After successful completion of the course, students are able to understand contemporary art and architecture production as a means and expression of cultural, political and economic changes and to engage themselves in new approaches of experimental, critical spatial practice. Due to its orientation toward a combination of scholarly and artistic research, the Visual Culture module offers students a range of transdisciplinary competences - critical thinking, cooperation, experimental approaches, research-oriented project work, interpretation and adaptation skills – for independently engaging with the production/reception of art and architecture.
PLATFORM URBANISM
The 2019/20 module programme deals with „platform urbanism” as part of a global development in which decisions about social life, urban projects and infrastructures are increasingly becoming the domain of platforms.
For years, platforms such as Amazon, Facebook, Google, and WeWork have sought to penetrate as many areas of social production and reproduction as possible outside of their original business model in order to expand their own market dominance and drive forward a generalisation of their speculative investment model in the structure of financial capitalist lending. The leverage of financial speculation platform companies can use in their choice of investment beneficiaries also affects the willingness of cities to meet the expectations of these investors. The investment-worthy city has thus become the target of today’s urban development, and not the city in which citizens can develop freely. Pleasure and enjoyment have taken the place of free development, two components that serve as both an incentive and a means for the investing city to compete for the top places in international city rankings.
The term „platform urbanism” thus does not only refer to the instrumental use of new technologies in urban space, as the smart city concept and its promise to offer more efficient services claim. What we therefore want to address in the module program under the title „Platform Urbanism” is a completely new paradigm of social organisation, which is expressed in a positive attitude to peer-to-peer interaction, in a dramatic destabilisation of existing institutions and in new kinds of entrepreneurship and for which urban space has become a key technology. How can we understand this radical change of our time and how can a model of critical practice be developed in this environment?
Part of the module programme is the lecture series "Age of Platform Urbanism" (Architekturzentrum Wien and University of Applied Arts, 25-26 November 2019), which will be the kick-off event of the Austrian contribution to the Architecture Biennale Venice 2020.
Guests: Douglas Spencer (architectural theorist at Iowa State University and author of The Architecture of Neoliberalism) and Ross Exo Adams (architectural theorist at Bard College and author of Circulation and Urbanization).
https://www.azw.at/en/event/age-of-platform-urbanism/
PREVIEW SUMMER TERM / Architecture Biennale Venice 2020:
Building on the Visual Culture module, an artistic project and an excursion to Venice will be offered in the summer term 2020:
In the artistic project all design elements of the Austrian contribution to the Venice Architecture Biennale will be developed 1:1; In the accompanying excursion (May 2020), these designs will be jointly implemented on site in the Austrian Pavilion.
Due to the limited number of participants, participants of the Visual Culture module will be given preference for this project in the summer term!
Core courses
LVA Gegenwartskultur: PLATFORM URBANISM I
LVA Kunst als Architekturkonzept: STADT-RAUM UND BAU-KAPITAL
LVA Visuelle Kultur der Stadt: PLATFORM URBANISM II
LVA Angewandte Kulturtheorie: TBA
LVA Regime des Visuellen: TBA
Additional courses
LVA Architekturen des Alltags: STADT-GRENZEN UND BAU-KAPITAL
LVA Neue Modelle von Kultur und Kunstproduktion: NEW MODELS OF URBAN LIFE
All courses are open to incoming ERASMUS students!
For further information in English see TISS pages of individual courses
and the programme's homepage: https://institute.tuwien.ac.at/visual_culture_unit
