11 Nov 2008

THIS IS TOMORROW? Urban Utopia - Dystopia - Heterotopia
MIT Visual Arts Program Lecture Series

This is the sixth in a series of cross-disciplinary lectures that include speakers from art, architecture, urbanism and related research fields from around the world. We pose questions to start a discussion about imagining tomorrow's urban 'everyday life'- a topic that calls for a discourse beyond just formal disciplines. All programs are free and open to the public. The lecture series is directed by Ute Meta Bauer in collaboration with Yvonne P. Doderer and Amber Frid-Jimenez

SPEAKERS

Lucy Orta, trained as a fashion designer but working as an artist since the beginning of the 90s,has realized what she called 'architectures with soul.' Her objects respond in a critical and constructive gaze on the most sensitive areas of society, evoking the need for change, poetically prefiguring reality and suggesting alternative life styles. Is the idea of a settlement in a place like Antarctica – inherently isolated, inhospitable and uninhabitable - a tabula rasa that could lead to a 'nation of humanity' and a peaceful land for those escaping economic or natural disasters, war or political intimidation?

Nicholas Makris, Professor of Mechanical and Ocean Engineering; Director of the Laboratory for Undersea Remote Sensing at MIT, Cambridge (USA) How are new technologies, such as Ocean Waveguide Remote Sensing, enabling many new discoveries about remote undersea habitats? How will these technologies permit scientists to detect and monitor extra-terrestrial ecosystems, such as the vast ocean under the ice of Jupiter's moon Europa? How is a habitat, remote in terms of time, i.e. the Renaissance culture of lute playing, now being retrieved and sensed?

Armin Linke, currently based in Milano and Berlin, is a photographer and filmmaker. He is working on an ongoing archive about human activity and the most varied natural and man-made landscapes. His attempt is to document scenes where the boundary between fiction and non-fiction blurs or becomes invisible. What do we know about the habitats on the numerous islands in the Mediterranean Sea?


SERIES SCHEDULE

September 29 - Imagining Communities

Ute Meta Bauer, Director MIT Visual Arts Program; Yvonne P. Doderer, architect and urban researcher, MIT Visiting Professor in Visual Arts; Jesko Fezer, architect, collaborator with the Institute of Applied Urbanism in Berlin, Germany, and coeditor of AnArchitektur.

October 6 - Urban Utopia?

Peter Marcuse, Professor of Urban Planning, Columbia University, NYC; Pia Maria Ahlback, Lecturer and Researcher in Comparative literature at Åbo Akademi University, Finland.

October 20 - The Right to the City

Shuddhabrata Sengupta, member of Raqs Media Collective and Sarai.net, New Delhi, India, co-curator of manifesta7, Bolzano, Italy; Philippe Rekacewicz, geographer and cartographer for Le Monde Diplomatique, France and the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP/Grid), Arendal, Norway.

October 27 - What City? Whose City?

Regina Bittner, curator and coordinator of the Bauhaus Kolleg at the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation, Germany; Stefano Boeri, Editor-in-Chief of Abitare, Milan, Italy, teaches at the Milan Polytechnic and is a visiting professor at the Graduate School of Design, Harvard University; Bartolomeo Pietromarchi, Italy, art critic and curator, recently appointed curator for MAXXI, the Italian National Contemporary Art Museum in Rome.

November 3 - Mobile Life, Ghost Towns

Lukas Feireiss, Berlin, Germany, curator, and editor of Architecture of Change: Sustainability and Humanity in the Built Environment; AbdouMaliq Simone, Professor in the Department of Sociology, Goldsmith University of London, UK.

November 17 - Remote Habitats

Lucy Orta, Studio-Orta, Paris, France, and Professor for Art, Fashion and the Environment, London College of Fashion, UK; Nicholas Makris, Professor of Engineering and Director of the MIT Laboratory of Undersea Remote Sensing; Armin Linke, photographer and film maker, Milan, Italy, and guest professor at the HFG Karlruhe, Germany.

December 1 - Urban Culture, Urban Agriculture

Ingrid Book and Carina Hedén, artists, Oslo, Norway; Nikolaus Hirsch, architect, current work includes the European Kunsthalle in Cologne, United Nations Plaza (with Anton Vidokle) Berlin, Germany, and a cultural laboratory for a new residential area in Delhi, India.

SPECIAL THANKS

This lecture series is made possible by a special grant from the Office of the Dean, MIT School of Architecture and Planning.

ABOUT US

The MIT Visual Arts Program offers a two-year Masters of Science in Visual Studies (SMVisS). The program is focused on the development of artistic practices that challenge traditional genres and the limits of the gallery/museum context. The program is part of the Department of Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology