mediating realities
new inc. new museumNew York, NY | 04/18/2015
fifth season of Interpretations, an installment of the annual symposium series led by the Critical, Curatorial and Conceptual Practices in Architecture students at GSAPP.
is it real? The question is too obvious, too fundamental, yet it’s one which continues to trouble architecture and other disciplines. Despite the extensive deconstruction of the term within the framework of the 20th century's semiotic discourse, claims on the real, in the colloquial sense of the term, still surface in a contemporary condition which is, according to some, increasingly mediated.
The real isn’t dead, it’s disfigured. Its ghost lingers. Even now, the increasingly complex and invisible mechanisms of capital exchange are rendered real through their spatial products; they are seemingly anchored or made concrete in the domain of architecture. While our everyday experience is constituted by an entanglement of appearances—which are simultaneously physical, networked, represented, simulated, abstracted, quantified, remembered, imagined, performed, and so on—and which have the capacity for “real” affect, we still insist on the possibility of a life offline, in the street, and somehow disengaged from what might be called “unreal” engagements. Whether addressed to the real or its obverse—the unreal, the fake, the simulation, the phantasmagoric, the non-existent, the imaginary—the trope of reality seems to find its way to the surface of discussions, questioning the reasons, places, times and forms by which architects practice upon the world.
Committed to addressing the practice and effects of mediation, this symposium will reflexively position its structure as a mediating device. How have these definitions of the real latent in contemporary discourse shifted into new forms? How do critical and conceptual propositions in spatial, visual, and theoretical practices engineer new realities? Within and beyond these identified sites—Publics, Time, Economies—what are mediating strategies that construct, and perhaps now comprise reality? We hope to locate these questions in architecture, art, media, curatorial, journalistic, philosophical and even economic practices, asking invited speakers to engage through their own work questions pertaining to the mediated status of the real.
symposium
interpretations v
curated by 2014 CCCP candidates
virginia black, maite borjabad, pedro ceñal, lai jing chu, pedro correa, martina dolejsova, rosana elkhatib, james folta, maryam fotouhi, gabrielle printz, rayna razmilic, tania tovar
graphic design: pedro ceñal, lai jing chu, rosana rlkhatib and tania tovar catering/afterparty: rosana elkhatib, lai jing chu
Photography: lai jing chu
