INTERPRETATIONS: DISCERNING FICTIONS (New York, April 20, 2013)

Third edition of the symposium series organized by the graduate
students of the Critical, Curatorial and Conceptual Practices in
Architecture (CCCP) program at the COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY's Graduate
School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP).

WHEN
April 20th, 2013
12:30—7:00PM
FREE and open to the public

WHERE
Studio-X New York. (Columbia University)
180 Varick Street, Suite 1610
New York, NY 10014

GSAPP (COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY) Events listing:
http://events.gsapp.org/event/interpretations-discerning-fictions

RSVP: archigonicsarch.columbia.edu
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/467542469961844/

INTENTION
This symposium examines the intermediation of architecture
and fiction. Architecture acts and re-enacts a continuous telling of
stories. Fiction is used to establish contexts, outline narratives,
describe logics, or frame polemics. Likewise, fiction can be
instrumentalized to distort or deceive. Structures both built and
unbuilt inflect and are informed by numerous other media such as
literature, cinema, theatre, and so on. Despite its ubiquity, the
fictive trope’s function remains elusive. Utopias and dystopias,
visionary drawings and experimental writings, exhibitions and
installations, all require, utilize, or play off fiction in order to
carve out a space to exist. What are the specificities and
eccentricities of fiction's role in critical, curatorial, and
conceptual practices of architecture?

Fiction allows us to imagine new possibilities, new politics, new
modes for living, new ways of understanding the world. Indeed, fiction
enables and encourages the elaboration or extrapolation of the present
and proves history and memory are mutable and contingent. What
para-fictional possibilities open up when architectural production
purposely blurs truth and how might this problematize relationships to
the real? What are the limits of fiction and its gestures of autonomy?
Considering Felicity Scott’s remarks, “Fiction is not just escape from
reality but can produce an engaged withdrawal,” is it possible to
identify not only the mechanics but strategic moments of fiction? How
does a fictive architecture prescribe experience or project models,
and how do (counter-)narrative forms act as testing grounds for
speculative ideas? The seminars’ conversations will range from the
technical to the nonsensical and hopefully help us begin to recognize
the myths architecture continues to reproduce and understand the
alchemical potential of fiction in the discipline.

This third annual Interpretations symposium and its live proceedings
will form the basis of a forthcoming publication titled ARCHIGONICS.
[The suffix -gonic implies “the work required to facilitate a
reaction.”] In conjunction with documentation of the event, the
publication will include additional commissions in the form of
contributions and commentary by artists, architects, and curators. It
will also include selected writings/projects related to the topic
through an open call for papers following the event.

DISCERNING FICTIONS CURATORIAL TEAM
Javier Antón, Greg Barton, Caitlin Blanchfield, Max Lauter, Elis
Mendoza

FORMAT/SCHEDULE
The symposium will take the form of a series of roundtable seminars
with invited guests from varied backgrounds. In each roundtable,
speakers will briefly present a provocation, statement, or paragraph
responding to the day’s thematic concerns, oscillating between
architecture, writing, and exhibition-making. The participants will
discuss for one hour, followed by an open question-and-answer session.
Everyone attending the event is invited to actively engage in the
discussion. The coffee breaks between panels, demarcated by ellipses
(...), hopefully are equally productive.

Program:

12:30—1:00PM PREFACE [INTRODUCTIONS]

1:00—2:30PM FICTIONAL ARCHITECTURE [DESIGN & EXHIBITIONS]
First Round Table Description

From premises for exhibitions (or the objects displayed) to individual
projects, artists, architects and curators often utilize fiction as a
tool or methodology to make claims, communicate stories, advance
arguments, provoke questions, or rationalize schemes. Designers and
writers routinely engage or rely on the fictive in order to elaborate
ideas and construct the present or history. Mark Wigley observed of
1960s radical architecture: “The only difference between reading a
science fiction story and an architect’s project was that the architect
might use a few words to clarify the images while the storyteller might
use a few images to clarify the words.” We are interested in
fiction’s capacity as a critical device and hope to unravel the ways in
which text and image operate on each other. Where does fiction
intersect the material-spatial-temporal conditions of the built
environment? Is it possible to locate the circuits between fiction and
architecture, or, is the slippery nature of fiction’s role part of its
magic?

PANELISTS
-Ricardo de Ostos_Unit Master, Architectural Association and the
Bartlett School of Architecture and co-founder of NaJa & deOstos
-Jimenez Lai_Assistant Professor, University of Illinois at Chicago
and Leader of Bureau Spectacular
-Chus Martinez_Chief Curator, El Museo del Barrio
-Mark Wasiuta (moderator) Co-Director of CCCP and Director of
Exhibitions, Arthur Ross Gallery, GSAPP

2:30—2:45PM (...)

2:45—4:15PM ARCHITECTURAL FICTION [WRITING & CRITICISM]
Second Round Table Description

Dealing in currencies of the yet-to-be, architectural projects spin
stories of the lives of their subjects, or the future cities they
inhabit. While possibility is the lingua-franca of the field, such
narratives are enraptured by a literary and cinematic sensibility.
What then is the symbiosis between fictional traces and architecture’s
unbuilt worlds? How can the departure from reality that fiction offers
refocus our critical lens as we turn it toward inhabiting the city?
And conversely, at what point are fictions the very constructions we
require tools to recognize and call into question? When writers deploy
architecture within their practices, they often open up space for
unrecognizable events and existences, challenge existing narratives,
offer alternative readings, and unveil the uncanny in what we accept
as fact. How might we begin to understand the effect and impact of
importing fiction into criticism, and what are the possible mutated
forms of prose bred by such a cross contamination?

PANELISTS
-Keller Easterling_Associate Professor, Yale University School of
Architecture
-Ingo Niermann_Novelist and editor of the book series ‘Solution’
(Sternberg Press)
-Mark Von Schlegell_Guest Professor, Staedelschule in Frankfurt and
novelist (Semiotext(e))
-Mark Wigley (moderator) Dean of the GSAPP, Columbia University

4:15—4:30PM (...)

4:30—5:00PM CODA [A FICTIVE INDEX]

5:00—7:00PM POSTSCRIPT [RECEPTION]