This event will be live streamed on the Facebook page of the Taubman College of Architecture + Urban Planning: https://www.facebook.com/taubmancollege.
Today, we live inside the digital. Increasingly, our public and private lives are conducted online and in digital space where our relationships are forged, nurtured, or deleted, where our bills are paid and finances tracked, and where our ideologies are fed and our politics balkanized by our respective media bubbles. And while the digital now constitutes more and more of our daily routines, it can also offer a distorting abstraction of “external life.” Swiping left is easier than breaking up, and even the most civil among us can become an entitled consumer on Yelp. At once, our digital environments offer new grounds for engagement and interaction, and immersive venues for escape from the exigencies of the outside world. This session will discuss this dialectic.
Panelists will include Aubrey Anable (Carleton University), Amy Kulper (Rhode Island School of Design), and Jose Sanchez (University of Southern California). Join us for presentations and a discussion about the digital as both a totalizing environment unto itself – a bubble apart from the external lifeworld – and a new venue for social organization and engagement.
2:00-2:15 Introduction
2:15-3:30 Presentations by panelists
3:30-4:10 Discussion
4:15-4:30 Intermission
4:30-5:15 Guided tour of Art In the Age of the Internet, 1990 to Today
5:15-6:00 Discussion & Closing
Aubrey Anable
Aubrey Anable is an Assistant Professor in the School for Studies in Art and Culture at Carleton University in Ottawa. Aubrey’s research examines digital aesthetics, video games, and virtual reality in conversation with feminist and queer theory. Her book Playing with Feelings: Video Games and Affect (University of Minnesota Press, 2018) provides an account of how video games compel us to play and why they constitute a contemporary structure of feeling emerging alongside the last sixty years of computerized living. She’s an advisory editor for the journal Camera Obscura and is currently co-editing The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Visual Culture.
Jose Sanchez
Jose Sanchez is an Architect / Programmer / Game Designer based in Los Angeles, California. He is the director of the Plethora Project, a research and learning project investing in the future of on-line open-source knowledge. He is also the creator of Block’hood, an award-winning city building video game exploring notions of crowdsourced urbanism.
He has taught and guest lectured in several renowned institutions across the world, including the Architectural Association in London, The Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London.
Today, he is an Assistant Professor at USC School of Architecture in Los Angeles. His research ‘Gamescapes’, explores generative interfaces in the form of video games, speculating in modes of intelligence augmentation, combinatorics and open systems as a design medium.
Amy Kulper
Amy Catania Kulper is an architectural educator whose teaching and research focus on the intersections of history, theory, and criticism with design. Throughout her career, Kulper has taught at Cambridge University, the University of Pennsylvania, UCLA, SCI_Arc, the University of Michigan, and RISD where she is currently an Associate Professor and Head of the Department of Architecture. In her time in Ann Arbor, she was a four-time recipient of the Donna M. Salzer Award for teaching excellence.
Kulper’s writings are published in Log, The Journal of Architecture, arq: Architectural Research Quarterly, Candide, The Journal of Architectural Education, and numerous edited volumes. Kulper has served on the editorial board of the Journal of Architectural Education where she has acted as the Design Editor for six years. In March of 2017 she received the Distinguished Service Award from the ACSA for her work on the journal. Kulper holds master’s degrees from the University of Pennsylvania and Cambridge University and a Ph.D. in the History and Philosophy of Architecture from Cambridge University.
