Program in Media and Modernity, Princeton University

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Program in Media and Modernity, Princeton University

Architecture, art, film, photography, literature, philosophy, music, history, and all forms of electronic media from radio to video, to information technology.

Program in Media and Modernity, Princeton University
Directors: Beatriz Colomina and Irene V. Small

The Program in Media and Modernity promotes the inter-disciplinary study of the unique cultural formations that came to prominence during the last century, with special attention paid to the interplay between culture and technology, centering on architecture, art, film, photography, literature, phi

losophy, music, history, and media from radio to information technology. It draws on the rich human and material resources that exist at Princeton and provides a focus and forum for research and teaching in the spaces, texts, media, and modernities of the 20th and the 21st century. The program offers a graduate certificate and collaborative teaching, learning, and research opportunities centered on team-taught seminars and cross-disciplinary colloquia. Graduate Certificate in Media and Modernity

The Graduate Program in Media and Modernity offers students from a wide range of fields — architecture to computer science, visual arts to anthropology, literature to political theory — the opportunity to enrich and broaden their study through participation in the interdisciplinary activities of the program. The Graduate Certificate in Media+Modernity is conferred each year to Princeton University graduate students that fulfill the requirements listed below. Ph.D. students may obtain the M+M certificate by fulfilling the following requirements: 1) Enrollment in at least three seminars cross-listed with MOD (Media and Modernity). 2) Regular attendance at M+M events held during the semester. 3) Participation in a dissertation colloquium led by the program's directors. Masters students may obtain the M+M certificate by fulfilling the following requirements: 1) Enrollment in at least three seminars cross-listed with MOD (Media and Modernity). 2) Regular attendance at M+M events held during the semester. Students qualifying for the certificate should send the following information (in a single document) to [email protected] no later than May 1 for awarding of the certificate in that academic year:

a) Full name, department, program, year, expected date of graduation, contact email;
b) Name and contact email of primary advisor;
c) A list of courses fulfilling the qualifications for the Certificate, as listed above. Each of these should include all course numbers under which the class was listed, course titles, instructor names, descriptions (as listed on the Course Offerings website of the University) and the grade option for which each class was taken;
d) Any further information that might be useful and is not covered by the points above. Please note: Students may not gain admission to the University through the Program in Media and Modernity. They may affiliate with the program and earn a certificate from it after having been admitted through a degree-granting department. The certificate does not appear on the official transcript.

04/16/2024

The Graduate Program in Media + Modernity | Princeton University presents:

Lydia Kallipoliti
“An Unfinished Cyclopedia; Histories of Ecological Design”
[Response: Sylvia Lavin]
Tuesday, April 23, 2024 ET
N107 (School of Architecture)

Histories of Ecological Design; An Unfinished Cyclopedia presents conflicting definitions and concepts of architects and designers and the parallel histories of their intellectual positions toward environmental thought from the 19th century to today. In 21 chapters and 3 periods [ I. NATURALISM, II. SYNTHETIC NATURALISM, III. DARK NATURALISM], the context is not exclusively examined chronologically, but also in connected worldviews, each rendering evolving perceptions of nature, its relation to culture, and the occupation of the planet by human and non-human subjects.

Throughout the book, there is an acknowledgement and a critique that ecological histories reflect, in one way or another, hierarchical modalities of domination; ones that are bent on controlling knowledge and shaping the physical and material world into ontological and scientific worldviews. Architects, designers, and thinkers have long been complicit in the hubris of the position that humans are the caretakers of the planet and that the self — as a distinct individual entity— possesses a sublime power to analyze the world, devise hierarchies, and construct ideological cosmologies that become norms.

04/03/2024

The Graduate Program in Media + Modernity | Princeton University presents:

Benjamin Buchloh
“The Ends of a Critic”
[Response: Yve-Alain Bois, Hal Foster]
Tuesday, April 09, 2024 ET
N107 (School of Architecture)

:: co-sponsored by the Department of Art & Archaeology ::

In The Ends of a Critic, Yve-Alain Bois will interrogate Benjamin Buchloh and Hal Foster on their new book, Exit Interview.

In Exit Interview, a conversation in three parts, eminent critics and art historians Hal Foster and Benjamin H. D. Buchloh discuss the intellectual foundations and motivations of Buchloh, tracing an arc from family history to activist politics of the 1960s and ’70s to encounters with significant artists, including Michael Asher, Marcel Broodthaers, Louise Lawler, Gerhard Richter, Martha Rosler, and Lawrence Weiner. Foster engages Buchloh on his education and ambitions; his time in communes in Berlin; and his experiences in London as an aspiring fiction writer; and his return to Germany in 1971 to work at art galleries, publish the short-lived but influential magazine Interfunktionen, and teach at the Dusseldorf Academy. Together they chart Buchloh’s path from Europe to North America, first to Nova Scotia, then Los Angeles, and finally New York, as a publisher, professor, curator, and critic. Building on years of collaboration and friendship, Foster and Buchloh’s compelling conversations move from biography and anecdote to important reflection on one’s critical life as a whole. Their discussion is a study in dialectical thought as they explore what Foster calls the “fascinating contradictions” that have structured Buchloh’s approach to culture. The interview retains the intimacy of a frank and generative dialogue, with close examinations of the connections between politics and art. Exit Interview closes with a postscript by Buchloh that reflects on his rigorous commitment to the potential of critical art, despite the relentless commodification of everyday life.

03/28/2024

Graduate Program in Media + Modernity | Princeton University

Inaugural Branden Hookway Interface
Shannon Mattern and Olga Touloumi
Tuesday, April 02, 2024 ET
Betts Auditorium (School of Architecture)

::Event co-sponsored by the School of Architecture::

Interface 2024 inaugurates an annual lecture program given in honor of one of the brilliant graduates of the School of Architecture, Branden Hookway, who passed away in 2021. Inspired by his description of the interface as an “apparatus” that can “contest and conjoin,” the format of this annual event brings together two scholars working in different clusters of the many areas that informed Branden’s theoretical and historical writing.

Tables organize our everyday but also structure political representations in the public realm. We gather around tables – to share, talk, negotiate – but tables also keep us apart, as Hannah Arendt reminds us. In this conversation, Olga Touloumi will consider the diplomatic table as the political economy of assembly that marked postwar imaginaries of liberal internationalism. Shannon Mattern will consider various virtual tabular interfaces designed to facilitate both the assemblage of objects or concepts and the assembly of minds and bodies. The conversation will also look beyond the table to consider newer sites of virtual gathering — digital gardens, mesh networks, and solidarity infrastructures, for instance — that adopt alternative topologies in order to foster hospitality and cultivate a different politics of assembly.

03/20/2024

The Graduate Program in Media + Modernity | Princeton University presents:

Samia Henni
“Colonial Toxicity”
[Response: Simon Gikandi]
Tuesday, March 26, 2024 ET
N107 (School of Architecture)

Between 1960 and 1966, the French colonial regime detonated four atmospheric atomic bombs, thirteen underground nuclear bombs and conducted other nuclear experiments in the Algerian Sahara, whose natural resources were being extracted in the process. This secret nuclear weapons programme, whose archives are still classified, occurred during and after the Algerian Revolution, or the Algerian War of Independence (1954–62). Colonial Toxicity: Rehearsing French Radioactive Architecture and Landscape in the Sahara brings together nearly six hundred pages of materials documenting this violent history of France’s nuclear bomb programme in the Algerian desert. Meticulously culled together by the architectural historian from across available, offered, contraband, and leaked sources, the book is a rich repository for all those concerned with histories of nuclear weapons and engaged at the intersections of spatial, social and environmental justice, as well as anticolonial archival practices.

03/13/2024

The Graduate Program in Media + Modernity | Princeton University presents:

Ekow Eshun
“In the Black Fantastic”
[Response: Tina M. Campt]
Tuesday, March 19, 2024 ET
N107 (School of Architecture)

:: co-sponsored by the Princeton Collaboratorium for Radical Aesthetics ::

Ekow Eshun will explore the landscape of ideas and imagery that inform his recent book, In the Black Fantastic (MIT Books, 2022). Embracing the mythic and the speculative, In the Black Fantastic, recycles and reconfigures elements of fable, folklore, science fiction, spiritual traditions, ceremonial pageantry, and the legacies of Afrofuturism to shows how speculative fictions in Black art and culture are boldly reimagining perspectives on race, gender and identity. Standing apart from Western narratives of progress and modernity premised on the historical subjugation of people of color, In the Black Fantastic celebrates the ways that Black artists draw inspiration from African-originated myths, beliefs, and knowledge systems, confounding the Western dichotomy between the real and unreal, the scientific and the supernatural.

Writer and curator Ekow Eshun is Chairman of the Fourth Plinth, overseeing the foremost public art programme in the UK, and the former Director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London. He is the winner of the Association for Art History Curatorial Prize 2023 and author of books including Black Gold of the Sun (Penguin 2006) shortlisted for the Orwell Prize, and Africa State of Mind (2021) nominated for the Lucie Photo Book Prize.

Tina M. Campt is Roger S. Berlind ’52 Professor of Humanities in the Department of Art & Archaeology and the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University.

02/29/2024

The Graduate Program in Media + Modernity | Princeton University presents:

Dennis Yi Tenen
« Literary Theory for Robots”
[Response: Grant Wythoff]
Tuesday, March 05, 2024 ET
N107 (School of Architecture)

::Event co-sponsored by the Center for Digital Humanities::

Literary Theory for Robots (W.W. Norton, 2024) reveals the hidden history of modern machine intelligence, taking readers on a spellbinding journey from medieval Arabic philosophy to visions of a universal language, past Hollywood fiction factories and missile defense systems trained on Russian folktales. In this talk, we will discuss the past and future of literary technologies: the necessity of research into the material conditions of textual production, and the surprising afterlife of Structuralist thought. A case study from the book will conclude the conversation.

Dennis Yi Tenen is an associate professor of English at Columbia University, where he also co-directs the Center for Comparative Media. His research happens at the intersection of people, text, and technology. A long-time affiliate of Columbia’s Data Science Institute, formerly a Microsoft engineer in the Windows group and fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, his code runs on millions of personal computers worldwide.

Grant Wythoff heads the graduate program of the Center for Digital Humanities at Princeton. He is cofounder of a cooperative mesh network and digital equity organization called Philly Community Wireless and founding editor of a journal for experimental research in the humanities called Startwords. His latest book, Technique in the Age of Tech (University of Minnesota Press), is forthcoming 2025.

Please visit M+M’s official website for details and current information.

M+M strives to make everyone feel welcome. If you are concerned that room N107 will not provide adequate physical accommodation for you, please contact us in advance to discuss it.

02/21/2024

The Graduate Program in Media + Modernity | Princeton University presents:

Paul Chan
« Ars::longa”
[Response: Devin Fore]
Tuesday, February 27, 2024 ET
N107 (School of Architecture)

It is traditionally understood that the first part of « Ars longa, vita brevis » means it takes a long time to master an art or technology. Another interpretation is that art lasts, perhaps longer than life. I suggest a new third reading: that art extends life itself. To support this reading, I consider the work of Chris Marker, Arakawa & Gins, and experiences from my own private research and development in the domain of artificial intelligence called Natural Language Processing. Hellenistic mathematicians Archimedes and Eratosthenes, who fused poetry with calculation to capture what is « unbounded » or « infinite » are invoked. Naturally, Faust appears.

Paul Chan is an artist based in New York. He founded the press Badlands Unlimited (2010-2018). « Breathers », a survey exhibition of his recent practice organized by the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, will travel to the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis in March 2024. Chan was named a MacArthur Foundation Fellow in 2022.

Devin Fore is Professor of German at Princeton University. He is editor of Revoliutsiia! Demonstratsiia! Soviet Art Put to the Test (Yale University Press, 2017) and History and Obstinacy by Alexander Kluge and Oskar Negt (Zone Books, 2014); he is also author of Realism after Modernism: The Rehumanization of Art and Literature (The MIT Press, 2012) and Soviet Factography: Reality without Realism (University of Chicago Press, forthcoming this fall).

Image Caption: Paul Chan, Left Handed Stomachion, 2023 (detail)

Please visit M+M’s official website for details and current information.

02/14/2024

The Graduate Program in Media + Modernity | Princeton University presents:

M+M Doctoral Colloquium – Spring 2024
with Tairan An, Joe Bucciero, Clemens Finkelstein, and Julian Rose
Tuesday, February 20, 2024 ET
N107 (School of Architecture)

The Doctoral colloquium is an exciting opportunity for Ph.D. candidates who pursue the M+M graduate certificate to share their research and receive feedback from faculty and colleagues across a wide range of departments.

Tairan An | Architecture
“Assailing the Sun: Expeditionary Outbuildings and Other Extempore
Artifacts of Solar Science in Sicily, c. 1870”
[Advisor: Sylvia Lavin]

Joe Bucciero | Art & Archaeology
“Highly Skilled Animals: Carl Grossberg’s Art of Distinction”
[Advisor: Hal Foster]

Clemens Finkelstein | Architecture
“Planetary Survey Architectures, c. 1902”
[Advisor: Spyros Papapetros]

Julian Rose | Art & Archaeology
“Modern Art in Wretched Sheds: Francis Fowke’s Painting Galleries for the South Kensington Museum of Science and Art”
[Advisor: Hal Foster]

Please visit M+M’s official website for details and current information.

02/01/2024

The Graduate Program in Media and Modernity announces its series of events for the Spring 2024 semester. All events take place in Room N107 (School of Architecture) at 5:00 pm, unless otherwise noted. Please visit M+M’s official website for details and current information.

FEB 20
M+M PhD Colloquium

FEB 27
Paul Chan: « Ars::longa »
[res. Devin A. Fore]

MAR 05
Dennis Yi Tenen: « Literary Theory for Robots »
[res. Grant Wythoff]
::co-sponsored by the Center for Digital Humanities::

MAR 19
Ekow Eshun: « In the Black Fantastic »
[res. Tina Campt]
::co-sponsored by the Princeton Collaboratorium for Radical Aesthetics::

MAR 26
Samia Henni: « Colonial Toxicity »

APR 02
Shanon Mattern and Olga Touloumi
Inaugural Branden Hookway Interface
::co-sponsored by the School of Architecture::

APR 09
Benjamin Buchloh: « The Ends of a Critic »
[res. Yve-Alain Bois, Hal Foster]
::co-sponsored by the Department of Art and Archaeology::

APR 23
Lydia Kallipoliti: « An Unfinished Cyclopedia; Histories of Ecological Design »
[res. Sylvia Lavin]

M+M co-sponsors:

FEB 13
Hani Rashid, Daniela Fabricius, Josephine Meckseper:
« Scenario for a Past Future and Avant-Garde Immersive Worlds »
also co-sponsored by Princeton’s Humanities Council and the Center for Digital Humanities

Please visit M+M’s official website for details and current information.

11/21/2023

The Graduate Program in Media + Modernity | Princeton University presents:

WAI Think Tank
"Beyond Reparations: Post-Colonial Loudreaders, Colonial Footprints, and the case for white studies”
[Response: V. Mitch McEwen]
Tuesday, November 28, 2023 ET
201, Morrison Hall (African American studies)

Event co-sponsored by the Department of African American Studies (AAS).

:: Please note that this event will start at 6:00 pm instead of 5:00 pm, and that it will take place in Room 201 (Morisson Hall), instead of Room N107 (SoA)::

Addressing the scaffolding of reparations, WAI Think Tank proposes to redefine the post-colonial, not as life after the colony (since Puerto Rico continues being one after more than 500 years), but as the brutalizing regimes historically imposed on the colonial plantations spilling on the rest of the world like organic matter. This condition of planetary urgency calls for radical practices of solidarity and education like the loudreaders that shared anti-capitalist and anti-colonial imaginaries in the to***co factories of the Caribbean, and the possibility and necessity of white studies that account for the colonial footprint of the architectures of white supremacy, capitalism, heteropatriarchy and the cosmogonies of destruction and subjugation they produce and reproduce.

Nathalie Frankowski and Cruz Garcia are co-founders of WAI Architecture Think Tank and the free and alternative education platform and trade-school LOUDREADERS. They are authors of several books including A Manual of Anti-Racist Architecture Education, and co-editors of Journal of Architectural Education issue on Reparations! and InForma Journal issue on Networks of Solidarity.

V. Mitch McEwen is an Assistant Professor at Princeton’s School of Architecture. She is principal of Atelier Office, director of the Black Box Research Group, and co-founder of the Black Reconstruction Collective.

M+M strives to make everyone feel welcome. If you are concerned that room 201 will not provide adequate physical accommodation for you, please contact us in advance to discuss it.

Please visit M+M's official website for details and current information.

11/08/2023

The Graduate Program in Media + Modernity | Princeton University presents:

Jonathan Crary
"Tricks of the LIght”
[Response: Hal Foster]
Wednesday, November 15, 2023 ET
N107 (School of Architecture)

:: Please note that this event will take place on Wednesday, instead of Tuesday ::

Jonathan Crary, internationally known for his groundbreaking and widely admired studies of modern Western visual culture, will discuss his recent book, Tricks of the Light: Essays on Art and Spectacle (Zone Books, 2023), a compelling selection of Crary’s responses to modern and contemporary art and to the transformations of twentieth-century media systems and urban/technological environments. Tricks of the Light explores the work of painters, performance artists, writers, architects, photographers, and filmmakers, while it is enhanced by several expansive essays on the historically unstable status of television, assessing its many-sided role in the reshaping of subjectivity, temporality, and the operation of power.

Jonathan Crary is Meyer Schapiro Professor of Modern Art and Theory at Columbia University. His books include Techniques of the Observer (MIT Press, 1992), Suspensions of Perception (MIT Press, 2001), 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (Verso, 2013), and Scorched Earth (Verso, 2022).

Hal Foster is Townsend Martin, Class of 1917, Professor of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University. His publications include Brutal Aesthetics: Dubuffet, Bataile, Jorn, Paolozzi, Oldenburg (Princeton University Press, 2020), What Comes After Farce? Art and Criticism at a Time of Debacle (Verso, 2020), and Conversations about Sculpture, with Richard Serra (Yale University Press, 2018).

M+M strives to make everyone feel welcome. If you are concerned that room N107 will not provide adequate physical accommodation for you, please contact us in advance to discuss it.

Please visit M+M's official website for details and current information.

11/03/2023

The Graduate Program in Media + Modernity | Princeton University presents:

Gerard & Kelly
"On Modern Living”
[Response: Beatriz Colomina]
Tuesday, November 07, 2023 ET
Betts Auditorium (School of Architecture)

Event co-sponsored by the Program in Visual Arts (VIS).

In Modern Living, a series of films and performances created in iconic architectural sites, Gerard & Kelly mine “ruins of modernism” for their hidden choreographies and radical social experiments. Beginning with the R.M. Schindler House in West Hollywood, California (1922), designed to house two young couples in an early experiment of communal living, and continuing through their recent project at E 1027, Eileen Gray’s villa in Roquebrune-Cap Martin, France (1929), the lecture tracks the artists’ ongoing probe of the layered and complicated history of modernism.

American artists based in Paris since 2018, Brennan Gerard and Ryan Kelly have collaborated for nearly two decades on performance, video, and installation, among other formats. Having collectively studied ballet, visual art, literature, and gender studies, Gerard & Kelly use conceptual strategies within art and dance to examine broader themes of memory, history, subjectivity, and sexuality.

Beatriz Colomina is the Howard Crosby Butler Professor of the History of Architecture. Her most recent books are X-Ray Architecture (Lars Muller, 2019)and Radical Pedagogies, ed. with Ignacio Gonzalez Galan, Evangelos Kotsioris, and Anna-Maria Meister (MIT Press, 2022).

Please visit M+M's official website for details and current information.

Gerard & Kelly, Modern Living, 2016. Performance view: MAK Center for Art and Architecture at the Schindler House, West Hollywood, California. Julia Eichten, Rachelle Rafailedes. Courtesy of the artists and Marian Goodman Gallery. © Adagp Paris, 2023

10/25/2023

The Graduate Program in Media + Modernity | Princeton University presents:

David Joselit
"Art’s Properties”
[Response: Irene V. Small]
Tuesday, October 31, 2023 ET
N107 (School of Architecture)

Art's Properties is a revisionist reading of modern art in response to recent calls for racial justice. It assesses modern Euro-American art, from the late 18th century to the present, in light of systemic racism or white supremacy. As such, it addresses questions of repatriation, the history of museums and copyright, black radical theory, and contemporary art criticism to explore the ethics of claiming aesthetic content as one's own exclusive property.

David Joselit is the Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor and Chair of Art, Film, and Visual Studies at Harvard. He is author several books including Heritage and Debt: Art in Globalization (MIT Press 2020) which won the Robert Motherwell Book award in 2021 and Art's Properties (Princeton University Press, 2023).

Irene V. Small is Associate Professor of Contemporary Art & Criticism in the Department of Art & Archaeology at Princeton University, and associated faculty in the Program in Latin American Studies and the Department of Spanish & Portuguese. She is the author of Hélio Oiticica: Folding the Frame (University of Chicago Press, 2016). A new book, The Organic Line: Toward a Topology of Modernism, is forthcoming from Zone Books in 2024.

Please visit M+M's official website for details and current information.

M+M strives to make everyone feel welcome. If you are concerned that room N107 will not provide adequate physical accommodation for you, please contact us in advance to discuss it.

MVRDV, Rendering Depot BoijmansVan Beuningen copyright 2022

10/17/2023

The Graduate Program in Media + Modernity | Princeton University presents:

Seb Franklin
"Value and slavery, or the longue durée of the analog-digital distinction”
[Response: Paul Nadal]
Tuesday, October 24, 2023 ET
S118 (School of Architecture)

:: Please note that this event will start at 12:00 pm instead of 5:00 pm, and that it will take place in Room S118, instead of Room N107 ::

In this talk I theorise the analog and the digital as bundles of concepts, feelings, and attachments whose origins long precede the technical media most commonly associated with them. Beginning from Hari Kunzru’s 2017 novel White Tears, which overtly connects analog media fetishism to an extractive fascination with racial blackness, I argue through readings of media history, Lacanian and Marxist theory, and Black studies that the prevailing notions of analog and digital emerged from and remain animated by the network of relations that shaped specifically capitalist notions of ‘free’ labor, slavery, and indenture. In so doing, I propose Richard Ligon’s 1657 True and Exact History of Barbados as an exemplary text for a media theory of social form.

Seb Franklin is Reader in Literature, Media, and Theory in the Department of English at King’s College London. He is the author of The Digitally Disposed: Racial Capitalism and the Informatics of Value (2021) and Control: Digitality as Cultural Logic (2015).

Paul Nadal is Assistant Professor of English and American Studies at Princeton University. An interdisciplinary scholar working at the intersection of literature and economy, he is completing a book on novels and remittances in the Philippine diaspora, a chapter of which appeared in American Quarterly and won the Best Essay Prize from the American Literature Society.

10/04/2023

The Graduate Program in Media + Modernity | Princeton University presents:

Catherine Ingraham
“Architecture’s Theory”
[Response: Spyros Papapetros]
Tuesday, October 10, 2023 ET
N107 (School of Architecture)

This event is about a book Catherine Ingraham currently published entitled « Architecture’s Theory. » As one reviewer, Marko Ristic, noted, « ...the title cannot be considered general. The author’s decision not to use the common term ‘architectural theory,’ but architecture’s instead, is a subtle intervention that epitomizes a specific relationship of architecture to theory questioned throughout the book. This relationship...introduces the idea of theory that is ‘architecture’s own.’ « While the matter of architecture’s « theoretical attitude » and its ordering of what is imported from outside its domain are important parts of the book’s inquiries, such questions always require contextualization and argumentation. This event, hopefully, will allow for both of these requirements.

Catherine Ingraham is a tenured Professor in the Graduate Program of Architecture at Pratt Institute, a program she started and Chaired 2001-2005. She has been a periodic visiting professor at the GSD, Harvard University and the GSAPP, Columbia University. Publications include «Architecture’s Theory» (MIT Press 2023), «Architecture, Animal, Human» (Routledge 2006), «Architecture and The Burdens of Linearity» (Yale University Press1998), plus numerous articles and invited essays. Ingraham was a co-editor, with Michael Hays and Alicia Kennedy, of the critical journal Assemblage 1991-1998 and has lectured at conferences and universities worldwide. She has received grants and fellowships from The Institute for Architecture and Urbanism in Chicago, The CCA in Montreal, the MacDowell colony, NEA and the Graham Foundation. Catherine received her doctoral degree from Johns Hopkins University.

Spyros Papapetros is an Associate Professor at Princeton’s School of Architecture. Forthcoming book publications include «Pre/Architecture» (Critical Spatial Practice series edited by Nikolaus Hirsch/Sternberg-MIT Press, 2024) and «Frederick Kiesler’s Magic Architecture»

09/27/2023

The Graduate Program in Media + Modernity | Princeton University presents:

On the occasion of the installation of Louise Lawler’s Birdcalls:
“Birdcalls: a Roundtable”
[with Sylvia Lavin, Tom Levin, Maria Loh, & Gavin Steingo]
Tuesday, October 3, 2023 ET
N107 (School of Architecture)

Event co-organized by the School of Architecture
and the Program in Media and Modernity.

For this work, sometimes referred to as “Patriarchal Rollcall”, Louise Lawler sounded out the familiar names of male artists dominating the art world in the 1970s using the chirps and peeps of birdcalls - activating the artistic tradition of mimesis but with a twist. The humor of the work is tinged with urgency as it attests to how the constant repetition of these names operates to block the voices of women artists, artists of color and other underrepresented persons. Installing Birdcalls also calls attention to the importance of sound and animal studies to current discourses on aesthetics and hence to the environmental conditions undergirding the making and showing of art today.

09/19/2023

The Graduate Program in Media + Modernity | Princeton University presents:

Rania Ghosn
“Climate Inheritance”
[Response: Sylvia Lavin]
Tuesday, September 26, 2023 ET
N107 (School of Architecture)

Climate Inheritance is a speculative design publication that reckons with the complexity of world and heritage in the Anthropocene. The impacts of climate change on heritage sites—from Venice flooding to extinction in the Galápagos Islands—have garnered empathetic media attention in a landscape that has otherwise failed to communicate the urgency of the crisis. In a subversion of the media aura of heritage, DESIGN EARTH casts ten World Heritage sites as narrative figures to visualize pervasive climate risks and narrate entangled inheritances to bequeath other worlds and values.

Rania Ghosn is Associate Professor of architecture and urbanism at MIT and founding partner of DESIGN EARTH. She is author of Geographies of Trash (2015), Geostories: Another Architecture for the Environment (3rd ed. 2022; 2018), and The Planet After Geoengineering (2021). Ghosn holds a Doctor of Design from Harvard GSD, where she was founding editor of the journal New Geographies and editor of its issue Landscapes of Energy (2009).

Sylvia Lavin is a Professor of History and Theory of Architecture at Princeton University. Her work explores the limits of architecture across a wide spectrum of historical periods. Her publications include Form Follows Libido: Architecture and Richard Neutra in a Psychoanalytic Culture, Everything Loose Will Land: 1970s Art and Architecture in Los Angeles and Architecture Itself and Other Postmodernist Myths. She is currently working on a new book, Building Sylvan Media.

A discount code will be provided to each attendee of the event.

09/06/2023

The Graduate Program in Media + Modernity | Princeton University presents:

Mara Mills
"Disability as Method”
[Response: Viktoria Tkaczyk]
Tuesday, September 12, 2023 ET
N107 (School of Architecture)

Scholars in disability studies began using the phrase “disability as method” across several disciplines in the 2010s, to consider disability as a tool, a theory, an aesthetic, and a source of new media. Mills will discuss Crip Authorship: Disability as Method (August 2023), coedited with Rebecca Sanchez, a volume that convenes this scholarship across literature, the arts, anthropology, and media studies. In conversation with Viktoria Tkaczyk, she will also discuss her work on "disability as method" in the history of science.

Mara Mills is Associate Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University and founding co-director of the NYU Center for Disability Studies. She is also a founding editorial board member of Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience. She is recently co-editor of Testing Hearing: The Making of Modern Aurality (Oxford 2020), Crip Authorship: Disability as Method (NYU 2023), and a forthcoming special issue of Osiris on "Disability and the History of Science" (2024). Upcoming publications include the NSF-funded edited collection How to be Disabled in a Pandemic (NYU Press), a coauthored book with Jonathan Sterne on time stretching, and an NEH-funded collaborative research project with Michele Friedner on "The Global Cochlear Implant."

Viktoria Tkaczyk is Professor in the Department of Musicology and Media Studies at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and currently the Whitney J. Oates Visiting Fellow in the Humanities Council and the Department of German. She has published widely on the history of early modern and modern aviation, architecture, acoustics, neuroscience, experimental aesthetics, and sound media. Her current work includes a new project exploring how humanistic and scientific technologies relate to geopolitics and resource regimes, and a collaborative project entitled "Applied Humanities: Genealogies and Politics.“

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Princeton University
Princeton, NJ

Website

http://mandm.princeton.edu/

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Videos

:: Coming up tomorrow :: Giuliana Bruno « Atmospheres of Projection” [Response: Sylvia Lavin] Tuesday, November 08, 2022 @5pm ET N107 (School of Architecture)

::Coming up this week:: Wolfgang Schäffner « Getting to the Point. Genealogies of the Analog Code” [Response: Joseph Vogl] Tuesday, November 01, 2022 @5pm ET N107 (School of Architecture) Event co-sponsored by: Art & Archaeology, Center for Collaborative History, Comparative Literature, German, IHUM, Program in European Cultural Studies, Program in Medieval Studies.