Practiced, Conceived and Lived Space in the Postdigital City – published in STOA, Journal of Architecture

Alvaro, S. (2022). Practiced, Conceived and Lived space in the Postdigital City. Estoa. Revista De La Facultad De Arquitectura Y Urbanismo De La Universidad De Cuenca, 11(22). Recuperado a partir de https://publicaciones.ucuenca.edu.ec/ojs/index.php/estoa/article/view/3950

Abstract:

The pandemic has highlighted the fast transmission of needs, goods and
ideas that sustain the functionality of our globalised, networked world.
At the same time, it has highlighted the resilience and unbreakability of
this network when transporting undesirable events such as fake news or a virus.
Henceforth, this situation has forced us to rethink how we plan our inhabited
space. Since the inception of ubiquitous computing, the city has mutated under a
new technologically mediated functionalism, overlaid by the platforms of a global
and highly relational system that is submitting space to the logic of computing.
Fruit of previous doctoral research, this article reviews the transformations
leading to the constitution of this technologically mediated urban space and
analyses them by applying Lefebvre’s Unitarian Theory of Space. The objective is
to unveil the challenges of the postdigital urban space and present projects that
point towards alternative possibilities for urban planning.

Keywords: postdigital; new urbanism; ubiquitous computing; Lefebvre; digital art.

Resumen:
La pandemia provocada por el covid-19 ha puesto de manifiesto cómo la
funcionalidad del mundo globalizado se sustenta en la rápida transmisión
de bienes, necesidades e ideas a través de una densa red de conexiones, así
como la resiliencia e inquebrantabilidad de esta red cuando transporta eventos
indeseables, como pueden ser las noticias falsas o un virus. Esta situación nos
fuerza a replantearnos cómo hemos planificado el espacio urbano. Desde la
aparición de la computación ubicua, la ciudad se ha visto transformada por
un funcionalismo tecnológicamente mediado, que sobreimpuesto por las
plataformas de un sistema global y altamente relacional, está sometiendo el
espacio a la lógica de la computación. Fruto de una investigación doctoral previa,
este texto revisa las transformaciones que han llevado a la constitución de este
espacio urbano global y tecnológicamente mediado y las analiza aplicando la
Teoría Unitaria del Espacio de Lefebvre. El objetivo de este análisis es desvelar
los múltiples problemas que conlleva este espacio Postdigital y al mismo tiempo
exponer proyectos que apuntan a posibilidades alternativas para el planeamiento
urbano.
Palabras clave: postdigital; nuevo urbanismo; computación ubicua; Lefebvre; arte
digital.

Read full text

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PAISAJES Y ARQUITECTURAS DEL ERROR – Seminario Internacional

Fotografia proceso cientifico grupo dparq

MORILLE (SALAMANCA)
27, 28, 29 Y 30 DE SEPTIEMBRE

El Seminario Internacional Ruinas y Descampados se centrará en los paisajes olvidados y arruinados por la furia del progreso. Al respecto, se debatirá sobre fábricas y minas abandonadas, puertos en decadencia, pueblos sumergidos por las presas, urbanizaciones nunca habitadas o bosques plantados y luego olvidados. A pesar de todo, el objetivo del evento no es el de recrearse en los yermos, sino el de mostrar esa vida y ese arte que crecen en los márgenes del sueño del capitalismo. Además de reunir a algunos de los mayores pensadores y especialistas europeos en Teoría y Práctica del Paisaje, las conferencias se acompañarán de actividades complementarias, como mesas de debate o un ciclo de cortometrajes, entre otras.

Programa

Se debatirán los primeros resultados del proyectoPaisajes y arquitecturas del error. Contra-historia delpaisaje en la Europa latina (1945-2020). PID2020-112921GB-I00

Deparq es un proyecto de investigación centrado en el estudio de los paisajes marginales y arruinados del capitalismo industrial y postindustrial en el Sur de Europa. Hasta hace unos años, el grueso de las intervenciones en el ámbito de la arquitectura y el urbanismo contemporáneos tenía que ver con cierta espiral de demoliciones y construcciones basada en un modelo económico de desarrollo infinito. El contexto del Antropoceno y la insistencia en el cambio climático están dando al traste con la lógica intervencionista y de construcción basada en el crecimiento y la humanización desatados. Ahora de lo que se trata es de denunciar los peligros de ese crecimiento imparable y de vislumbrar otros modelos.

http://www.deparq.info/index.php/proyecto/

Ponentes: Sandra Álvaro Sánchez, Jean-Marc Besse, Ramón del Castillo, Ignacio Castro Rey, Gilles Clément [pendiente], Matías G. Rodríguez, Roque Lazcano Vázquez, Pedro de Llano Neira, Sergio Meijide Casas, Raffaele Milani, Mª Carmen Molina Barea, Iván Moure Pazos, Rafela Nicolau, Uxío Otero Urtaza, Arantxa Pérez Indaverea, Henar Rivière Ríos, Guillermo Rodríguez Alonso, Alberto Ruiz de Samaniego, Pere Sala i Martí, Federico L. Silvestre, Miguel Serrano Pérez, Gilles A. Tiberghien, Anna Zahonero Xifré

Presentación Nomadología Botánica del Depaisaje

Comunicación: Nomadología Botánica del Depaisaje (Sandra Álvaro y Miguel Serrano

ver en vimeo (Observatori del Paisatje de Catalunya)

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Workshop “Interactive Art and Posthuman thought II” at Interface Cultures Program – Art University, Linz

Interface Cultures lädt zum zweitägigen Gastworkshop von Sandra Alvaro, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona.

http://interface.ufg.ac.at/blog/sandra-alvaro/

Short intro
“Interactive Art and Posthuman thought” is a theoretical workshop aimed to introduce the students to the development of this current of thought and the entanglements between art science, computation and politics that accompanied its evolution.
The workshop consists of two sessions, one introductory theoretical and a second practice-based in which students will discuss previously facilitated texts and propose their art examples. Participation and open discussion are welcomed in both sessions.

“The System must not only be in perpetual heterogeneity, it must also be an heterogènesis”

Deleuze,Two regimes of madness : texts and interviews, 1975-1995

Abstract
The Anthropocene, the role information technologies play in society and culture, and eurocentrism conforms the subjects at the core of contemporary humanistic research and art practice, which addresses them in a rising number of developing projects, grouped under labels as eco-aesthetics, techno-ecology, art and science, speculative fiction, post-anthropocentrism, Postdigital, critical making, post-colonialism, and so on. These works share concepts, references, and a new relation of the human with its environment that denounces human exceptionalism and the traditional distinctions -between nature-culture, body-mind, time-space, sciences-humanities- that characterized Modern thought. The same critic and concepts are developing in the work of contemporary thinkers that under the influence of post-structuralist thinkers -notably Foucault and Deleuze – surpasses the traditional division of disciplines and consider the participation of complex entanglements between science, technology, humanities, art and politics in the production of the contemporaneous subjects and its environment.
The work by Haraway, Stengers, and Latour departed from science studies to encounter with a rising number of authors in the production of a philosophical thought in which science intersects with feminism ( Donna Haraway, Isabelle Stengers, Elizabeth Grosz, Elizabeth Povinelli), digital humanities (Katherine Hayles), anthropology (Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing) Sociology (Myra J Hird), economics (Jason W. Moore ), politics (Jane Bennett), post-colonialism (Simone Bignall) and Philosophy (Claire Colebrook, Rosi Braidotti). Inside this schema of thought, art appears as a transversal, postmedial and material-based research engaged in the process of worlding and with a political and ethical function.
This workshop consists of three parts: First, the introduction to the evolution of posthuman thought focusing on the influence of science (systems theory, ecology and the theory of evolution) and interactive art. Here, we will address the bibliography and main concepts of some of the already mentioned theorists. Second, the analysis and discussion of posthumanist texts related to interactive artworks. Here, we will highlight the concepts and functions attributed to art and its relationship with Deleuze’s art definition. Third, we will comment and discuss texts – from other fields than philosophy -, which had contributed to the development of the concepts and practices previously analyzed.

Teaching program (Schedule)

Workshop 1 (Friday, 11 March, from 11:00 to 16:00h)
11:00– 13:00 h. Posthuman thought:
• Systems Theory, radical theory of evolution, poststructuralism and the assemblage of humans and non-humans
• Geopower, the Inhuman and the possibility of a post-anthropocentric future
(introduction to posthumanism’s authors and concepts)
13:00 – 13:30h. (lunch break)
13:30 – 16:00 Reviewing interactive art through the comments and references of posthumanist thinkers
(Deleuze’s definition of art and its posthumanist interpretation)


• Workshop 2 (Saturday, 12 March, from 11:00 to 16:00h)
11:00 – 13:00 Open discussion of previously proposed texts relating to science-fiction, aesthetics, ethics, radical epistemologies, postcolonialism, postcapitalism and the Anthropocene.
(The students will relate the proposed texts with concepts and art practices previously discussed)
13:00 -13:30h (lunch break)
13:30 – 16:00h -Open discussion continuation

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Lecture at POSTSENSORIUM – RIXC Art-Science Festival 2021

PostSensorium RIXC 2021


PostSensorium festival aims to provide a platform for artistic interventions and critical discussions on the 21st-century’s virtual sensing technologies, science, and aesthetics, reconsidering the relations between the actual and virtual, organic and artificial, natural and techno-social, human and “more-than-human”…

https://festival2021.rixc.org/

Panel 4A. (AI/ECO) INTELLIGENT ECOSYSTEMS AND MORE-THAN-HUMAN CONDITIONS – 25th September

Lecture – Aesthetics of Perception, a historical approximation to inhuman vision and its ecological meaning

Aesthetics is derived from the Greek term aisthetikos, meaning “aesthetics, sensitive, sentient, about sense perception”. First considered as the critic of taste [Baumgarten, 1750] aesthetics was enmeshed in a historical narrative that imposes a distinction between the cognitive-semantic and the affective-stimulant. This paper will sketch a different narrative in which perception is linked to knowledge. In this history, art is an experimental endeavour in which media are resurfaced as constitutive of our experience and always linked to situated histories and politics. Media digital or analogue links the viewer in networks of transindivituation that go beyond their organic limits [Stiegler, 2009, Colebrook, 2014].

This history starts in Modernity with Goethe’s experiments on the perception of colour that led into the avant-garde, this introduction will link with contemporary art and New Media. The possibility of interpretation and action always relies on a complex relationship between digital and analogue, or the capacity to reduce differential complexity to already established units of recognition [Bergson, 1912]. Artworks that process data implementing interfaces and ‘intelligent’ systems whit purposes other than efficiency, control or organic live maintenance engage us in complex ecologies that go beyond our organic limits and our milieu as a given system. This creative process opens our perception to a posthuman world, Gaia evolving indifferent to us [Margulis] and into the possibility of other futures.


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Exposició: ‘Art Postmedia Nous Formats i Comunicació’ a la Biblioteca d’Humanitats de la Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

Art Postmedia: Nous Formats i Comunicació

Aquesta exposició mostra el programa realitzat per Sandra Alvaro per l’assignatura d’Art Contemporani del Grau en Comunicació Audiovisual de la Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona mitjançant una selecció dels treballs realitzats pels estudiants.

https://mirades.uab.cat/exposicions/exhibits/show/artcontemporani

L’assignatura d’Art Contemporani del grau de Comunicació Audiovisual introdueix l’alumnat en l’ecosistema de la creació contemporània, fent especial atenció a com aquest es desenvolupa en diàleg amb els nous avenços tecnològics i socials del seu temps. D’aquesta manera el programa de l’assignatura contempla els canvis socials, culturals i científic-tècnics que caracteritzen el món contemporani, per d’una banda: introduir els conceptes que han sorgit, en diferents camps de pensament, per donar-ne raó, des de el punt de vista del seu significat estètic i de l’aplicació que se’n fa a la creació artística. D’altra banda, per ensenyar els nous formats i estratègies artístiques que s’han desenvolupat des de les Avantguardes, així com la seva transformació a partir de la convergència tecnològica que es produeix a partir de l’accessibilitat als nous mitjans tecnològics i que definirà l’art Postmedia. Aquests conceptes i estratègies de creació s’introdueixen a partir de la seva apropiació artística en el tractament de temes que articulen la creació contemporània, tot reflectint les preocupacions de les noves generacions, com són: l’experiència i definició del subjecte confrontat a un món canviant i cada vegada més digitalitzat; la construcció i administració de l’entorn urbà i els afectes que aquest té sobre la vida dels individus; les crisis mediambientals que acompanyen la definició de l’Antropocè.

El que es mostra en aquesta exposició es una selecció dels treballs finals realitzats pels alumnes. Aquests treballs, més enllà de formar part del procés d’avaluació, suposen una part important de la metodologia docent. Son treballs en equip, en que es fomenta la col·laboració, el compromís en un objectiu comú i la capacitat dels alumnes per a la comunicació eficient cap a l’emergència d’una interdependència positiva. Aquest treball col·laboratiu permet als alumnes implicar-se i esdevenir part activa en una problemàtica actual del seu interès, aprofundint d’aquesta manera en els conceptes y pràctiques proposades al curs ‘mans al treball’ i mentre experimenten amb els formats i pràctiques proposats per desenvolupar la seva pròpia aportació

Llistat Obres

  • El Subjecte postmodern: Cos i identitat (breu introducció, descripció i links als treballs sobre aquest tema:
    • Manifest feminista per el s.XXI)
    • Under Argos Vigilance,
    • El tren del soroll
  • Estètica i pràctiques artístiques a l’entorn urbà (breu introducció, descripció i links als treballs d’aquest tema:
    • performArt
    • Color sobre gris
    • Arquitectura hostil
    •  L’odissea d’una dona qualsevol,
    • La ciutat connectada
  • Art i ciència en un món global: Antropocè i crisis climàtica (breu introducció, descripció i links als treballs d’aquest tema:
    • Alerta Plastificada

Crédits:

Comissària:

  • Sandra Álvaro Sánchez (Departament d’ Art i Musicologia – UAB)

Disseny i Muntatge de l’exposició virtual :

  • Sandra Álvaro Sánchez
  • Cristina Navarro Sánchez (Biblioteca d’Humanitats – UAB)

Textos i disseny de capçalera: Sandra Álvaro Sánchez

Imatges de les obres exposades: dels seus respectius autors

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Lecture at the 5th Open Fields Conference: ECODATA

ECODATA


October 8-10, online and in Riga, Latvia will take place the RIXC Art and Science festival: ECODATA.  The festival will feature exhibition in the physical space at The National Library of Latvia and the RIXC gallery, online conference as well as a hybrid program of online and onsite activities – artistic interventions, screenings, virtual bio/eco-artworks and performances by young artists.

https://festival2020.rixc.org/

Lecture: Art, Eco-aesthetics And Cosmopolitics

Isabelle Stengers (2015) described our time as catastrophic, the result of convergent crisis concerning the global economy, the environment, increasing violence and depletion of social cohesion. The Anthropocene and its consequences have become an urgent subject for scientists and policymakers, but also philosophers and artists. Current art projects intervene in our environment through speculative projects, approaching geoengineering and the proposal of new post-anthropocentric futures, as well as, by the production of new entanglements of humans and non-humans which could mobilise new affects and change our behaviour.

All these projects share the same aesthetics, a new technologically mediated vision, from where our environment appears as a complex network of systems. The Gaia 2.0 (Latour, 2018) resulting from a process of Technomorphisation (Maturana, 1997) which translates our environment to data and rends it predictable and operational.

This presentation examines a selection of environmental art projects with a twofold aim. First, explore the evolution of this aesthetics after the encounter with post-structuralism and critical epistemologies. Second, interrogate about the inclusion of these art projects inside a Cosmopolitics (Stengers, 2004), after considering art as a material form of experimentation with the capacity of worlding -making up an inhabitable world.

Full programme and registration at https://festival2020.rixc.org/

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A topological space for design, participation and production. Tracking spaces of transformation – Publication at the Journal of Peer Production

A topological space for design, participation and production

Álvaro, Sandra (2019), “Atopological space for design, participation and productio” at The Jornal of Peer Production, Issue #13 open (April 2019)

‘Space of transformation’ is a concept borrowed from Serres’ communication theory and here redefined after the evolution of the post-digital milieu and the materialistic critique of the same. Hackerspaces, fablabs, medialabs and other shared machines shops are defined here as spaces of transformation, places for the encounter between humans and non-humans, where disciplines are bridged together, hitherto severed, giving place to collective practices related to education, production and society.

Shared machine shops are sited locally but also connected globally. Online, they share innovative forms of production, education and collective organization, giving place to a complex ecosystem. This article presents an analysis of the topology of this ecosystem conducted by means of tracking and visualizing the online interactions between the hackerspaces listed at the platform Hackerspaces.org. The application of network analysis is aimed to answer the research questions: First, how shared machine shops are locally and globally connected? Second, what links hackerspaces among them and these with new social issues? The concept of shared machine shops as spaces of transformation and the study of their mutual relations allows for an understanding of the transformative capacity of these spaces and how they are producing a new space for social innovation through its mutual interchange of information.

Keywords:
hackerspaces, network analysis, design, social innovation, space of transformation

See the article

About the project

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Workshop “Interactive Art and Posthuman thought” at Interface Culture Program – Art University, Linz

Interactive Art and Posthuman Thought

Visualizing the evolution of Posthuman Thought through the Interactions between Art-Philosophy-Science.

Workshop by Sandra Alvaro

Interface Culture Program – 6 and 9 of Mars 2020
https://www.ufg.at/News-detail.2042+M5da5309928b.0.html

“Interactive Art and Posthuman thought” combines theory (lectures and in-class text commentaries) and practice (drawing networked diagrams) to illustrate the relationship between the evolution of interactive art -interfacing humans with machines- and the development of new frames of thought related with posthumanism and post-anthropocentrism.

Abstract

This workshop aims to build a diagrammatics of the emergent system of thought named posthumanism to bring it closer to the art practice. Rosi Braidotti defines the posthuman turn as the convergence of posthumanism with post-anthropocentrism and relates it to the materialist philosophy by Deleuze and Guattari, the influence of indigenous philosophy and the feminist thought – represented by authors as Elizabeth Grosz, Karen Barad, Donna Haraway and Elizabeth Povinelly. Besides, to this evolution, we could add the influence of cybernetics in the thought of Simondon -also influencing Deleuze- and Katerine Hayles.

The work of these thinkers has evolved parallelly to artistic practice. The evolution of interactive art is bridged with the experimentation with new technologies and the proposal of forms of interfacing humans with machines. It shaped new systems of knowledge, information structures that progressively became embodied in computerized electrotechnical systems and hybridised with the human. These extensions of our body and intellect have evolved from the proposal of cyborgs to the creation of a new artificially intelligent other, the source of deep mediatization and control, otherwise a new creative collaborator. Artistic artworks had exemplified and accompanied this evolution showing the changes in the definition of the human, the environment and knowledge. We can quote the dematerialized networked cyborgs created by Tina Laporta, the cyborgian immersive representations by Jill Scott, the immersive spaces of knowledge created by Monika Fleishman and Wolfang Strauss or the Knowbotic Research Group finally, the autonomous interactive dancing entities by Simon Penny or the more recent co-singer trained by Tommony Adachi.

This workshop consists of two sessions. Each one including a short theoretical introduction illustrated with the commentary of artworks; a text commentary and practical work based on the methodology of diagrammatics -developed accordingly the definition of Deleuze and Guattari. In the sessions, the students will learn about the evolution of posthuman thought concerning art practice and will develop diagrams -working in groups and based in previously offered texts – of the posthuman conglomerates acting in our environment, acquiring an understanding of how they affect differentiated fields of our reality as the epistemology, finance, health and the human body, or the Anthropocene.

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Projects Exhibition by Contemporary Art student’s of Audiovisual Communication (UAB)


Exposició on-line dels treballs de l’assignatura d’Art Contemporani del Grau de Comunicació Audiovisual

La rapida evolució i adopció de les tecnologies associades a la computació han modificat els modes en que percebem i construïm el nostre entorn social i cultural. Introduint aquests canvis McLuhan ja va assenyalar el paper indispensable dels artistes en l’anàlisi i comprensió de les noves formes de vida i estructures generades pel canvi tecnològic. L’art no només a pres un paper actiu en la conformació de la nostra relació amb els nous mitjans tecnològics, sinó que ha conduit una experimentació i procés de hibridació que ha donat forma als nous formats per a la comunicació i expressivitat humana.Els alumnes de Comunicació Audiovisual han aprofitat la inspiració de moviments artístics d’avantguarda com el Situacionisme, i d’altres més contemporanis com el Ciberfeminisme i el Hacktivisme, per explotar, experimentar e hibridar els nous mitjans al seu abast – el web, interactius, vídeo, infografia, jocs transmedia, mapeig digital…- i exposar l’evolució i vigència actual d’aquests moviments (Ciberfeminisme, Hacktivisme time-line i Why Map), al mateix temp,s en que estudiaven els temes socials que més els preocupen. Entre ells, els nous processos de subjectivació relacionats amb les xarxes socials (Instagram 3.0, Renx 800, Euphoria, La pèrdua de la Identitat), l’actual situació política (Unlocking Streets), La manca de privacitat i el control associat a la ubiqüitat tecnològica (Under Argos Vigilance, La Ciutat Connectada), els problemes mediambientals (MeLata) o les noves formes de transmissió cultural (Nova Museografia). 

Sandra Àlvaro
Professora d’Art Contemporani

Veure l’exposició a la web del departament de Comunicació Audiovisual i publicitat

Permanent link to this article: https://enlaciutat.es/wordpress/?p=770

Preparing for the next course 2019-2020 at the UAB

We are in the middle of a heatwave and ready to leave the city for surfing on our favorite coast. However, we would not leave before setting up our September incoming obligations.

uab

Next course will be especially exciting for me, because, in addition to my course “artistic teams management” at the UEMC (Universidad Europea Miguel de Cervantes), I will also start teaching as an associate professor at the Department of Art and Musicology of the Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona.

I will be teaching contemporary art relationship with technology and society, concretely:

–             The debates that face current artistic works at the Degree of Art History.

–             The new formats arising from artistic technological convergence and how they are deployed in new narratives and visualizations at the Degree of Audio-visual communication.

Enjoy your summer!

ocean-waves-1000x675-1000x675

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