Googleplex, Silicon Valley, 2018 (photo: Peter Mörtenböck)
winter term 2018/19: NEW MODELS OF THE FUTURE
Continuing our engagement with questions of BUILDING CAPITAL, we will link up with the courses "Contemporary Culture", "Urban Visual Culture" and "Regimes of the Visual" to jointly investigate, both analytically and practically, the neoliberal imperative of "city" as "platform". Using texts, visual material and case studies, we will explore the dynamics and contradictions in today's constellation of capitalist economy, innovation technology, artistic creativity and urban production.
As the composition of economic growth has now shifted toward knowledge-based creative ventures (cloud-based software, social media, mobile applications, etc.), cities around the world are outcompeting each other to attract a strong talent pool of young creatives and innovators in the hope that venture capital will follow in their wake, resulting in crops of fast-growing companies. Successful campaigns often include the invention of new architectural typologies evoking notions of co-working and co-living to suggest a febrile atmosphere of creativity and entrepreneurship. Revolving around "urban rooms", communal spaces and pop-up entertainment, these new architectures focus on the creation of fluid circulation and meeting spaces so that the incoming human capital (millennials and tech professionals) can be "put to work" - interacting and exchanging with investment patrons, clients, customers and peers alike.
The coordinated exchange between the different courses will allow us to address this new form of speculative urbanism from a range of different theoretical and practical perspectives, interrogating ongoing shifts in political thinking, economic frameworks, global connectivity, communication channels, cultural aspirations, as well as building technologies and architectural practices.
To connect these different aspects, we will work across the different courses on a multi-dimensional mapping project that can make tangible the plurality of actors, forces and ideas involved in realising the "Platform City". As a distinctive relation between politics and spatial aesthetics is key to this new urban paradigm, in a second step we will seek to develop analytical tools of "architectural reading". Our objective is to develop ways of navigating the civic, social and cultural implications of this speculative approach to city-building, which champions the creation of disruptive "situations" and in which the process is deemed to be more important than results.
Data Cities
The course "New Models of Culture and Art Production" takes as its starting point an active understanding of the participation of today's populations in data generation and the shaping of new public spheres. It seeks to dynamically explore the political implications of hybridised data environments in which individual, commercial and governmental agendas and actions are becoming increasingly blurred. Through both theoretical and practical explorations we will inquire into the impact of a "data mentality" on our expectations and articulations of public spheres. In our contribution to the multidimensional mapping project, we will experiment with new visual and cultural modes of transgression within the digital public realm and speculate on new models of governance in the context of self-generating data cities.
see also: www.visuelle-kultur.net
1st class: 16 October 2018, 11am to 3pm
Seminarraum 264/1, Karlsgasse 13
Course requirement: you will need to also take the courses "Gegenwartskultur" and "Visuelle Kultur der Stadt".
