I have been working on organizing and curating this conference and exhibition…

Cambridge Talks is an annual symposium organized by the PhD Program in Architecture, Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning at Harvard University that brings together junior and senior scholars to engage in an interdisciplinary exchange on critical themes in architectural discourse and urban studies.

This year, the topic for Cambridge Talks III will be “Mediated Space.” With media technologies embedded ever-deeper into architecture, the city and everyday life, a rigorous historiography of media’s relationship to space has become a burning issue. Under the radar of the dominant discourses on media that are fueled by technological fetishism and determinism, an innovative and rapidly evolving body of scholarship has evolved. The work of these scholars has crossed disciplinary boundaries to situate architecture and urbanism within new histories of spatial perception and kineaesthetics, the contingencies of the human sensorium, 19th-century optical devices and early cinema, sound technologies, and an expanded conception of cartography. Cambridge Talks III aims to channel this interdisciplinary momentum by providing a forum for the presentation and debate of vital new work.

A new experiment is underway here in Boston called The New Factographers.

About

The New Factographers is a evolving network of Boston-based sonic bricoleurs, moving image interventionists, experimental documentarians, urban dramaturges and critical theorists working across various media to re-interpret the particularity of place. The name is inspired by a strain of the 1920s Russian avant-garde.

Projects

NF01  :: Union Square (The Chirping Sidewalk) is the first in this series of events using the platform of the Boston bar to create immersive audio, visual, and socio-sculptural installations about local neighborhoods and urbanism internationally. This initial experiment focuses upon the Union Square neighborhood of Somerville. For one evening, the many flat screens of Toast Lounge will be transformed with a montage of short videos portraying the details of this historic crossroads intermixed with footage from cities around the world. Sonically, bar-goers will be drawn into a series of local soundscapes interspersed between music by Boston bands.

“NF01 :: Union Square (The Chirping Sidewalk)” takes place starting at 10 pm at Toast Lounge in Union Square, Somerville. The event is presented in partnership with Union Square Main Streets and Somerville Community Access Television (SCAT) on occassion of the MIT-GSD-LSE conference Writing Cities.

Some very exciting news! Yellow Arrow :: Capitol of Punk, the interactive documentary we made in 2006 about Washington D.C. and its punk music history, is going to be exhibited at MOMA in New York this spring. The project is a part of the larger exhibition “Design and the Elastic Mind,”from February 24–May 12, 2008 on The International Council of The Museum of Modern Art Exhibition Gallery, sixth floor. The exhibition was organized by Paola Antonelli, Curator, and Patricia Juncosa Vecchierini, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Architecture and Design. Here’s the description of the whole show:

In the past few decades, individuals have experienced dramatic changes in some of the most established dimensions of human life: time, space, matter, and individuality. Working across several time zones, traveling with relative ease between satellite maps and nanoscale images, gleefully drowning in information, acting fast in order to preserve some slow downtime, people cope daily with dozens of changes in scale. Minds adapt and acquire enough elasticity to be able to synthesize such abundance. One of design’s most fundamental tasks is to stand between revolutions and life, and to help people deal with change. Designers have coped with these displacements by contributing thoughtful concepts that can provide guidance and ease as science and technology evolve. Several of them—the Mosaic graphic user’s interface for the Internet, for instance—have truly changed the world. Design and the Elastic Mind is a survey of the latest developments in the field. It focuses on designers’ ability to grasp momentous changes in technology, science, and social mores, changes that will demand or reflect major adjustments in human behavior, and convert them into objects and systems that people understand and use.

The exhibition will highlight examples of successful translation of disruptive innovation, examples based on ongoing research, as well as reflections on the future responsibilities of design. Of particular interest will be the exploration of the relationship between design and science and the approach to scale. The exhibition will include objects, projects, and concepts offered by teams of designers, scientists, and engineers from all over the world, ranging from the nanoscale to the cosmological scale. The objects range from nanodevices to vehicles, from appliances to interfaces, and from pragmatic solutions for everyday use to provocative ideas meant to influence our future choices. The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue.