CFP Architecture, Technology and the Historical Subject

Conference: “Architecture, Technology and the Historical Subject” / Paris, Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de Paris La Villette / November 12-13 2007

The Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture Paris-La Villette and the College of Architecture of the Georgia Institute of Technology are sponsoring a conference on « Architecture, Technology, and the Historical Subject » to be held in Paris on November 12-13, 2007. The aim of the conference is to advance critical thinking on the relationship between architecture and technology, with a special focus on how new techniques affect perception. The conference will move from a historical examination of
19th and 20th century architecture to issues of contemporary design theory and practice. The goal is to promote an understanding of the cultural and ideological - as well as material - roles that new techniques play within the field of architecture.

As a general critical framework, the conference takes as its point of departure Walter Benjamin’s reflections on technology and human subjectivity. In contrast to commonplace teleological interpretations, which emphasize the development of technology in directly shaping architectural form and expression, new techniques, according to Benjamin, generate an expansion of vision and other bodily perceptions. Ultimately, they introduce us to an "unconscious optics [just] as psychoanalysis does to unconscious impulses." Benjamin's work thus suggests a different, richer and rather surreptitious understanding of the interplay of architecture and technology. This conference aims at stimulating reflection, starting with Benjamin's ideas and evolving towards a new understanding of the role of technology in architecture. This role inevitably has to take into account human subjectivity in historical terms. From construction techniques to communications and computing, new technologies shape our experience of the world with the same efficiency as they shape our built environment. Can we learn from the 'panorama' and the 'arcade', and understand our 21st-century cities better by relating them to certain ways of experiencing the world?

Session One: The interior as phantasmagoria

This session focuses on 19th century interiors, arguing that they provided a privileged vehicle of immersion into fictional worlds for their users. Technology and decor are often portrayed as opposites. In Walter Benjamin's work, however, their relation is more complex. The interior and its decor, by creating alternative worlds for its users, can be conceived as a technique of visualization that negotiates with the rest of the world in which he or she lives. It is this kind of 'negotiation' that will be explored here, by looking at how architects reinvent the social and the historical dimensions of architecture through decor.

Session Two: Technological landscapes

This session considers how new modes of perception relate to various systems and institutions of power. The dramatic expansion and industrialization of visual and auditory culture in the 20th century generated disruptions within the perceptual field that Benjamin apprehended as a present-day “crisis of perception”. During the 20s and early 30s, new forms of mass spectatorship emerged through technologies of reproduction, recording, and amplification. This session focuses on spaces of mass consumption and spectacle (exhibition halls, sports facilities, crowd containers) and attempts to chart their uneven development into the present.

Session Three: Architecture, Cinema, and Digital Reproduzierbarkeit

There is a growing consensus among media scholars, technologists, and designers that digital reproducibility today is an almost complete reversal of all patterns that for centuries defined mechanical reproductions. Hence in many ways, our understanding of digital reproducibility is still crafted in the mold (albeit in the negative) that Benjamin created in the Thirties, when he famously epitomized the cultural logic of mechanical copies. This session will investigate the continuity of Benjamin's interpretive patterns in some aspects of the contemporary critical discourse on digital art and architecture.

Session Four: Perception, Media Theory, and the Subject of Psychoanalysis

This session explores the implications of Benjamin’s theory of perception for “media theory” today, specifically in relation to “virtual technologies.” Benjamin’s contribution, it is argued, rests on two major claims: first, that all experience is technological, insofar as it involves an artificial organization of perception, and second, that architecture is the “concrete a priori” for the training of perception. Among other things, the session will attempt to extend Benjamin’s psychoanalysis of perception as an “epistemological break” to the media theories of Marshall McLuhan, Paul Virilio, and Jean Baudrillard.

Exhibition: Architecture, technology, perception – critical explorations

This session combines paper presentations with an exhibition and panel discussion devoted to recent work that questions the discourse of technology and its uses in the field of architecture and urban planning today. We are especially interested in papers, projects, and installations that reconsider the relationship between "machine" and "hand" as it was articulated in the modern period -- or that investigate how current tactics and techniques of production may affect the haptic and optic experience of spaces. This would include work that explores current interests in new materials, the phenomena of surfaces, and ornament. While the exhibition will most likely feature original work, papers that provide critical readings of the work of others are very welcome.

Submissions:

The conference organizers welcome proposals in English or French for 30-minute presentations on all topics relevant to the conference theme. Submissions, in the form of a 500-1000 word abstract, a Curriculum Vitae, and/or visual samples should be sent to coll-ats@paris-lavillette.archi.fr. Deadline for submissions is Friday, March 30, 2007. Successful applicants will be notified by May 15. Funding for travel is available to a limited number of participants. Questions regarding the conference should be submitted to the conference email address, which is coll-ats@paris-lavillette.archi.fr.