After successful completion of the course, students are able to have an overview over current state of the art respective to the course's overall theme. Students have learnt to orientate themselves within this field and know how to do harvest it for their own reasearch. Additionally, students will have learnt how to introduce their own questions into discussions and how to craft their interests into arguments.   

DATA AND THE FOLD OF THE GIVEN

How to relate data to computation and calculability is among the greatest challenges today: pure data renders an inhospitable world dominated by calculability, while its aesthetization poses severe challenges for democratic politics. There is an abyssal 'gap' between data and its 'givenness' that needs to be accounted for philosophically as well as architectonically. With this intent, Michel Serres’ book The Incandescent (2003) gives a new meaning to the term "architectonic" by relating it to the current concerns with the Anthropocene. In close dialog with contemporary phenomenology, he proposes to relate to this abyssal gap as an incandescent well, and proposes a notion of cornucopin instruments to speak about the cultural techniques of writing, drawing, and mathematics.

Michel Serres is one of the great philosophers to learn from for the 21st century, and the attention drawn to his work has been swelling rapidly throughout the last few years. Nobody has approached the emergence of information science and cybernetics quite like him, highly imaginative as well as thoroughly well informed about the complex developments and relations among a broad spectrum of scientific disciplines, from mathematics to molecular biology, from nuclear physics to literature, laws to meteorology, sculpture to epistemology: Serres’ writings couple what we could call anthropographic documentation with cosmoliterate readings, and this in an architectonic manner of polymath literacy. This course will provide an introduction to Michel Serres’ thinking, and its relevancy for contemporary architecture theory more specifically. No prior familiarity with Serres’ approach is necessary.

We will read The Incandescent (Michel Serres, 2003) in parallel to Mathematics and Information in the Philosophy of Michel Serres (Vera Bühlmann, forthcoming 2020).

close readings, lectures, argumentation, discussion.

students are expected to prepare weekly readings of approx 35 pages, and actively participate in the discussion. Presence is mandatory. 

PLEASE WRITE AN EMAIL TO OFFICE@ATTP.TUWIEN.AC.AT SO WE CAN ADD YOU TO THE EMAIL LIST AND PROVIDE YOU WITH THE READINGS.