1. Atmosphere, Anthropocene, Urbanity, Sensitivity
Session Chair(s): Niels Albertsen (Aarhus School of Architecture, Denmark), Suzel Balez (AAU Laboratory, Cresson, France), Laurent Devisme (AAU Laboratory, Crenau, France), Jean-Paul Thibaud (AAU Laboratory, Cresson, France)
This proposal is based on a double observation. On the one hand, we are currently witnessing a growing importance of the sensitive domain, both in social sciences research and in architectural and urban design. On the other hand, the current socio-ecological crisis is also and inseparably a crisis of sensitivity to our environments. Environmental humanities show this very well: we are indeed affected by the feeling of being less and less at home on earth and with the impression that the ground tends to slip under our feet.
We hypothesize that our way of being sensitive to the spaces we inhabit is changing and that the question of sensitivity is a particularly relevant entry for thinking about current and future changes in our living environments. From this point of view, sensitivity is not a simple passive reception but rather a power of intensification and transformation of our relationship to the world.
This session project proposes to put the atmosphere to the test of Anthropocene.
What about the heuristic power and the operational potential of the ambient perspective in the Anthropocene era? How can ambiances help us support the socio-ecological transition and “bring ecology home”?
Within this framework, the orientations that we suggest are the following:
- Different spatial devices, in situ experimentations, scientific, artistic or documentary projects, aim to concretely experience this "new era": observation platform for landscape change, exploration of places affected by a disaster, exhibition-awareness of the Anthropocene … What can we say about the use of such devices, what is their scope?
- One of the characteristics of the Anthropocene era stems from the difficulty of projecting ourselves. It has never been so much a question of planning failures, disappointments in planning… If this impacts public policies, it is not unrelated with sensitivities affected by forms of disenchantment and defeatism. We can more particularly observe them in places marked by the golden age of development and whose future is problematic: seaside resorts, ski resorts and other spheres related to modern spatial design. What do these situated sensitivities tell us?
- The subtle, tenuous characteristics of certain ambient transformations undoubtedly also contribute to the apprehension of Anthropocene. How are these sometimes discrete evolutions perceived and / or represented, playing out at the limits of the phenomenal and often unusual temporal ranges? Can we consider these discreet changes capable of initiating important processes having long creative spans?
-
Atmosphere, Anthropocene, Urbanity, Sensitivity
2. Artificial Lighting and Darkness in the Architectural and Urban Pratices
Session Chair(s): Nicolas Houel (AAU Laboratory, Crenau, France)
As a public service taken for granted by populations for its contribution to comfort, identity and the feeling of safety, urban artificial lighting has recently started a renewal process of two kinds: light extinction and/or switching the lamps in favour of energy-efficient ones. The first option faces an outcry regarding the discomfort and the feeling of insecurity generated, while delighting associations and individuals with strong ecological values. The second option does not initiate the expected reduction in light pollution. If it does generate the energy savings that are called for, these could be short-lived. It is undoubtedly the first time since its invention and deployment on a large scale that artificial lighting is so controversial.
Largely studied in its geographical (Challéat, 2011; Gwiadzinski, 2014), ecological (Sordello et al., 2018), sanitary (Zieliska-Dabkowska, 2007) or even security-related (Mosser, 2007) dimensions, night remains a space-time explored through political and technical considerations in relation with artificial lighting. The question of the connection to darkness (Edenson, 2013) seems in turn to represent a wealth of resources and knowledge to be discovered. In reply to this, university and institutional initiatives are nowadays in place to study the protocols for the complete or partial restoration of darkness in urban environments (Challéat, Samuel, Lapostolle, 2017; Chhaya, 2012). In a context where, in the western world, artificial lighting is culturally accepted as an identity and security tool, what nocturnal urban landscapes will we eventually design and experience if darkness is partially restituted?
> This session proposes to take stock of the place of artificial lighting and darkness in the theoretical approach to architectural and urban production. It examines the absence of studies about the night in architecture schools and considers the physical results in development projects. Here, it questions the opportunity of situating night and darkness as sensitive dimensions in the education of architects and urban planners.
Questions:
- Why and how to discuss light sobriety?
- How to establish the state of beliefs regarding artificial lighting and darkness?
- How do architects and urban planners deal with the nocturnal space-time?
- What should we expect from the design of future nocturnal urban ambiances?
-
Artificial Lighting and Darkness in the Architectural and Urban Pratices
3. Atmospheres + Design
Session Chair(s): Shanti Sumartojo (Monash University, Australia)
In this session we consider how interventions through design, architecture and creative practice can help us understand atmospheres better, their constitution, impact and analytical limits. It starts from the premise that, while the creation of atmospheres has been the goal of a range of design fields, they inevitably escape this intention when they are taken up in the experiential world. Art, design and architecture may make interventions in the world that configure or are understood atmospherically, but atmospheres themselves cannot be designed (Sumartojo and Pink 2018). Moreover, while visualisations or prototypes are important tools in such processes (Degen et al 2017), they can never predetermine or predict exactly how atmospheres will be experienced, even when this is the aim. At the same time, many places, buildings, events or routes are understood atmospherically by people who experience them, whether or not atmospheres are the purposeful goal of designers.
This session seeks to probe the relationship between atmospheres and the processes and interventions of design, architecture and other forms of creative practice. Moreover, it invites contributions not only on professional design work, but also vernacular, ‘everyday’ and improvisational modes of design and making (Duque and Popplow 2019, Wakkary and Maestri 2007) that may intentionally or accidentally help to constitute atmospheres.
We invite papers that bring atmospheres and creative practice of all kinds together, and that reflect on the relationship between atmosphere and design, including:
- The processes through which designers, architects or artists intervene atmospherically to shape affective or sensorial experience.
- Accounts of how art, design and architecture are experienced, which might include new ethnographically-informed research.
- ‘Everyday’ design and its relationship to atmospheres.
- New methodological approaches that advance understandings of the relationship between atmospheres and design.
- Creative projects that engage with atmospheres.
-
Atmospheres + Design
4. Body, Culture, Identity
Session Chair(s): Cristina Palmese and José Luis Carles (Universidad Autonoma de Madrid, Spain)
The objective of this thematic session is to explore how the relationship between artistic and scientific tools can overcome divisions and conceptual schemes that do not correspond to our contemporary condition, exploring the complexity of its open, broad and varied development.
The city, apart from being a potential receptacle of images and sensations dealing with all the senses, experiments deep social, political or technological changes (a reorganization of structures, fluctuations and populational migrations, an architecture of cultural spaces, etc.) in such a quick way that there is hardly time for a critical reflection or for creating a state of consciousness about it.
Moreover, in a culture submitted to the power of images, we hardly pay attention to the perceptual complexity of our body. Our perceptions are submitted to geometry, and to discreet and simplified observation, which enables a better control by means of prototypical designs and remote control, handling our interaction with the environment, of our desires, aligned bodies.
There is a common consensus about the need of interdisciplinary or rather, transdisciplinary approach to research, but often this agreement does not correspond to a real application of this idea. The criticism of the Western schematic, quantitative and reductionist tradition, is maintained within the criteria of tradition itself, usually limited to a mere disciplinary and methodological juxtaposition. This does not address the complexity and it does not facilitate the construction of a common language nor the achievement of common objectives.
The challenge of this session is to stress the importance of a collaborative and participative way to understand through our senses.
The direct experimentation of space helps us understand it, as well as "to perform it", it helps us understand the aesthetic and emotional relationships we have with it. A new approach to the knowledge could be the basis of the conception, formulation and construction of a new landscape capable of highlight the role and diversity of embodied expression. We invite papers (theoretical, actions, field studies…) that address the above points within themes including:
- How to explore connections between thinking and acting in everyday city experiences,
- How to develop processes of appropriating public spaces (sensibilization, activism, citizenship…) by means of a sensorial consciousness and the experience of the inhabitants (cultural landscapes, immaterial heritage)?
- How do the collective, community exploration of the vital flow of the urban space, altering the classical relationship between expert, artist, landscape and inhabitants?
- Can we consider our body, not as something defined, but as a flow of relations with the environment? How can we explore this theoretically and methodologically ?
- Is it possible to create experiences and experimentations that provide knowledge through the embodiment of urban space?
- How to create new dynamic and participatory performative environment as a dynamic dialogic process, in which a citizen, constructed space and technology are regarded as co-creators?
-
Body, Culture, Identity
5. Digital Architecture. Atmospheres in Design and New Responsive & Sensitive Configurations
Session Chair(s): Amal Abu Daya (AAU Laboratory, Cresson, France), Philippe Liveneau (AAU Laboratory, Cresson, France)
Since the 1960s, the digital shift in architecture has shaped the evolution of the discipline, both in terms of academic research and operational practice. Preliminary explorations on the generation of forms was followed by the issue of performative design and the control of atmospheres, then the renewal of design methods using parametric modeling tools.
Since the 90s, material embodiment, manufacturing tools, and interactive technologies constitute new theoretical, methodological and aesthetic horizons for architecture. Notions of non-standard architecture, the design-manufacturing continuum (from file to factory, from design to production) or even the renewed interest in ornamentation, directly question the ambiances ; those of design situations, on one hand, and the situated experiences of contemporary architecture, on the other hand.
Are there unique atmospheres likely to characterize the digital architecture of the 21st century, whether we focus on the terms of design, manufacture or perception of these "new" ambient environments ?
- How has the transition from digital virtuality to the of (physical)prototypes transformed the activity of designing architecture and / or atmospheres ?
- How does the possibility of embodying design objects, also known as the design-manufacturing continuum, have the effect of refocusing the project activity on the perceptual quality and the sensitive interactions of the designer with the artefacts produced ?
- How does the renewal of design practices induce new ecosystems of actors, enabled the development of new “workshops” of design-production and generated new “working atmospheres”, within schools of architecture, research laboratories or in operational practice?
- Is it possible to single out, through the joint reintroduction of technique and materiality in the field of architecture, a “phylum machinique” specific to the digital era, whose expression features question the atmospheres, in terms of variation, configuration or renewed aestheticism of our built and perceived environments ? Are there arrangements and / or devices specific to digital architecture?
- How does the development of a non-standard architecture, which we will associate with the possibility of the serial production of differentiated components, allow us to think of an architecture that is more attentive to users (mass customization) and the environment (energetic performance)? Can the digital turn of the architectural discipline be understood as the renewal of a socio-ecology of atmospheres to be designed ?
-
Digital Architecture. Atmospheres in Design and New Responsive & Sensitive Configurations
6. From a Sensitive Ecology of Ambiances/Atmospheres to a Political Ecology
Session Chair(s): Rachel Thomas (AAU Laboratory, Cresson, France), Damien Masson (CY Cergy Paris University, MRTE Research group)
Recently, there has been an evolution in urban practices and sensibilities that bear more or less directly the mark of the effects of certain "ambiances policies" (in terms of urban marketing, security, pacification, aestheticization, hygiene, entertainment, etc.). Many works in the field of ambiances show how they affect the experience of spaces, by giving a certain tone to the situations in which we find ourselves, we act and interact. But, few of them clearly highlight the role they play in situations of unrest, marginalization, stigmatization - in short, in situations that undermine our ability to participate in ordinary social life. However, these “ambiances proposals” also generate diffuse forms of normativity that make certain practices, some attentional regimes, some ways of being and being together in public more or less acceptable.
The challenge of this session is precisely to pay attention to the ways in which descriptive approaches to ordinary social life - attentive to their sensitive and affective dimension - can help to understand the social, cultural, ethical and moral issues involved in the current transformations of urban atmspheres, in particular when these transformations reflect climates of tension, vulnerability, intranquility, threat... How does an ambiance-based approach allow us to apprehend these issues in terms of symbolic violence, hierarchy, inequalities? How does it allow us to access these phenomena below their visibility and enunciation? In which ways do they upset our affects, ways of feeling, tones of experience? How can this become a critical research category that addresses changes in our living environments?
We invite papers (theoretical or field studies) that address the above points within themes including:
- How to switch from a sensitive ecology of atmospheres to a political ecology of atmospheres? What theoretical and methodological postures?
- What are the political uses of ambiances? On what kind of dispositifs do they rely? What are the pervasive values that drive them?
- How do ambiances/atmospheres contribute to produce discrimination, "marginalization", fragility, unrest, vulnerability?
- How do ambiances/atmospheres affect the bodies, sensitivities, capacities of individuals to act and participate in ordinary social life?
- How to take into account these problems critically without being in a denunciatory posture?
-
From a Sensitive Ecology of Ambiances/Atmospheres to a Political Ecology
7. Infinite Atmospheres? Ethical Dimensions of and for the Design of Public Spaces
Session Chair(s): Théa Manola (AAU Laboratory, Cresson, France), Evangelia Paxinou (AAU Laboratory, Cresson, France)
Recent architectural practices grouped under the title Infinite Spaces (Encore heureux, 2018) differently rests the interactions between the spatial, sensitive and social dimensions of atmospheres. Into this frame, the role of architects is redefined, the processes of design is more clearly shared with other actors of the projects and the tools and fields of architectural practice are changing (experimentation, temporary urbanism processes, “architectural permanence”…). Atmospheres seems to be particularly important in these spaces, in particular because the physical part of the design is subdued.
If atmosphere permits to reveal ways of existence and coexistence in the public space (sensible experience) and can inspire the “sensible” approach of the architectural and urban environment, which relies, in addition to the technical, aesthetic and functional dimensions, on the affects (as personal and collective expression), what the atmospheres of this infinite spaces teach us about contemporary urban production and life?
How do these (infinite) places become an environment and thus favor a climate that goes beyond the built space? As spaces for continuous experimentation, are these infinite places a new way of thinking and creating an atmosphere? Are these spaces the vectors of infinite atmospheres?
How do these places and the atmospheres they carry become means of defining and redefining the commons of public space? How do they contribute to the definition of the contemporary 'commons' for public spaces design?
This session awaits critical contributions on the sensitive conception of the atmosphere, its ethic and socio-political aspects, and aims to open the debate on contemporary practices of architectural creation.
-
Infinite Atmospheres? Ethical Dimensions of and for the Design of Public Spaces
8. Inhabiting Insecurity. Practices and Representations
Session Chair(s): Alia Ben Ayed (ENAU, National School of Architecture and Urbanism, Tunisia), Olfa Meziou (ENAU, National School of Architecture and Urbanism, Tunisia)
Within the current prevailing insecurity climate, humans develop and integrate, to their daily life, individual and collective strategies to continue living an ordinary life, to ensure a continuum of habits and corporality. These strategies, be they more refuge or navigation, rely on space devices, prosthesis, high-tech gadgets, specific movements and practices, etc. The immunity issue (Sloterdijk, 2005) underlies, more than ever, living practices in their uses, their representations and their cartographies of the place, the city, the world and their own body. How is this insecurity cartography built and what practices does it generate? What are their impacts on the construction / conception of both our paths (Virilio, 1996) and our interiors, that is to say, on our relationship to both the public and the private spaces? Can we say, like Virilio concerning speed, that insecurity is a milieu?
In order to answer these questions, here are some clues for reflection:
- Sense of Self and space representation.
If inhabiting is a sense of self in space [Sloterdijk, 2005], how does insecurity impact this sens? What are their atmospheric determinants ? How do they affect our « body status » [Guisgand, 2012] ? what is the share of the factual and the psychological in our representations of territory security or insecurity?
- Stays and paths in insecurity
In 1993, Morphosis published Connected isolation. The monography title sums, according to Sloterdijk, the big principle of modernity. Six centuries before, around 1300, Guillaume de Saint-Pathus distinguished two aspects of existence: the home and the ride (la demeure et la chevauchée). How is insecurity expressed through these modalities of existence: stay and journey, openness and isolation? For Sloterdijk [Sloterdijk, 2005], being is inhabiting an island, investing an interior. In the most private space to the most public one, in our staying spaces as on our paths, we are supposed to continually try to build interiors, bubbles. How are these atmospheric interiors shaped? How are their limits, their thresholds and their openness to the world defined?
- Safeguard atmospheres
Due to the increase of insecurity, barricades are rising, surveillance is amplifying, "pacification", security and labelling operations are widespreading. What are the atmospheric consequences of security? Do they hinder our freedoms? Do they exacerbate inequalities or, on the contrary, do they smooth them out? Do they in fine change the feeling of insecurity? How do they affect our ways of being together? Can we really live in the « guarantee city » [Breviglieri, 2013] ?
-
Inhabiting Insecurity. Practices and Representations
9. Physical/Digital Spaces Collisions. So What?
Session Chair(s): Thomas Leduc (AAU Laboratory, Crenau, France), Myriam Servières (AAU Laboratory, Crenau, France), Vincent Tourre (AAU Laboratory, Crenau, France)
In recent decades, the use of new technologies in mobility situations has fostered the emergence of new forms of society. The empirical and tangible world of proximity, of short distances, of small communities, backdrop of our traditionally recognized senses, has suddenly collided with a set of virtual, networked universes operating on a world scale, capable of interconnecting billions of humans and non-humans.
In an article from 1992, the American geographer H. Couclelis "begs the philosophical question of the most appropriate conceptualization of geographic space" in the context of a controversy between the "object" and "field" views of geographic space. She first notes that this question is "closely analogous" to the atomic-plenum debate in the philosophy of physics before exploring "the theoretical and practical implications of the plenum ontology for geographical modeling". In such an understanding of space, the later is a continuous and ubiquitous field of potentials.
The question now arises as to the relevance of this model to the above-mentioned collision. How does physical/digital collision occur in urban space? What is the impact of this collision on our experience of space?
What are the impacts and consequences of these interaction on the perception of space, on urban ambiences, on the way of the city are design today and on the way the people can live and interact into these city?
-
Physical/Digital Spaces Collisions. So What?
10. Presencing Atmospheres
Session Chair(s): Niels Albertsen (Aarhus School of Architecture, Denmark)
This thematic session invites contributions that interrogate and exemplify different ways of ‘presencing’ atmospheric experiences to different others in other spaces and times. ‘Presencing’ here indicates that original in situ atmospheric experiences can and should be somehow sensibly recognizable for outside others as atmospheric. The presencing of atmospheres should itself be atmospheric. Another dimension of this problematic is the idea of ‘presencing’ atmospheres in situ, i.e. enhancing people’s attentiveness to atmosphere in a given place and time by further atmospheric intervention.
The many ways of presencing atmospheres atmospherically may include poetry, literature, ‘thought pictures’ and other forms of verbal gestures, visual, auditory, haptic and olfactory arts, sculpture and architecture, exhibitions, and a host of new electronic media. They may include combinations among these as well as with more research oriented modes of representation, the point being that in case of atmosphere there is no such thing as pure representation without expression or pure expression without representation, but only intermediaries of both, more or less oriented toward one or the other idealised pole (‘rexpresentations’ or ‘rexpressions’!).
The idea is that this issue calls for different approaches from different arts and sciences as well as the interaction between them. Contributions may exemplify atmospheric ways of presencing atmospheres and they may interrogate more principled theoretical, philosophical and conceptual questions as well.
-
Presencing Atmospheres
11. Sense and Sensibility of Affective Atmospheres
Session Chair(s): Andrea Jelić (Aalborg University, Denmark) and Aleksandar Staničić (TU Delft, Netherlands)
The aim of this thematic session is to bring in different disciplinary and methodological perspectives on affective atmospheres to examine the underlying, intertwined processes of sensing as sensibility (i.e., feeling, experiencing) and sensing as sense-making (i.e., understanding, conceptualizing, meaning making). Recent affective and ‘more-than representational’ turns in the scholarship and praxis, particularly visible in design of heritage architecture and places of memory, has emphasized the potential of affective and embodied experiences to act as a medium in production and communication of meaning. Such approach to creating interactive spaces assumes a negotiation between the processes of experiencing affective atmospheres and conceptualizing meaning, shaped by the broader socio-political context.
By considering the notion of affective atmospheres in spaces of heritage (and beyond), we ask what is the relationship between sense and sensibility? How can we investigate with different disciplinary and cross-disciplinary lenses—such as architecture, cultural geography, philosophy, cognitive science—the links between these two modes of sensing? What are the possibilities of a range of methodologies and tools—from ethnography to measuring physiological responses, from lived to simulated realities and other phenomenographic representations of atmospheric worlds—for understanding the ways in which we feel and think affective atmospheres? In what ways are sense-making and sensibility affected by the various socio-political factors and multiple stakeholders’ positions? And finally, what are the implications of understanding sense and sensibility of affective atmospheres at individual and collective level for creating a shared sense as a common ground for co-habitation in the future?
-
Sense and Sensibility of Affective Atmospheres
12. Sensitive Spaces and Urban Practices
Session Chair(s): Cristiane Duarte (Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro – UFRJ, Brasil), Ethel Pinheiro (Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro – UFRJ, Brasil)
The research on Architecture and Urbanism, provided by the bias of Social and Human Sciences, has sought to work on the strategies of multidisciplinary approach and deliberated studies applied to collective spaces in contemporary cities for many years. Such actions can promote the resensitization of people and spaces, if developed towards though more sensitive approaches.
It is clear that far beyond the role of Information Technology in the modification of spaces, Metropolization and Suburbanization have introduced a degree of detachment, or social indifference, into the experience of public spaces, that is expressed today as a state of exacerbation of opposites (much densified public spaces enlivened by actions of tactical engendering x inert spaces without occupation, bequeathed to an exclusive public of the society). Thus, the current processes of dispersion and division of the city intensify the perception of public space as a destabilized and erratic dimension, which needs to be revised and enlarged to make survive new subjectivities.
In this way, to fully understand collective space, considering it as the locus of action and reaction of social actors, it is our goal with this thematic session to shed new light on the understanding of the emotions and practices experienced in the process of rehabilitation, or lack of it, in small ordinary spaces. By experiencing these places, giving time for awareness and rediscovery, it is possible to make emerge some individual and collective senses, affections, resonances of memory and desire; it is also possible to be asked about the presence of the old and the new and about how to think collective spaces from a harmonious relationship between humans and objects; it is also possible to highlight absences, cast a glance at the remains and perspectives for the future. These thoughts can be instigated by reflexive, theoretical, poetic and critical essays, or even practices that can be archived in a synesthetic and (inter) subjective way – through videos, photographs or drawings.
We hope to receive contributions that may interfere with the expectations of every citizen or passer-by, in relation to the way they experience those collective spaces, raising ideas that may promote the recognition of alterity. We also wish to receive contributions based on the construction of subjective and cultural dynamics on the scale of everyday life, through the intertwining of architecture and urbanism with other Social Sciences, and with a view to developing new processes for engendering spaces that are open to differences and also motivators of more humanizing experiences.
These contributions are to be materialized through descriptions of practical actions, carried out in public spaces, and should portray the diversity with which we can think and execute the plans and goals for more politicized and touching urban spaces - beyond the traditional methodologies academically taught.
-
Sensitive Spaces and Urban Practices
13. Sensory Experience, Environmental Experience, Political Engagement
Session Chair(s): Théa Manola (AAU Laboratory, Cresson, France) and Edith Chezel (PACTE Laboratory, France)
Considering on one hand, the increase in power of an aesthetic capitalism (Assouly, 2008; Böhme, 2016), resulting from neoliberal logics of production of inhabited spaces, often adorned with ‘green aesthetics’ (Fel, 2009; Blanc, 2012) ; and considering on the other hand, climate emergency and the injunction to transition, mobilizing various technical objects (Labussière and Nadaï 2018); we are witnessing multiple processes of "smoothing" spaces and experiences (standardization - Manola, 2012; Faburel and Manola, 2016; Thomas, 2018; aseptization - Thomas, 2009; fluidization and pacification - Masson, 2009; Adey et al., 2013) often ignoring our relationships to the "weather- world" (Ingold 2011, 120).
Nevertheless, in a contemporary world enduring various crisis (namely environmental), sensitive experiences can also help understanding spaces in other ways (Thibaud, 2018). Physical engagement(s) in, with and by this world, using the body comprehension of space, might lead both to awareness and to forms of collective action, struggles and resistance (cf. Blanc and Lolive, 2007 ; Chezel, 2018). In this session we propose to discuss these political engagements/involvements generated by the body (Céfaï 2009) and to question ourselves through the sensitive, on the very meaning of the produced space.
How do we relate to others (human and especially here non-human) through sensitive experiences? To what extent do sensitive experiences allow consideration or even awareness of environmental issues (both locally and more globally - climate change, biodiversity loss, etc.)? In short, how do sensitive experiences become political? How might sensitive experience be considered as one an element of environmental engagement or even of claiming by "citizen" involvement? In return, how do environmental issues challenge sensitive approaches to space (normativity, knowledge making, etc.)?
Theoretical contributions on the tensions between the neoliberal logic of space production in times of environmental crisis and the sensitive experiences of our contemporary world, as well as methodological contributions on the understanding of these sensitive experiences, particularly as engagements/involvements (environmental or other), are invited for this session.
-
Sensory Experience, Environmental Experience, Political Engagement
14. Sound Stakes of the Atmosphere
Session Chair(s): Grégoire Chelkoff (AAU Laboratory, Cresson, France), Théo Marchal (AAU Laboratory, Cresson, France)
The sound dimension is a fundamental component and input of ambiences and atmospheres. By unifying space and structuring time, it is both a sensitive and social dimension for what it engages in everyday relationships whether urban or domestic, and from architectural scale to territorial scale. Sound has spread both in space and time in the inhabited world, and the technologies of production / reproduction have made it a special way of raising awareness as well as a particular « marker » for investigating this theme.
But it is also as a vector of "décadrage" in comparison or in relation to the dominant senses -such as sight- and major preoccupations -like today's environmental issues- that the hearing can provide constructive and reframed elements. This session will seek to present and discuss this particular thread by taking stock of advances and new perspectives:
What does sound tell us about current and future developments in the world?
]What perspectives emerge when listening is taken as a privileged and relevant posture for analysis as well as for the design of inhabited environments?
This session will question how different "listening" or “hearings” could invite us to understand, to design and to produce ; especially when they intersect with societal and environmental matters and are confronted with other sensitive modalities.
Contributions are expected to be about prospective postures, specific or various studies as well as fundamental methodological questions and/or pedagogical experiments. The scope of actions may extend from experiments to situation analysis, including the proposal of tools, methodologies or case studies to build a sound culture of urban and architectural ambiences.
-
Sound Stakes of the Atmosphere
15. The Way of Ambiances: Scientific Practices, Artistic Practices
Session Chair(s): Didier Tallagrand (ESAAA - Superior School of Arts of Annecy Agglomeration) and Nicolas Tixier (AAU Laboratory, Cresson, France)
Design practices and research practices on ambiances inform one another in order to grasp and understand a situation and to plan for the future. Two mutual concerns of this use of ambiances are outlined both in the research field and in the broadened practices of art and design:
- The specificity of each situation, the focus on what exists, its capture, its formatting and its delivery into the public space call for the hybridisation of knowledge and practices between research on ambiances and art and design production through renewed forms and formats implemented by each individual. This perpetually renewed use of the concept of ambiance thus involves a pragmatic dimension through field work.
- Actions both in art, design and research work in a joint way about the sensitive. To this end, they make use of the open field of ecology (perception ecology, attention ecology, social ecology, environmental ecology, etc.) for scientific production and for the development of situations and/or of artistic forms. The question of urban and territorial conditions implies a commitment to a theoretical and critical dimension.
Sensitive ambiances and atmospheres can be used very differently, whether it is in the field of the arts, the urban or social sciences. How can ambiances contribute to test ordinary situations against the sensitive? How do they open up new ways in terms of artistic practice, methodological experiments or theoretical exploration? What about a situated socio-aesthetics focusing on percepts and affects that would permeate our living environments and infuse the contemporary sensitivities?
This session, open to researchers, designers and artists, aims to discuss these questions and the forms and experiences that allow to report on them.
References:
Derek McCormack, Atmospheric Things: On the Allure of Elemental Envelopment, Duke University Press, 2018.
Tim Ingold, Making, Anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture, Routledge, 2013.
Didier Tallagrand, Jean-Paul Thibaud, Nicolas Tixier (dir.), L’usage des ambiances. Une épreuve sensible des situations, Éd. Hermann, Paris, collection Colloque de Cerisy, 2020 (forthcoming).
Jean-Paul Thibaud, En quête d'ambiances. Éprouver la ville en passant, Genève, MétisPresses, 2015.
-
The Way of Ambiances: Scientific Practices, Artistic Practices
16. What is the Place of Atmospheres in Urban "Renaturation"?
Session Chair(s): Sylvie Laroche (AAU Laboratory, Cresson, France), Emeline Bailly (CSTB - Scientific and Technical Center for Building, France)
The stakes involved in climate change call for the development of new renaturing policies to adapt urban spaces to hazards. Indeed, nature (or a natural solution) and the redevelopment of ecosystems offer perspectives regarding a more lasting territorial resilience than many grey infrastructures. Renaturing metropolises, i.e. humans’ main environment, can also foster the urban quality of developed spaces. In cities, nature is increasingly perceived, appropriated and desired as a medium for strolls, recreational practices and the sensorial, emotional enjoyment that comes with imagining being in such locations. It encourages the creation of milieus and habitats for non-humans. It thus can contribute to improve the urban, ecological and sensory qualities of urban spaces for humans and non-humans.
In this context, focus will be specifically placed on renaturing projects that aim to reconcile urban and natural potentials in metropolitan areas. How does the development of ecological rehabilitation projects integrate and encourage the development of more qualitative sensitive experiences? How can the consideration of architectural and urban ambiances enable an influence on ecosystems?
The case studies can deal with urban renaturing strategies in areas where there are strong pressures on real estate, as well as in areas in urban decline. This session aims to question the ways in which the concept of architectural and urban ambiances allows us to develop sustainable life conditions for living beings and to encourage different forms of coexistence between humans and non-humans. It also aims to question the ways in which it encourages urban quality by creating environments that foster the pleasure of being in a place.
-
What is the Place of Atmospheres in Urban "Renaturation"?
1. Curating Urban Sound Parks: an ambiance perspective
Urban sound parks make excellent laboratories to consider how curated sound installations might transform the sonic ambiances of future cities. This panel invites three curators of internationally significant urban sound parks – Caramoor’s Garden of Sonic Delights, Lisbon’s Lisboa Soa, and Neerpelt’s Klankenbos – to reflect on the challenges of curating sound installations for public spaces, and the types of perceptual and social effects they generate. As global cities become more densely populated, issues of anxiety and stress related to noise and air pollution are increasing. Urban sound parks point to a way in which sonic ambiances might be transformed to create restful, evocative and imaginative spaces that enable the human body to explore other modes of experience in relationship to their immediate environments. To date, most sound parks have been located in rural and park settings. This workshop will focus on the challenges of adapting successful examples of sound parks to an urban context.
The panel invites three international leaders in sound park curation to share their experiences and insights in a workshop environment that invites audience discussion. The panel includes Dr Stephan Moore, senior lecturer in the Sound Arts and Industries program at Northwestern University, and curator of sound art for the Caramoor Center for Music and the Arts in New York State since 2014; Dr Raquel Castro, convenor of Invisible Places since 2014 and curator of the Lisboa Soa Sound Art Festival since 2016; and Dr Paul Craenen, Royal Conservatoire The Hague and Leiden University, who curated the Musical Impulse Centre for Music’s Klankenbos Sound Forest in Neerpelt, Belgium from 2012-17. The workshop will be facilitated by Dr Jordan Lacey, College of Design and Social Context, RMIT University , Melbourne, Australia, whose monograph, Sonic Rupture: a practice-led approach to urban soundscape design focussed specifically on the possibilities of curating networks of sound installations for future cities.
Each of these curators was responsible for programming sonic works into outdoor public spaces at a variety of scales and durations. These range from large scale permanent installations to short sonic performances, employing a variety of materials, instrumentation and artistic talents. Each of the parks are public facing, and as such are designed to enhance human experiences – cultural, social, entertainment. Given the interweaving of introduced sounds with the existing ephemeralities of site, each of the curators has significant experience in transforming the medium of sound, air and at times light to shift perception towards new relationships with immediate environments. Typically, the curated installations were located in already pleasant environments – green, quiet and tranquil. Future challenges include methods for adapting these curated environments to often dense urban centres, to facilitate experiences that take people outside of their everyday urban practices. The panel will be asked to reflect on their curatorial experiences, and ways in which this might be extended into an urban context.
Panel Biography
Jordan Lacey is a creative practitioner, transdisciplinary researcher, musician and curator who specialises in soundscape design and the creation of public sound art installations. He is the author of Sonic Rupture: a practice-led approach to urban soundscape design (Bloomsbury 2016). His was recently awarded an Australian Research Council grant titled Translating Ambiance: restorative sound design for urban soundscapes. This project aims to address the issue of sensory overload caused by noise pollution. Using an interdisciplinary approach that combines biophilic design and ambiance theory the project aims to create new techniques for the creation of sound art installations that advance the effectiveness of urban renewal initiatives.
Stephan Moore is a sound artist, designer, composer, improviser, coder, teacher, and curator based in Chicago. His creative work manifests as electronic studio compositions, improvisational outbursts, sound installations, scores for collaborative performances, algorithmic compositions, interactive art, and sound designs for unusual circumstances. He is the curator of sound art for the Caramoor Center for Music and the Arts, organizing annual exhibitions since 2014. He is also the president of Isobel Audio LLC, which builds and sells his Hemisphere loudspeakers. He was the music coordinator and touring sound engineer of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company (2004-10), and has worked with Pauline Oliveros, Anthony McCall, and Animal Collective, among many others. He is a senior lecturer in the Sound Arts and Industries program at Northwestern University.
Paul Craenen is a lecturer, researcher, composer and curator and a frequently demanded expert at the intersection of art practice, education and research. He obtained his PhD at Leiden University (2011) for artistic research on the performing body in contemporary music. His thesis was published by Leuven University Press under the title "Composing under the Skin" (2014). From 2012 to 2018 he was director of Musica, a Flemish organisation for music and sound education. He currently holds a position as research professor at the Royal Conservatoire in The Hague and is a member of the Academy for Creative and Performing Arts of Leiden University.
Raquel Castro is a researcher, curator and film director. Her work draws upon the relationship between sound, environment and urbanism, and has been presented in different formats. She is the founder and director of Lisboa Soa Sound Art Festival and the International Symposium Invisible Places. She holds a PhD in Communication and Arts from FCSH-UNL with the thesis "Contributions for an Analysis of the Soundscape: Sound, Space and Acoustic Identity". As a director, she highlights Soundwalkers (2009) and Soa, which will premiere at Indie Film Festival in May 2020. Currently, she is post-doc researcher at Cicant/Universidade Lusófona.
-
Curating Urban Sound Parks: an ambiance perspective
2. Scaling Sensory Experiences: Linking Perspectives from Dance, Occupational Therapy and Urban Design
Rennie TANG, Lisa SANDLOS, Elisa SEIDNER
In the midst of a global health crisis (in reference to the Covid-19 pandemic happening at the time of this writing) when everyday life as we know it has been turned on its head, the act of sensing and our sensitivity to the world has radically shifted. Interior atmospheres shaped by lighting and sound have become primary concerns while lively outdoor atmospheres have become oddly subdued yet marked by a heightened sense of spatial awareness of those around us. As a result some senses are sharpened while others have been dulled. The impact of these shifts upon our daily lives, both for better and for worse, can be understood and appreciated more deeply if we are invited to enter into other disciplinary worlds; we might see this as a form of alloaesthesia where ‘other senses’ and other ways of using our senses are opened up. The disciplines of dance, occupational therapy (OT) and urban design share an interest in human mobility, its sensory effects and the atmospheres produced. At the same time the specificity of each discipline will help us to diversify issues, priorities and strategies involved in reimagining the future of cities.
The way in which the senses are understood within each discipline is highly dependent on two scales: the scale at which each bodily sense functions and the scale of the environment within which the body is situated. The notion of ’scaling sensory experiences’ acknowledges that scale is a non-static condition that is continually shifting in an effort to deepen the dialogue between bodies and environments. With this dialogue in mind the three disciplines can work together to determine the types, qualities and modulations of sensory experience and atmosphere that might be suitable for a given space. On the other hand if we reconsider this dialogue in the context of our current state of crisis, what might be deemed ‘suitable’ may be called into question. New modes of togetherness that are less about physical proximity and more about collective sensory experience reinforce the notion of ‘scaling’ now more than ever. There is much to be remembered and learned as we immerse ourselves in the sonic atmosphere of accumulated applause at a certain hour each day or move about the city guided by an atmosphere of silent kinesthetic communication. Bodily gestures both big and small participate in the creation of unspoken yet acutely felt atmospheres. Clearly illuminated at this moment is how sensory experiences can shrink and expand, or be scaled, invoking new modes of attention. How might each discipline respond to these new modes? Can these responses evolve into new forms of hybrid practice?
As part of this research a panel discussion between the following three researchers/practitioners is proposed: 1) Dr. Lisa Sandlos, dance educator certified in Laban Movement Analysis (LMA), 2) Elisa Seidner, pediatric occupational therapist certified in sensory integration, evaluation and interventions and 3) Rennie Tang, urban designer and educator in landscape architecture with expertise in movement-based research; as author of this proposal Tang will serve as both moderator and panelist. The discussion will reflect on the possibilities of ‘scaling sensory experiences’ as a transdisciplinary process that responds to the pandemic crisis and its aftermath.
To launch the discussion each of the panelists will be asked to consider scale, sensory experience and atmosphere as interwoven elements within the context of their own discipline. Occupational therapists (OT’s) are trained to assess whether a client is having difficulty perceiving or processing sensory information and provide therapeutic intervention to help enhance that person’s sensory function to improve participation in everyday life activity. Beyond the familiar five senses of touch, smell, taste, sight and hearing OT's often refer to two additional senses: called proprioception (awareness and gradation of the muscles and joints in the body and the sense of the relationships between different parts of the body) and vestibular (awareness of the moving body). OT practice focuses on enhancing the functional aspects of the body in relation to the environment. Dance is a discipline that falls within the field of performing arts. Dance training involves the learning of specialized physical abilities such as flexibility, strength, coordination, balance and the shifting of weight along with aesthetic qualities such as bodily alignment and stage presence. On a more theoretical level dance can be studied through methods such as Laban Movement Analysis (LMA), developed by dance scholar Rudolf von Laban (1879-1958); his method entails breaking movement down into the four categories of Body, Effort, Space and Shape. LMA also includes a notation system which is a graphic language, similar to a musical score, that enables dancers to record movement either as a tool for archiving dance works or to stimulate creativity in movement. Dance scholars use the concept ‘thinking in movement’[1] a kind of corporeal intelligence that positions the body as a receiver, processor and producer of knowledge through the kinesthetic sense. Urban designers create public environments that stimulate the senses through material assemblages that evoke certain atmospheres and can help to modulate the scale of sensory experiences. Architectural convention teaches us that ‘human scale’ is based on the physical dimension of a human body, yet the above mentioned collective bodily action as generator of an urban scale atmosphere may suggest otherwise.
The richness of this transdisciplinary conversation will lie in the differences, overlaps and points of convergence that will emerge as the different disciplinary perspectives are unpacked. This research is grounded upon the belief that a nuanced understanding and respect for other world views, with alloaesthesia as a mindset, will plant the seeds for renewed sensory modes of designing, dancing and living that are much needed as we contemplate our post-pandemic future.
[1] Sheets-Johnstone, M. (1981). Thinking in Movement. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 39(4), 399-407.
Panelists Biographies
Rennie Tang is a designer and educator based in Los Angeles holding the position of Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture at California Polytechnic State University Pomona. She spent the 2019-20 academic year on sabbatical leave in Paris, France, where she was living during the period of confinement. Her practice-based research interests include the investigation of choreographic tools as methods for architectural/landscape design, health and well-being in urban landscapes and intergenerational play; this research is fueled by collaborations with choreographers, artists, movement analysts and occupational therapists. Her teaching methods emphasize topographic manipulation, material exploration and one-to-one scale spatial construction. She is recipient of the 2017 Excellence in Design Studio Teaching Award from the Council of Educators in Landscape Architecture (CELA).
Lisa Sandlos holds a PhD in Gender, Feminist, and Women’s Studies at York University in Toronto, Canada where her current research focuses on sexualization of girls in competitive dance and girl dancers' psychological and social development. Sandlos holds an MA in Dance and certificates in Laban Movement Analysis from the Laban Institute of Movement Studies and Université du Québec à Montréal. She is a long-standing faculty member of York University’s Department of Dance and the School of Kinesiology. Also working through organizations such as the Ontario Arts Council’s Artists in Education program, the National Ballet of Canada’s Creating Dances program, the Toronto District School Board’s Drama/Dance Project and the Royal Conservatory of Music’s Learning through the Arts, she has taught contemporary dance, somatics, creative process and Pilates to all ages and levels for over three decades.
Elisa Seidner is an occupational therapist and owner of KidAbilities, a pediatric occupational therapy clinic in Santa Monica, California. She is currently pursuing a PhD in Health Related Sciences at Virginia Commonwealth University with a research emphasis on Sensory Integration and objective measurement of sensory-motor function using mobile technology. She has clinical experience with populations across the life span in a variety of specialty settings (NICU, inpatient/outpatient adults and pediatrics, schools, sensory integration based clinics, spinal cord injury community programs). Her interest in interdisciplinary training and work grew from her involvement in the Maternal and Child Health Bureau funded Leadership Education in Neurodevelopment and Related Disabilities program with the University of Southern California and Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles. Elisa was a lead examiner in the pilot testing of a sensory integration and praxis evaluation instrument, the Evaluation of Ayres’ Sensory Integration. She has co-led interdisciplinary collaborative projects and presentations combining environmental design with adaptive features for individuals of varying diagnoses and abilities.
-
Scaling Sensory Experiences: Linking Perspectives from Dance, Occupational Therapy and Urban Design
3. The Architecture of the Virtual: An Encounter between Cognitive Neurosciences and Architecture
Karan AUGUST, Zakaria DJEBBARA, Stavros KOUSOULAS, Andrej RADMAN"
Deleuze famously considered Phenomenology to be within the ancient tradition which placed light on the side of spirit and made consciousness a beam of light drawing things out of their native darkness, as it were (‘all consciousness is consciousness of something…’). By contrast, he follows Bergson for whom things are luminous by themselves without anything illuminating them: “all consciousness is something, it is indistinguishable from the thing, that is from the image of light.”1
The philosophies of substance presuppose a subject which then encounters a datum, as Whitehead explains in his Process and Reality.2 This subject then reacts to the datum. The process ontology presupposes a datum (firstness) which is met with feelings (secondness), and progressively attains the unity of a subject (thirdness).3 It is in this sense that our bodily experience is primarily an experience of the dependence of presentational immediacy upon causal efficacy, and not the other way round.4 To put it bluntly, the world does not emerge from the subject (as in Kant) but processes of subjectification emerge from the interactions between the body and world. This is what makes subjectification an ethico-aesthetic condition that is always temporal, intensive and individuating.
Perception is thus clearly an act of subtraction (sieve) and not of enrichment.5 It entails a selection of a flow of immediate experience out of the potential ground that is pure experience. Interestingly, this is also the current view in cognitive neurosciences: perception is the informational act of delimiting potentials.6 This means that there is less in perception than in matter. In the words of François Zourabichvili: “Mind is the membrane of the external world, rather than an autonomous gaze directed towards it.”7 Quentin Meillassoux explains the underlying principles of such a subtractive theory of perception:
"[I]f, to pass from matter to perception, we must add something, this adjunction would be properly unthinkable, and the mystery of representation would remain entirely intact. But this is not at all the case if we pass from the first to the second term by way of a diminution, and if the representation of an image were held to be less than its simple presence. Now, if living beings constitute 'centres of indetermination' in the universe, then their simple presence must be understood to presuppose the suppression of all the parts of the object that are without interest for their functions [...] Perception does not, as in Kant, submit sensible matter to a subjective form, because the link, the connection, the form, belongs wholly to matter. Perception does not connect, it disconnects. It does not inform a content but incises an order. It does not enrich matter, but on the contrary impoverishes it."8
The poet William Blake wrote: “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.” According to the neuroscientist Walter Freeman such cleansing would not be desirable at all. Without the protection of the doors of perception we would be overwhelmed by eternity.9 Besides, it is never necessary to distinguish all the features of an object and it would in fact be impossible to do so.10 According to the founder of the Ecological School of Perception James Jerome Gibson, perception is economical: “Those features of a thing are noticed which distinguish it from other things that it is not – but not all the features that distinguish it from everything that it is not.”11
To address this, one needs to return to the (architectural) event itself. In the traditional view, the event is decomposed into a succession of moments, each described by its own stimulus. For the event to be perceived the succession of stimuli needs somehow to be strung back together. A deus ex machina is drafted for the mysterious task of reconstituting the dynamic. By contrast, in the ecological approach the perceiver’s task is merely to detect the event as specified by information or signs.12 The ‘information’ here is meant in Batesonian terms, not as a code, but as a difference that makes a difference, and it is for this reason that Gibson finds ‘tuning in’ a more appropriate metaphor than ‘computing’. Our bodily units must incorporate within themselves aspects of the world beyond themselves (umwelt).
There is an intimate connection between Senses, Inventions and Worlds. In contrast to phenomenology where the problem of construction of signs becomes a problem of ‘bestowal of meaning (Sinn)’, in Deleuze’s account it is sense that is productive of signs and their meanings.13 This distinction between sense and meaning is not purely academic nit-picking, as Colebrook cautions: “Sense is that orientation or potential that allows for the genesis of bodies but that always, if extended, would destroy the bordered organism.”14 The life form itself becomes an image among other images. This special image – a Bergsonian ‘center of indetermination’ – acts as a filter creatively selecting images from the universal flux.
Our ability to distinguish the essential from the inessential is at the basis of this zeroing in. According to Antonio Damasio, the ‘sterile’ combinations do not even present themselves.15 However, on no account does this mean that we look on and grasp a specific aspect of the world or environment as detached and fully formed beings: “[A] being is what it is because it is already an expression of every aspect of the whole. [...] Organisms are possible because they concretely embody potentialities – the power to eat, to see, to move, to think – that could have been actualized differently, and that can even be counter-actualized.”16 According to Colebrook, a (fully) bounded organism is but an organicist fantasy. So is bounded architecture, and that is why it would make more sense to treat it as a (semi-permeable) membrane(s).17 In other words, architecture is cognition. The question then becomes how one knows what to subtract. Is it a matter of measurement (of the extensive) or an issue of intuiting (the intensive)? More so, what is the role of architecture in perceptual subtraction and what is the role of subtraction in the production of architecture?
Notes
1 G. Deleuze, Cinema 1; The Movement-Image (London: The Athlone Press, [1983] 1986), pp. 60–61.
2 A.N. Whitehead, Process and Reality: an Essay in Cosmology, ed. David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne (New York: Free, [1929] 1978), p. 234.
3 C.S. Peirce, “What Pragmatism Is” in The Monist (Vol. 15, No. 2, April 1905), pp. 161–181.
4 A.N. Whitehead, Process and Reality, p. 267.
5 E.S. Reed and R. Jones, Reasons for Realism, Selected essays of James J. Gibson (Hillsdale, NJ: L. Erlbaum, 1982), p. 297. “[P]erceptual learning is a process of discriminating or differentiating variables of stimulation rather than adding meanings to impoverished stimulus input.”
6 For instance: K, Friston, “The free-energy principle: a unified brain theory?” Nat Rev Neurosci. 2010 Feb 13;11(2):127–38. Cf. S. Gallagher, Enactivist interventions: rethinking the mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).
7 F. Zourabichvili, “Six Notes on the Percept (On the Relation between the Critical and Clinical)” in Deleuze: A Critical Reader, ed. P. Patton (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996), p. 195.
8 Q. Meillassoux, “Subtraction and Contraction: Deleuze, Immanence, and Matter and Memory” in Collapse: Unknown Deleuze (Vol. III, November 2007), pp. 72–73.
9 W. Freeman, “The Physiology of Perception” in Scientific American (Vol. 264 (2), 1991), pp. 78–85.
10 The same applies to memory. See: M. Augé, Oblivion (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, [1998] 2004), p. 14. “To praise oblivion is not to revile memory; even less is it to neglect remembrance, but rather to recognize the work of oblivion in the first and to spot it in the second. Memory and oblivion in some way have the same relationship as life and death.” This thesis is, in fact, consistent with the plasticity of the brain as explained by contemporary neuro-sciences.
11 J.J. Gibson, The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1966), p. 286. [emphases in the original]
12 This is arguably Gibson’s most conspicuous contribution to the non-representational approach. He provided a concrete realist alternative to resolving the supposed ambiguity of the structures available in ambient energy by urging a higher-order isomorphism, i.e. invariance detected by the active living organism.
13 G. Deleuze, Proust and Signs: the Complete Text (London: Athlone, [1964] 2007). See also: G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (London, New York: Continuum [1980] 2004), p. 124. “If we call the signifying semiotic system semiology, then semiology is only one regime of signs among others, and not the most important one.”
14 C. Colebrook, Deleuze and the Meaning of Life (London: Continuum, 2010), p. 37.
15 A. Damasio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (New York: Putnam Publishing, 1994), p. 180.
16 C. Colebrook, Deleuze and the Meaning of Life (London: Continuum, 2010), pp. 84, 110.
17 G. Teyssot, “Architecture as Membrane” in Explorations in Architecture, ed. R. Geiser (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2008), p. 166. This resonates also with the current cognitive neuroscientific theories of the ‘extended mind’: Andy Clark, “How to Knit Your Own Markov Blanket: Resisting the Second Law with Metamorphic Minds” in Philosophy and Predictive Processing, eds. T. Metzinger T, W. Wiese (Frankfurt am Main: MIND Group, 2017).
Panelists Biographies
Karan August an independent scholar and City Planner in the San Fransisco Bay Area. Since 2007 she has published in the fields of philosophy, architecture, and led design studios throughout Europe, the UK, Japan, New Zealand, and the States. Her formal training includes the study of philosophy at UC Berkeley and architecture at TU Delft. She is on the editorial board of Footprint, Delft Architecture Theory Journal.
Zakaria Djebbara is a PhD-fellow at the Department of Architecture, Design, Media and Technology, Aalborg University, Denmark, and is currently fully invested in the project “Expecting space: an enactive and active inference to transitions”. Zak is a trained architect with a focus on the integration between architecture and cognitive neuroscience. He investigates the structure of architectural experience during spatial transitions from an enactive and active inference perspective. With a specific interest in the dynamic process of action-perception cycle, the experimental setups are based on a Mobile Brain/Body Imaging technique that reveals cortical activity in an animate being using an electroencephalogram.
Stavros Kousoulas is Assistant Professor of Architecture Theory in the Faculty of Architecture, TU Delft. He has studied Architecture at the National Technical University of Athens and at TU Delft. He received his doctoral title cum laude from IUAV Venice participating in the Villard d’ Honnecourt International Research Doctorate. He has published and lectured in Europe and abroad. He is a member of the editorial board and production editor of Footprint Delft Architecture Theory Journal since 2014.
Andrej Radman has been teaching theory courses and design studios at TU Delft Faculty of Architecture and The Built Environment since 2004. In 2008 he was appointed Assistant Professor of Architecture and joined the research and teaching staff of the Delft School of Design (DSD). As a graduate of the Zagreb School of Architecture in Croatia, Radman received a Master’s Degree with Honours and a Doctoral Degree from Delft University of Technology. His current research focuses on New Materialism in general and Ecologies of Architecture in particular. Radman is a member of the National Committee on Deleuze Scholarship, and production editor and member of the editorial board of the peer-reviewed architecture theory journal Footprint. He is also a licensed architect with a portfolio of built and competition-winning projects. In 2002 Radman won the Croatian Association of Architects annual award for housing architecture in Croatia. His latest publication is Critical and Clinical Cartographies: Architecture, Robotics, Medicine, Philosophy, coedited with H. Sohn (EUP, 2017).
-
The Architecture of the Virtual: An Encounter between Cognitive Neurosciences and Architecture
-
Experimental methods to capture and represent Ambiances
