NEW BEGINNINGS
In a time increasingly characterised by conflict, catastrophe, and crisis – how do we imagine better futures? Layered and expanding systems of social inequity manifesting in various forms of discrimination, racist violence, climate change, and wealth disparity are producing what Mark Fisher refers to as a ‘malaise,’ a feeling that there is, and can be, ‘nothing new;’ That there may be ‘no alternative’ to the structural processes and ideological frameworks informing the crises shaping our world today.
The Visual Cultures Module for the Winter Term 2022/23 will concern the urgent theme of new beginnings. How can we theorise for new paradigms of world-making centred on equality and human rights? How can these theorisations be translated on concrete terms? Further, what do we consider the role of critique to be amidst the urgency of action and practice?
Situated between the discursive fields of architecture, contemporary art and theory, the module will create a structure for critical reflection, collaborative discussion, and material practice through seminars, reading groups, public lectures, workshops, and screenings. Each week will address a thread of critical theory which concerns the structural roots and repercussions of imbalance and inequity. Examples from art, architecture, and activism will be shared to discuss what to do with critique – supplanted by bi-weekly public programmes with renown thinkers and practitioners from around the world, each engaging with designing, curating, making, and imagining for better futures.
Students will be required to work both independently and collaboratively in an active and discursive atmosphere. With the support of department lecturers and tutors, each student will be asked to produce a ‘research file’ conceived throughout the course, which shows practice-based interpretations and reflections on the ideas raised throughout the module’s duration. Students will also be asked to work together to conceive of a final collective intervention, which could take the form of a group exhibition, spatialised group project, discursive conference, or public activity in a selected space in Vienna. This collective intervention will respond to the course’s guiding query, ‘how can we imagine and articulate new beginnings?
Core courses
Contemporary Culture
Visual Culture of the City
Regimes of the Visual
Art as an Architectural Concept
Applied Cultural Theory
Additional courses
Architectures of the Everyday
New Models of Culture and Art Production
Excursion Visual Culture
Dates:
Monday, 3 October 2022
14:00 – 16:00 Carmen Lael Hines + Bilal Alame
Introduction into the Visual Culture Module
Monday, 10 October 2022
14:00 – 16:00 Peter Mörtenböck + Helge Mooshammer
Seminar: Data Publics, Platform Urbanism, and New Accounts of Future-Making
Tuesday, 11 October 2022
11:00 – 13:00 Tutor/Student Workshop
Monday, 17 October 2022
14:00 – 16:00 Ofri Cnaani
Seminar: On Un-naming
Tuesday, 18 October 2022
11:00 – 13:00 Tutor/Student Workshop
Monday, 24 October 2022
14:00 – 16:00 Carmen Lael Hines
Seminar: They say it is love. We say it is unwaged work: An Introduction to Social Reproduction Theory.
Monday, 31 October 2022
14:00 – 16:00 Carmen Lael Hines
Seminar: Working Spaces: Architecture and Capitalist Productivism
18:00 – 19:30 Joseph Henry
Public Programme: Sound Advice, Forms of Music
November 2022
Thursday, 3 November 2022
18:00 – 20:00: Stefano Harney
Public Programme: Pedagogical Sociality
Monday, 7 November 2022
14:00 – 16:00 Into the Black Box
Seminar (led by Mattia Frapporti and Maurilio Pirone): Imaginaries and Frictions of Platform Urbanism
18:00 – 20:00 Into the Black Box
Public Programme: (led by Niccolò Cuppini): What urban future: Do high-tech metropolises dream of electric sheep?
Tuesday, 8 November 2022
Tutor/Student Workshop
Monday, 14 November 2022
14:00 – 16:00 Slutty Urbanism
Seminar: Alternative Spatial Patterns
18:00 – 20:00 Benj Gerdes:
Public Programme: Oceans of/and Data
Tuesday, 15 November 2022
11:00 – 13:00 Slutty Urbanism
Workshop: Slutty Walk through the city
Monday, 21 November 2022
14:00 – 16:00 Ofri Cnaani
Seminar: Performance, Architecture and Productive Interruptions
18:00 – 20:00 Ofri Cnaani
Public Programme Data Apartheid: Data Colonialism and the Israel – Palestine Conflict
Tuesday, 22 November 2022
11:00 – 13:00 Tutor/Student Workshop
Monday, 28 November 2022
14:00 – 16:00 Peter Mörtenböck + Helge Mooshammer
Seminar: I took her to a supermarket - I don't know why - But I had to start it somewhere - So it started there
18:00 – 20:00 Ippolito Pestellini Laparelli
Public Programme: Across design, technology, environment and politics
December 2022
Monday, 5 December 2022
14:00 – 16:00 Bernadette Krejs
Seminar: Hegemonies of the Home and Imagining Housing Otherwise
Tuesday, 6 December 2022
11:00 – 13:00 Tutor/Student Workshop
Monday, 12 December 2022
14:00 – 16:00: Carmen Lael Hines
Workshop: Tinder Urbanism: Sex and Self-Optimisation in the Swiping City
18:00 – 20:00
Public Programme: Visual Cultures Screening
Monday, 19 December 2022
11:00 – 14:00 Tutor/Student Workshop + Carmen Lael Hines (Preliminary Presentations)
18:00 – 20:00: Lemonot (Lorenzo Perri + Sabrina Morreale) and Urban Radicals (Era Savvides + Nasios Varnavas)
Public Programme: Shaping Narratives and Designing Relationships
January 2023
Monday, 9 January 2023
14:00 – 16:00: Carmen Lael Hines
Seminar: Care of the Self and Collective Thinking
Tuesday, 10 January 2023
11:00 – 13:00 Tutor/Student Workshop
Tuesday, 17 January 2023
11:00 – 13:00 Tutor/Student Workshop
Monday, 23 January 2023
Final Presentation of Student Work (public), guest jury: Into the Black Box collective
For further information in English see the TISS pages of individual courses and the departmental homepage: https://visualculture.tuwien.ac.at