After successful completion of the course, students are able to apply the knowledge gained in the transfer of knowledge between their experiences of everyday life, artistic methods, curatorial practice and cultural-analytical perspectivation to their own practice.
(c) Christian Frieß and Benjamin Gerdes, 2019
THE INTERFACE CITY
From small scale neighborhood projects to collaborative city-making, from optimizing urban infrastructures to solving all kinds of social problems, platforms have stretched into almost all dimensions of the social and urban fabric in many places already. What is common to all those platforms is that huge amounts of data are aggregated and processed. Data, which is incessantly created and/or used, intentionally and/or unintentionally, by citizens interacting with both, the physical and the digital environment. However, platforms are not neutral mediators but infrastructures which embody ideologies and visions – be it technocratic utopias, social agendas or neoliberal politics capitalist endeavours.
How does architecture facilitate new encounters between people, data, and space in these contemporary visions for the 21st century city? What orientation do related projects take up in relationship to the accumulation of data, capital, and/or state or economic power?
In this semester’s course we will investigate a „platform mentality“ focusing on a variety of projects from Vienna and elsewhere. Based on case studies we will discuss the interrelation of a platform mentality and the cities’ imaginary and built fabric. We will draw upon architectural, artistic, and journalistic research methods to create multidisciplinary mappings and related experiments informed by tools of “reading architecture". These practice-based responses to the questions posed by the city as interface will culminate in an exhibition at the end of the term.
Depending on students’ preferences this course will be taught in either English or German.
1st class: Monday, October 7th 2019, 12:00
Seminarraum Argentinierstraße 8
for further information see: https://institute.tuwien.ac.at/visual_culture_unit
