Gradcam
This online seminar aims to develop a multidisciplinary research community to study the archive as it has been transformed by multi-scalar computational assemblages. What then are the kinds of spaces being produced by the archive. How, as a research community, might we understand these spaces? Who produces this space? What is it that is being produced? How is it being produced? Why is it being produced? For whom is it being produced? To what extent do these spaces contribute to our ability to participate in the democratic production of space?
The smartphone gathers real-time information while simultaneously archiving, processing and representing that information to me. This is the automatic-everyday where we are sold the myth that our digital prostheses are opening out a world of possibilities when in fact, according to a specific and ever-changing grid of algorithmic governance, they are closing it down. The previously unimaginable changes in speed created by planetary computation, the new technologies of real-time digital tertiary retention have caused a disruption to take place in the very structure of everyday life (which is itself now the mode of production) which has significant implications for spatial production. This is the archive of everyday life.
This archive is not a metaphor it is a material and spatial reality. This archive is vast, cavernous, anonymous looking warehouses filled with seemingly endless aisles of powder coated aluminium cabinets standing to attention, flickering led lights, a cardiograph of data lives — click-like-tweet-porn-share-send-spam-delete — all serenaded by the deafening soundtrack of energy hungry cooling fans.
This archive is human exclusion zones where robots respond to our buy-now-one-click demands, moving objects in the dark, the like of which we never knew we wanted across a military grade infrastructure — orders “fulfilled” by the logistical precariat of digital capitalism.
This archive is Cobalt uploaded from the earth by the hands of child miners in the not so Democratic Republic of Congo, to facilitate the technologies of Tesla Apple, Microsoft, Google and Dell who are currently being sued by International Rights Advocates on behalf of fourteen Congolese families.
Architecture has become the veil of secrecy that digital capitalism needs in order to survive and the currency of this new city is attention.
This online seminar aims to develop a multidisciplinary research community to study the archive as it has been transformed by multi-scalar computational assemblages. What then are the kinds of spaces being produced by the archive. How, as a research community, might we understand these spaces? Who produces this space? What is it that is being produced? How is it being produced? Why is it being produced? For whom is it being produced? To what extent do these spaces contribute to our ability to participate in the democratic production of space?
23 October, 2020
from 15:30 to 17:30
“The Production of Archival Space” presented by David Capener ( Architect, Co-curator of Ireland’s pavilion for the 17th International Architecture Biennale at Venice in 2021. PhD researcher TU Dublin) .
6 November, 2020
from 15:30 to 17:30
“The Geology of the Archive” presented by Dr. Nicole Starosielski (Author of The Undersea Network)
20 November, 2020
from 15:30 to 17:30
“The Data Furnace” presented by Dr. Julia Velkova ( Author of Data that warms: Waste heat, Infrastructural Convergence and the Computation Traffic Commodity)
27 November, 2020
from 15:30 to 17:30
“AI at urban Scale“ presented by Donal Lally ( Architect, Co- curator of Ireland’s pavilion, Entanglement, for the 17th International Architecture Biennale at Venice in 2021. PhD researcher at TU Dublin).
4 December, 2020
from 15:30 to 17:30
“Thermocultures of Memory and Memory Machines“ presented by Samir Bhowmik (multi-disciplinary Finnish artist and architect.)
18 December, 2020
from 15:30 to 17:30
“Archive of Everyday life“ presented by Dr. Robert Porter (author of Meanderings Through the Politics of Everyday Life).
Reading List: To be supplied on registration.
For enquiries contact: donal.lally@tudublin.ie
