Naturing Affairs: the Double-Leverage in Architecture, Design & Art

How do we communicate our inner world and spirit in coexistence with the physical world of diverse materialities and agencies? How do technologies, which store, transmit and process information, inner worlds, ideas, and dreams operate with or incorporate physical materialities? How, why and when are information, dreams, wishes, utopia and materials, architectures, landscapes entangled with each other? How do we talk about materiality of communication beyond dissecting machinery (a technical perspective) or inspecting the meaning (a cultural-social perspective)? How can we maintain an ambiguous position with regards to classical dichotomies of modern thought (mind/body, nature/culture) and provide avenues for recognition of the entangled nature of the artificial and the given, of order and disorder, of human and other-than-human.

The workshop attempts to discuss these questions, by having a closer look at the double forces (A+B) of the same (media) architectonic leverage. On one hand A) we have infrastructural capacities enabled by new technics and (media) technologies, on the other B) there is our intimate—at times massive—infusing of fantasies and imagination into these technologies.

Core participants and speakers: Mihye An (CAAD ETHZ), Shintaro Miyazaki, Selena Savic, Maria Smigielska and Michaela Büsse (all FHNW HGK).