Network Histories at Michigan, 3/8/18

I am delighted to be delivering the keynote address at the P+ARG Conference at the University of Michigan on March 8, 2018, at 6pm. More details here

My talk is titled "Network Histories: Baran and Milgram in Perspective" and the abstract reads roughly … 

The foundational work done by social psychologist Stanley Milgram and telecommunications researcher Paul Baran on networks in the 1960s remains profoundly influential today, establishing the basis of network theory. But both projects are more complicated than they seem: Milgram’s famous “Six Degrees of Separation” appears to have been largely fabricated while Baran’s plan for a “Distributed Network” is inevitably read within a retrospective mythography. This talk sets out to uncover not so much a theory of networks as an ideology of networks, seeking not a celebration but rather an understanding.

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10 Chairs in Baltimore, 4/11/15

I am delighted to be one of ten scholars, writers, and artists speaking at the Baltimore Museum of Art this Saturday about ten chairs from the collection in their newly re-opened American Wing. The event starts at 2pm. If you are in town, please join us. I'd love to say hello. 

I will be talking about the Elastic Chair, produced by Boston manufacturer Samuel Gragg. In 1808, long before Charles Eames or even Michael Thonet, Gragg patented a technique for bending wood with steam. Inspired by the Klismos, an ancient Greek chair, together with the ancient Greek methods of bending wood, Gragg's elastic chair employed the highest technology of its day. As we look at it today, we confront a time that is curiously like our own, faced with a past that forms a massive repository of precedent that we can’t get away from and an obsession with the possibilities of technology as a means of advancing both industry and society.     

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After Empirical Urbanism Symposium Talk, University of Toronto, 2/28/15,

I will be speaking at the University of Toronto's After Empirical Urbanism conference this coming Saturday, February 28th. It's a great treat to be seeing so many of my friends and colleagues and to be in fabulous Toronto again, even in February (not that it's more than a degree or two warmer here in Montclair!). Below is an abstract for my talk, wrapping up many of the thoughts I've been having over the last few years about atemporality and alternative modes of practice against its grain. 

Architectural History for Atemporal Times
Kazys Varnelis

The Last Great Time War is over. * Jean Baudrillard was right; by the time we finished the countdown to the millennium we reached the end of the end of history. Now we face a new condition, in which the phenomenological experiences of simultaneity and acceleration dominate like never before. Fulfilling Baudrillard’s paradoxical prophecy, we live in a time so saturated by information that we can’t orient ourselves within it.

Bruce Sterling describes our attitude toward history as “atemporality.” This stems, he observes, from the philosophy of history itself. We historians have become so averse to the totality, so terrified of master narratives and so obsessed with microhistories (the more micro the better), that we have played into the hands of a culture that is concerned only with the now and the proximate future. Our horizon is measured, not by epochs but by the length of Kickstarter campaigns. Take architectural education. Little by little, history has been whittled away to a bare vestige. Nowhere in NAAB’s accreditation documents is there any mention of critical thought as a skill that architecture history teaches or history as offering anything beyond a survey. But we can’t really lament that historians and NAAB are in step with the times. Such an approach fits the broader culture of atemporality that Sterling observes.

As Sterling suggests, it isn’t merely history that is undone, but chronology and temporal sequence as well, collapsing under the pressures of a computationally enhanced global capital that seeks to execute trades in milliseconds or microseconds but rather in nanoseconds. If the 90s had the Generic City, today we have Generic Time, without any idea of what time we live in. 

But how to react to this condition? Accelerationism would be one option. If there is any one end looming, it is either the end of capitalism, the end of the sustainability of human life as we know it, the technological singularity, or perhaps, as ISIS hopes, the Apocalypse. If accelerationism is one option, it is a difficult one for many of us, especially historians, who generally have problems with those sorts of ideas.

If we historians want to respond to this historical condition, we need to develop new ways of remaining relevant. Turning back to Walter Benjamin’s idea of “history against the grain,” I will conclude by discussing the New City Reader, a project that I did with Joseph Grima at the New Museum's Last Newspaper show and with the Network Architecture Lab at MoMA's Uneven Growth show as a way in which history can be deployed as a critical project in the city, utterly out of step with atemporality as that may be.



*
The Last Great Time War is a name for the war between the Time Lords and the Daleks, occurring between the 1996 “Doctor Who” film and the revival of the series in 2005 and seen in the fiftieth anniversary special. The war results in the Doctor’s home planet, Gallifrey being frozen outside of space and time.

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Aleksandra Kasuba at the NDG, Vilnius

It's a privilege to be speaking about the work of Aleksandra Kasuba at the National Art Gallery (Nacionaline Dailes Galerija) in Vilnius this coming Thursday at 5pm.

One of my earliest memories, from when I was four, is crawling through her Live-in Environment, which she had installed in the townhouse that she and her husband, sculptor Vytautas Kasuba owned. You can imagine the impact it had on me. 

In my talk, I will focus on Kasuba’s constructions of the 1960s and 1970s in which she worked with high technology fabric from Dupont to create environments that occupy a third spatial order, neither art nor architecture. I will also read her work against a larger discourse on art and architecture in New York City at the time, revealing her own approach to problems that challenged other avant-garde artists and designers of the day.

The occasion is the opening of a reconstruction of her 1975 project "Spectrum, an Afterthought " which she conceived of after the installation of "Spectral Passage" at the De Young Museum in San Francisco.  

Kasuba's work is uncannily similar, and in many ways to the digital architecture of the contemporary era (not to mention Richard Serra's torqued ellipses). Still, the diaphanous qualties of the fabrics that she worked with give it a lighter feel and mark it as distinct from architecture (she was neither trained as an architect nor did she consider herself to be one). Instead, it strikes me that these kind of inhabitations are closer to tents, perhaps structures that nomads might construct within the non-places of the contemporary world. Imagine if airports were filled with structures like these, as spaces to pause in.       

If you are in Vilnius that day, I hope you can make it. I'm afraid that my talk will be in English although I'll be delighted to take questions in Lithuanian as well as English. 

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Thinking the Unthinkable

I will be speaking about RAND Corporation, war games, and scenario planning tonight, 7pm at New York's Museum of Art and Design.

The link is here although be aware that I am NOT talking about Corbusier (well not for more than a few minutes anyway). If you miss the talk, you can see some of the things I will be talking about here or here

  

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How’s the Revolution Going? @ the Van Alen

I'll be appearing in a discussion tonight, Tuesday, October 28 at the Van Alen titled '"How's the Revolution Going?" Rethinking Architectural Education from '68 to Today' with Peggy Deamer, Quilian Riano, and Ron Shiffman. The event lasts from 6:30 to 8pm and will be held at Grimshaw Architects, 637 W 27th St, New York, New York. The topic, part of the Van Alen's 120th anniversary celebration, will assess the fate of the calls for change in architectural education made in the 1960s. For more information and to register for the event visit the Van Alen's site

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revolution of the present in limerick

As part of the fall lecture series at the University of Limerick, Ireland, I will be showing the film "Revolution of the Present," a feature-length documentary by writer/director Marc Lafia, executive producer Jose Fernandez-Richards, and producer Johanna Schiller on Tuesday, October 14th at 5.00pm. This is the European premiere of the film, so if you are in the area, we hope that you can make it. Course director Peter Carroll and I will discuss the film afterwards. I am honored to be part of this production and immensely proud of the work the team did. There is hardly any better introduction to my work or network culture than this film. Should you not be in Ireland at the time, you can check out Revolution of the Present here.    

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Kiosk @ Columbia

I will be appearing alongside Leah Meisterlin (formerly of the Netlab) and authors Astra Taylor and Andrew Blum today at noon in Ware Lounge (on the 6th floor of Avery Hall) at Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation to discuss the impact that digital technology is posing on architecture, cities, and most of all our lives. Topics to be discussed will likely include data centers, debt, oversaturation, creative workspaces and the tyranny of fun, together with ways to make all this better. Hope to see you there if you are in the area!

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Post-Planetary Capital Symposium

I'm delighted to be speaking at Ed Keller and Ben Woodard's symposium "Post-Planetary Capital" at the New School's Center for Transformative Media today. My own talk is titled "A Mote in God’s Eye: 
Eternal Recurrence and 
the Post-Capitalist Post-Planetary." So what in the heavens is that about (sorry!)? I'll be using a discussion of asteroid mining, private space colonization, and Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's "A Mote in God's Eye" to develop my arguments about the relationship between capital and complexity.  

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