations that are currently shaping art-historical practice, where scholars of the visual arts are working across different subject-fields to explore natural histories, indigenous forms of knowledge, animal studies, concepts of the post-human and revitalised theorisations of the sublime.
ANGELA Y. DAVIS AND GINA DENT: VISUALIZING ABOLITION— UC Santa Cruz: Institute of the Arts and Sciences — 4-5:30 PM PST
Angela Y. Davis and Gina Dent, noted antiprison activists, scholars, and educators, for an online conversation about critical issues in the arts, visual culture, and abolition. This is the first in a series of events that questions what it means to think of abolitionism as a vision—one that challenges the social, economic, and political worldviews that prisons promote.
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 21
SPECULATING CITIES AND LANDSCAPES THROUGH QTIABPOC ART PRACTICES — UCL BARTLETT
Join us for a thought-provoking conversation with Ruhul Abdin, urban researcher, architectural designer and artist, and alumnus of The Bartlett Development Planning Unit, and Ama Josephine Budge, who is a speculative writer, artist, curator and pleasure activist. Ruhul and Ama will discuss their practices and projects, introducing some of the contexts they engage with and the collectives they have worked with. Their work spans discussions of race, queerness, ecology and cities, and they have both been involved in setting up QTIABPOC night spaces and art platforms in London, such as The Batty Mama and Odbhut. Ama will read from a new story in Architectural Review, and Ruhul will talk about his life drawing and about Paraa, the architecture and design studio he co-founded which uses multi-disciplinary and community-led approaches.
MICHAEL STONE-RICHARDS: NEGATION AND DISAVOWAL IN SPATIAL POLITICS — Rice Architecture — 6:00-7:00 PM CDT
Drawing on the work of Detroit artists Scott Hocking and Carlos Diaz, amongst others, in "Negation and Disavowal in Spatial Politics," Michael Stone-Richards explores the way in which erasure and camouflage in public space and monuments attest to the work or modes of political and cultural unconscious in racial politics and what he calls the politics of attention - the question of Why now? posed by the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 22
APOCALYPTIC CONJUNCTURES: THE WEATHER OF ART HISTORY — Paul Mellon Centre — 8:00am PDT
This wide-ranging paper will consider Herbert Read's anarchistic views of the 1940s as a pivotal moment, that drew on radically organic and romantic political models of the past but pointed towards the multiple kinds of approaches available to art historians today, as they work alongside others in an expanded environmental humanities movement. The paper will attempt to offer useful methodological approaches captured within an historical context, where the apocalyptic presence of World War Two, the subsequent nuclear threat, and today's climate collapse give ecological possibilities in art history new urgency.
CHARLES DAVIS II: BLACK MATERIAL CULTURE IN THE ROUND — MIT Architecture — 6 PM EST
This talk analyzes the racial politics that subtended the Museum of Modern Art's 1932 International Style exhibition, which polemically defined modern architecture as a progressive social project of the EuroAmerican avant-garde. The artificial polarities that were established between so-called "primitive" and "modern" world cultures has subsequently trapped the cultural productions of people of color in a never ending loop of outright dismissal and cultural appropriation. Revising this definition to accommodate the modern subjectivities that people of color have created in the interwar and postwar periods breaks this loop and opens new grounds for a revisionist history of architectural modernity.
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 23
WHAT IS THE FUTURE OF COMMONS RESEARCH AND PLANNING? — Mark Lubell and Xavier Basurto — CORNELL — 10:10AM EST
Recent economic, social, and environmental crises have revived interest in the "commons" in research, policy, and practice, both in settings of urban community development and more rural/peri-urban areas. Today, concerns about racial justice, climate change, and economic crisis raise new questions about who has historically defined the "commons" (theoretically, methodologically, practically), and who comprises the commons, the nature of the relationship of those within and without the commons, and how the commons handles crises. This session asks long-time researchers of natural resource commons in agriculture, urban coastal zones, and fisheries to reflect on the following: How do they respond to urgent calls for policy change and critical reflexivity in research? What does research on the commons offer us in this current moment of change? How has research on the commons changed over time, and how does it need to evolve moving forward?
NICHOLAS MIRZOEFF: THE APPEARANCE OF BLM — CALARTS: WHAP! SERIES ‘BLACKOUT’ — 4:30 PM - 6:30 PM PDT
Nicholas Mirzoeff (NYU), "Whiteness, White Seeing, White Space and their Fall"
The fall 2020 series “Black Out: On the Surveillance of Blackness” is curated by Andrew Culp. The theme “Black Out” is prompted by Simone Browne writing about a popular Youtube video that demonstrated how the facial recognition software of a HP webcam failed to work on Black faces. Her provocative challenge is that, at least for the Black target of surveillance technology, increased visibility may not always be the appropriate goal. She instead prompts us to look for “fugitive acts of escape, resistance, and the productive disruptions that happen when blackness enters the frame” (Dark Matters, 164).
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 24
DANNY LYON ON THE DESTRUCTION OF LOWER MANHATTAN — aperture — 12:00 PM EST
Join Aperture, Museo ICO, and PHotoESPAÑA for a conversation with photographer Danny Lyon about his pioneering work The Destruction of Lower Manhattan – the project, its context, and its relevance to the story of New York City. First published in 1969, the work is a singular, lasting document of nearly sixty acres of downtown New York architecture before its destruction in a wave of urban development. Through his striking photographs and accompanying texts, Lyon describes the character of a city lost, and paints a portrait of the people who once lived there. Intermingled within the architecture are portraits of individuals and the demolition workers who, despite their assigned task, emerge as the surviving heroes. Fifty years after these photographs were made, they continue to resonate with moral power, serving as a cautionary tale as New York City begins to re-imagine itself once more post-Covid.