After successful completion of the course, students are able to work with texts, develop independent concept ideas and take a stand on an abstract topic in the form of structured discussions and a self-authored academic paper. Students become familiar with the practice of close reading and learn the correct use of citations and bibliographies, the basic principles of library and internet research as well as primary forms of argumentation. The participants are able to perceive, structure and organise a topic in such a way that it can be discussed in a scientifically and to appreciate diverse stylistic modes of rigorous academic writing. Furthermore, students will attain a broader understanding of architecture, not only as a discipline aimed at the realisation of buildings, but also as a device of architectonic thinking that concerns and connects both material and immaterial domains of production and theory.
[Hypomnemata] constituted a material memory of things read, heard, or thought, thus offering these as an accumulated treasure for rereading and later meditation. They also formed a raw material for the writing of more systematic treatises in which were given arguments and means by which to struggle against some defect (such as anger, envy, gossip, flattery) or to overcome some difficult circumstance (a mourning, an exile, downfall, disgrace).— Michel Foucault, "On the Genealogy of Ethics," in Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, 273.
“We can feel our images changing us,” John May prophetically announces on the first page of his pathographic manifesto “Signal. Image. Architecture” (Columbia, 2019) but all the while the sinking immersion continues and Bruno Latour’s drastic diagnosis of the “horrors of the unmanageable” leaves with the certainty that our “images are no longer a record of anything; they are the provisional translations and possible renderings of data that could take any other shape.” And yet, if images are merely contingent renderings—as also large part of the architectural practice seem to consider them—then how can we feel this changing us? And how can we recognise the rapidness of this reciprocity? How can we imagine, in the midst of our serene new world of images, to feel differently?The invention of the camera led to the belief that photography could somehow represent the world in a certain and disembodied way; that through this technique we could generate accurate, objective representations of what the world is like and assess with greater certainty what it means to inhabit it. Human vision became something that could be enhanced, altered and augmented. It was believed one could inspect the world more truthfully by observing it with tools and instruments that coincided with our retinal sight. Being in the world was to see it, to look at it, to look at it again and again; to observe a world in movement and of change. But change complicates the already conflicted relationship between seeing, knowing, imagining and representing. It tapers truth that wants to rely on certainty, and there is nothing more certain in our world than change. When asked what would we dream of once everything becomes visible, Paul Virilio replied “we will dream of being blind.” Aim of the Seminar is to explore this paradoxical “vision of blindness,” under the sign of the hypomnema—a material disembodied memory in which an affective optics meets an impersonal vision. This seminar wants to engage in a writing exercise aimed at clarifying the status of images under a techno-political condition belonging to ideas and ways of life that go beyond the lament of the digital visual dominance; instead wishes to gather in a situational bodily encounter a language to navigate the ‘dream of when everything becomes visible’.
» Video presentation of the course
The course will develop in a presence format. In the event of a changed Corona situation, there may be changes to the format to distance learning.
The course will be structured in different components: a series of lectures focusing on the topic of the seminar will be alternated by a set of exercises based on the provided literature, followed by discussion; the last part of the course will be entirely dedicated to reviews in preparation for the delivery of the paper, eventually to be presented as in an academic symposium.
www.attp.tuwien.ac.at
At the end of the seminar, participants will be asked to produce an academic paper on a topic related to the themes discussed in class. The paper will have to be written in English.Only participants attending the course, actively engaging in the discussions and delivering the scheduled exercises will be admitted to final evaluation. Attendance and participation are therefore mandatory.
Klee, P., & In Spiller, J. (1961). The notebooks of Paul Klee. The Thinking Eye (Vol. I) & The Nature of Nature (Vol. II) Foucault, M. (1966). Order of Things: An Archaeology of Human Sciences — ‘Las Meninas’Foucault, M., Harkness, J., & Magritte, R. (2020). This Is Not a Pipe. — ‘Non-Affirmative Painting’Deleuze, G., & Smith, D. W. (2017). Francis Bacon: The logic of sensation. — ‘The Eye and the Hand’ Duchamp, M., Sanouillet, M., & Peterson, E. (1989). The writings of Marcel Duchamp. — ‘The Green Box’ Steyerl, H. (2012). The wretched of the screen. — ‘In Free Fall’ Leonardo da Vinci, Irma A. Richter, Martin Kemp, Thereza Wells (2008) Leonardo da Vinci Notebooks May, J. (2019). Signal. Image. Architecture. — ‘Everything is already an image’ from Log40Merleau-Ponty, M. (1961) The Merleau-Ponty Reader (Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy — ‘Eye and Mind’ Valery, P. (1972). Collected Works of Paul Valery, Volume 8, Leonardo, Poe, Mallarme — ‘Leonardo’
