LIVING ON PLATFORMS – Staying with the Trouble
Due to the ongoing COVID-19 crisis, our life on platforms has assumed a state of permanence. We are learning, working, shopping, communicating and enjoying ourselves online all the time. The screen has become the most important interface to the outside world. Other crises - climate change, racist violence, social inequality - have become equally permanent. In this development, a new culture of crisis management has gained the upper hand, which awaits us with a solution for everything with simple rhetorics of resilience and efficiency. But instead of seeing this promise kept, our institutional trust is increasingly dwindling and it is becoming clear that many crises are also a means to control and accelerate the existing spatial, infrastructural and social changes. As a result, a discussion has broken out as to whether we really want to return to a pre-crisis state or whether we are longing for alternatives. What would such alternatives look like? Can such alternatives be envisaged independently of the experience of the current crisis?
Such thinking requires, as Donna Haraway argued in Staying with the Trouble, sym-poiesis or "making-with" instead of auto-poiesis or "self-making" - learning to stay with the trouble of living together. In the field of art, the urge for collective forms of work is currently making clear how joint thinking and joint action can lead to new possibilities: documenta 15, curated by the Indonesian artist collective ruangrupa; the projects of the five art collectives nominated for the Turner Prize 2021; or the discussion of this year's Venice Architecture Biennale, provoked by Hashim Sarkis with the question “How will we live together?” - they all represent arenas for experimenting with new forms of life and propose “making-with” architectures.
In the Visual Culture module, we dedicate ourselves every Monday afternoon in a virtual salon (lectures, talks, presentations, roundtable discussions, film afternoons, etc.) to a certain aspect of the ongoing living on platforms: who profits and who loses, and what is the architecture of the structure that is created here? Given this starting point, what alternatives can we jointly develop?
On these afternoons, different teachers of the module as well as invited guests will engage with the issues raised by our current situation. The envisioned topics to be addressed range from the tradition of the platform genre in art, literature and film to the question of how important a physical presence is for the recognition of basic human rights. These thematic afternoons will provide the point of departure for the weekly production of episodes of a “visual essay”, which will draw on different architecture-related methods (sketches, analyses, descriptions, photo-collages, videos, models, etc.). The episodic character of these essays should allow us to sound out the often contradictory characteristics of “living of platforms”, and, by exploring the architecture of these new life worlds, sketch the outlines of possible fields of action.
The core Monday programme will be supplemented by a series of other formats based on need and feasibility, such as virtual hangouts, crit sessions and collective work at physical sites. In addition, those teaching the module will be available to help guide the development of projects and provide feedback. Together, suggestions for further plug-ins in this learning structure can be developed in the course of the programme. Working in groups is possible.
Core courses
Contemporary Culture
Art as Architectural Concept
Urban Visual Culture
Applied Cultural Theory
Regimes of the Visual (course held in English!)
Additional courses
Architectures of the Everyday
New Models of Culture and Art Production
Dates
Mon 5-7 pm
Online via Zoom: You are going to find the links to the individual Zoom dates on TUWEL
(or. Mon 4-8 pm seminar room AC044
04.10.2021
Einführung/Introduction
Peter Mörtenböck & Helge Mooshammer
11.10.2021
Plattform Stadt
Peter Mörtenböck & Helge Mooshammer
18.10.2021
Der Spiel-Raum im Film-Bild
Sigrid Hauser
25.10.2021
Das Gesicht verlieren. Im Boden versinken.
Zur visuellen Kultur der Scham (Teil 1)
Robert Pfaller
08.11.2021
tba
Peter Mörtenböck & Helge Mooshammer
Diskussion mit Gästen
17.11.2021 - Mittwoch
Film- und Buchpräsentation
Ernst Strouhal & Robert Pfaller
22.11.2021
Social Reproduction in Platform City: When Is It Love, When Is It Work?
Carmen Lael Hines
24.11.2021 - Mittwoch
Kreativität, Verfügbarkeit, Bewegung: Wohnen in der Plattform-Stadt, oder: “Der Scheiß, den sie soziale Fähigkeiten nennen, ist ein Algorithmus zum Umgang mit Antisozialität.”
Peter Mörtenböck
29.11.2021
Public Platforms
Vyjayanthi Rao / Spitzer School of Architecture, New York
in conversation with Peter Mörtenböck & Helge Mooshammer
01.12.2021 - Mittwoch
Sex and the City: An Introduction to Queer Geographies
Carmen Lael Hines
06.12.2021
Der Stadt-Raum im Film-Bild
Sigrid Hauser
13.12.2021
Swiping Cities: Dating Apps, Urbanism, and the Production of Sexuality in Digitally-Mediated Archi-Scapes
Carmen Lael Hines
10.01.2022
Das Gesicht verlieren. Im Boden versinken.
Zur visuellen Kultur der Scham (Teil 2)
Ernst Strouhal
17.01.2022
Final Presentation
All courses are open to incoming ERASMUS students!
For further information in English see the TISS pages of individual courses and the departmental homepage: https://visualculture.tuwien.ac.at
