Deep Vista
Curated by Gabriel Esquivel & Coordinated by Paul Germaine McCoy
Assisting Team: Emily Majors, Hans Steffes, Madison Green
Deep Vista is a different way of looking at the issues instead of a pure panoramic view that architecture conferences have been offering recently.
The premise is to discuss architecture in terms of realism and conceptualism. Architecture as a cultural object the way architects approach these topics in the studio vs. real world), new technologies (beyond method and techniques), how they shape the perceptual and cognitive apparatus? And show how to deal with it when you build something. Architecture as a cultural agent is an issue that needs to enlarge its audience/ create the “we” that is a form of political agency in the societal milieu.
Design/Architecture, in the wake of insurgency of globally distributed digital platforms, has to obey to the dictum "nothing is given, everything is designed", from our individual online identities, to the interactive environment of personal devices, internet of things, infrastructures, data, in a way that is not simply determined by the continual transformation of inherited forms and traditions, but which draws on a manifest expansion in material science, transformations in construct-ability and manufacturing, cloud computing etc. In such a digitally pervasive environment, every designed object or component - either physical or non-physical, should be treated as manipulable hypothesis based on a "system of practices" that regulates a "set of conditions" that improves the probability that a desirable (rather than an undesirable) outcome will occur and the capacity to change the conditions when what is expected is not occurring, rather than treat as a solid theoretical, cultural or technical objects. Following this line of inquiry, designed object is without foundations, and as such, it manifests itself as a fusion of physics and algorithms, while simultaneously blurring the boundaries of the conceptual, semantic, syntactical and technical regimes used to conceive their production, reception and dissemination - or in other words formalization and normativity. The role of those boundaries is not any more to enclose different regimes, but rather to form tissue for osmotic exchange.
In such a condition, what is at stake? The task is to identify and asses different positions and choices about what architecture and design really are, what their objects of interest are, and what their manners of cognition are. As architectural and design multiple complexities are difficult to condense into a single formal criterion, it becomes apparent that a more inter-relational set of criteria is needed to develop architecture through collaborative methods. In times like today when we have faced numerous important changes in Architecture and Design. The need to look into the future is once again of paramount importance. At the same time we faced tremendous and complicated challenges in a context where technology has surpassed our expectations. We need to look into our surrounding ecologies and discuss how we can discuss our current circumstances.
However, we have the difficulty of contending with tremendous handicaps and diverse opinions in terms of the practice and the profession. In a world of impoverished global economies; how can architectural theory and technology respond to all these challenges.
Sean Anderson, Kristy Balliet, Ian Bogost, Levi Bryant, Courtney Coffman, Abigail Coover Hume, Sarah Deyong, Graham Harman, Nate Hume, Jimenez Lai, Laura Mandell, Tim Morton, Dwayne Oyler, Michel Rojkind, Kivi Sotamaa, Robert Stuart-Smith, Michael Young, and Gabriel Esquivel.
Special thanks to the Texas A&M Memorial Student Center and the Texas A&M College of Architecture
