4th Advanced Architecture Contest

The Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia and HP are pleased to announce the 4th Advanced Architecture Contest, on the theme of CITY-SENSE: Shaping our environment with real-time data.

The aim of the competition is to promote discussion and research through which to generate insights and visions, ideas and proposals that help us envisage what the city and the habitat of the 21st century will be like.

The competition is open to architects, engineers, planners, designers and artists who want to contribute to progress in making the world more habitable by developing a proposal capable of responding to emerging challenges in areas such as ecology, information technology, architecture, and urban planning, with the purpose of balancing the impact real-time data collection might have on sensor-driven cities.

4th Advanced Architecture Contest - Summary via Arkitektur & Miljøteknologi

Art and Code

ART AND CODE is a conference and online community focused on programming environments for artists, young people, and the rest of us.

The conference took place the weekend of March 7-9, 2009 on the campus of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA. It featured hands-on workshops and a symposium showcase for 11 different creative toolkits -- programming languages made by artists, for artists.

Art and Code

PLACE: Public Libraries - Arenas for Citizenship

An Investigation of the Public Library as a Community Meeting Place Fostering Social Capital in a Digital and Multicultural Context1

1. The general goal of the project

The project aims at investigating the possibility of developing public libraries in multicultural local communities into arenas

• that are experienced as relevant for all groups
• that can function as meeting places in the community promoting social capital
• that fosters the critical mass of cross-cultural communication necessary for democratic processes?

The project relates to concerns regarding social cohesion and integration, community and social capital in the multicultural and digital society. These concerns prove themselves more important every day; cf. the riots sparked by the publishing in Western Europe of the Mohammed cartoons in 2006.

The public library is not only a place where knowledge and culture can be found and distributed, but also a public space. A public space is not a fixed form, but a physical sphere with few limitations concerning those who visit the actual territory. The quality of a public space is a result of many interwoven processes regarding questions of public policy, physical design, and service quality.

As both a public space and a centre of knowledge and culture, the public library has a potential for being a vital part of a local community. It is used by most segments of society and it is a junction where different cultures as well as different spheres of life - education, leisure & entertainment, work and business – meet. This research project is aiming towards understanding the role of the public library in the making of social capital. It is most likely that public spaces are essential in fostering local communities with high quality. The sense of belonging, the nurturing processes of making identity, the social bridging between members of a community, is depending on the existence of mutual ground – virtual and/or physical.

Høgskolen i Oslo - PLACE

Art, Space and the Public Sphere(s).

Some basic observations on the difficult relation of public art, urbanism and political theory by Oliver Marchart

"Social space is produced and structured by conflicts. With this recognition, a democratic spatial politics begins." - Rosalyn Deutsche

As we know, "art in the public space" can mean at least two things. For one, art in combination with architecture and artistic urban outfitting; this is the traditional conception - among other things, a conception of space as a physical geographical urban and architectural space. Yet on the other hand, "public art" in the sense of more recent forms of "art in the public interest" (or "social interventionism", "community art", etc.) - not least in Austria - has also been developed into a secure niche in the canon of available art practices and forms. Sending Austrian artists, usually subsumed under this header, to the Biennale of Venice is just the keystone of sanctioning social interventionist art practices in art history (and could very well be their gravestone, too).

debalie: cultureel politiek debat centrum