continent. 4.3: Intangible Architectures (2015)

“This issue of continent. deals with the theme of intangible architectures. While in keeping with the theoretical and experimental nature of previous issues, this release intends a balance with an urgent grounding in current events, political schemas and areas of research that demand broadened dialogue. An underlying conversation represents some response to the tension that is enabled through systems that shape experience, behaviour and meaning – examining the imprints and traces that are left on our beings by these forms.

In some cases, this tension is manifest as social violence, where political and economic conditions are inseparable from the cultural expression of these structures. The idea of intangible architectures as political agents may relate to emergency states, militarised environments, questions of statehood and national borders, and the patterns of self-determining communities (Paul Boshears, Charles Stankievech, Ethel Baraona Pohl, César Reyes Nájera, Léopold Lambert). Architectures that are not yet constructed, and the rhetoric used to justify or oppose such development, are also revealing of the philosophy of private developers and communities of resistance (Lital Khaikin, Nathan Medema).

We may then find, after encountering these most immediate forms of intangible architectures, the spatial manipulations of social and intimate behaviour, laws, experiences, and memories. Architectural structures that do exist may yet conceal more complex frameworks, which exude laws that are autonomous to their initial, intended use. These subtle systems are encountered in liminal and transitory zones of city space, in artist-run exhibition spaces, in the homes that we recreate in our memories, in the emotional symbolism we create from structural space (Paolo Patelli, Giuditta Vendrame, Simone Ferracina, Sophie-Carolin Wagner, Tiara Roxanne).

But then, may we go deeper to find traces, mirrors of these intangible architectures, within language and more abstract experience of atmosphere? Do the systems by which we begin a construction of our understanding of the world – from phonemes to the cartographies that are charted in sonic atmosphere – not also shape our behaviours and relationships to space? (Kaie Kellough, Jason Sharp, Orit Halpern) In all cases, we are asked to consider the manifestations of structures that determine our experiences, interpretations and relationships to space. Let these be public or intimate – they engage the imagination equally, challenging us to think about the way these imprints affect our shared presence and relation to all beings.” (from Editorial)

Edited by Lital Khaikin, Paul Boshears, Jamie Allen, and Matt Bernico
Publisher continent., September 2015
Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License
ISSN 2159-9920

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Andreas Rumpfhuber: Architektur immaterieller Arbeit (2013) [German]

“The book takes up the (post-)operaist concept of immaterial labour (cf. Maurizio Lazzarato: 1998, Toni Negri, Michael Hardt: 2000) and relates it to spatial processes and architectural projects from the 1960s. The book’s title is the hypotheses of its investigation. It allows to be exemplified with the following questions: Do we find, parallel to a dominant cultural practice of immaterial labour new forms and orders of architecture? Which forms does it take on? Or does workplace architecture disappear at all parallel to the blurring of the formerly clearly marked spaces of the factory?”

Publisher Turia + Kant, Vienna, 2013
Kollektive Gestalten series, 1
Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 3.0 License
ISBN 9783851327052
239 pages

Publisher
OAPEN
WorldCat

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Kristin Romberg: Aleksei Gan’s Constructivism, 1917-1928 (2010)

“This is the first monograph about the Russian constructivist Aleksei Gan (1887-1942) and an experiment in the formal analysis of a materialist practice.

Best known as co-founder of the First Working Group of Constructivists and author of the group’s agitational and theoretical texts, Gan’s own oeuvre was comprised of amateur performances and mass-media objects (texts, books, journals, and films). This dissertation shows that the same qualities of ephemerality and dependency that make Gan’s work resistant to art-historical analysis were also what made it representative of constructivism’s ambitions for a materialist approach to art. In exploring these forms, Gan redefined the ‘work of art’ as a labor process through which the material world, human beings, and normative (common or social) frameworks simultaneously produced one another. The result was an alternative modernism, what I call an aesthetics of embeddedness, whose objects were extensive and responsive structures designed to permeate and shape their environment. Through close readings, the dissertation redefines art-historical concepts such as style and medium in ways specific to Gan’s historical moment, also examining them as manifestations of tensions in the early Soviet imagination. Most crucially these involve the cult of labor, the politics of group formation, and the power of the mass media to mold the normative frameworks governing social reality.

Chapter 1 reevaluates the origins of Russian constructivism by examining Gan’s early career in cultural and political enlightenment organizations, particularly his work in amateur theater and as a ‘constructor of mass action’. Chapter 2 focuses on the crystallization of constructivism as a movement and aesthetic theory in 1921. Chapter 3 looks closely at Gan’s book Constructivism (1922), developing an understanding of constructivism based on a typographic rather than sculptural model of material making. Chapters 4 and 5 examine Gan’s journal projects in terms of architecture and cinema, defining a set of constructive paradigms that run throughout Gan’s work. Finally, chapter 6 treats Gan’s work as a filmmaker in relation to contemporary efforts to rationalize artistic labor.” (Abstract)

Ph.D. Dissertation
Columbia University, New York, 2010
576 pages

Publisher

PDF (24 MB, illustrations missing, updated on 2017-3-21)