Economy
of Architecture
Architecture of Economy
Migration of Forms
Forms of Migration
September 20+21, 2019: Architectures for the Quantified Self – halfway micro-conference
July 18, 2019: Algorithmic Territories – Screening and Talk: Manu Luksch and Marie-France Rafael
July 17, 2019: T-Serai – Lecture and Talk by Azra Akšamija / The Future Heritage Lab – CANCELLED!
June 25, 2019: Bookpresentation MIGRANT JOURNAL NO.6 'FOREIGN AGENTS' with Michaela Büsse
June 5-22, 2019: Exhibition Project: We Hope this Does Not Make Us Sad – Urban Subjects
June 8, 2019: Brunch-Talk and „Stadtführung“ with Urban Subjects
April 12, 2019: Performative Situation with Anita Fuchs and Sonia Leimer
March 29, 2019: Imaginary Display(s) – Marie-France Rafael and Romain Gandolphe
January 17, 2019: Prop-Talk 2 with Helge Mooshammer and Peter Mörtenböck
January 10, 2019: Screening and Talk with Helen Knowles
January 9-19, 2019: Spatialization 1 in halfway
December 10, 2018: Prop-Talk 1 with Roman Seidl and Felix Stalder
October 12, 2018: Preview
Oktober 12, 2018: Spatial Table Talk with Sarah Widmer
July 25-26, 2018: Spatial Table Talk with Ryo Abe
Architectures for the Quantified Self
A micro-conference at halfway Vienna
Program:
Friday, September 20, 2019 – 6 pm Round Table
with contributions by John Cheney-Lippold, Gabu Heindl, Andreas Spiegl, Eva Maria Stadler
for halfway: Christina Nägele, Heidi Pretterhofer, Christian Teckert
Saturday, September 21, 2019 – 11 am Brunch Talk
Project presentation: User Environments in the Interface City, Christian Frieß
Video screening Total Living Industry II, Christian Teckert
Respondent: John Cheney-Lippold
Location:
halfway, Halbgasse 3-5, 1070 Vienna
www.halfway.at
info@halfway.at
(the event will be held in English)
halfway, June 2019, © Wolfgang Thaler
Friday, September 20, 2019, 6 pm
Round Table with contributions by John Cheney-Lippold, Gabu Heindl, Andreas Spiegl, Eva Maria Stadler
for halfway: Christina Nägele, Heidi Pretterhofer, Christian Teckert
The micro-conference Architectures for the Quantified Self at halfway in Vienna is a discursive platform for discussing current effects of digitized cultures on the urban. As a conclusion of the research project Curating the Urban, the question of how and by which means of (re)presentation within the field of arts-based research practices these effects can be mediated will be publicly discussed.
The debate will explore the type of spaces in which the “quantified subject” acts and its “dividual” constitution is shaped and sometimes created. In a culture increasingly characterized by evaluations, algorithmically generated recommendations, and more and more specific profiling, how can we conceive an architecture configured for these digitally measured subjects?
John Cheney-Lippold’s book We Are Data (2017), which was a crucial point of reference for the research project, portrays the dividual mechanisms of contemporary subjectivity against the background of the omnipresent data collections and profiling concepts of digital global players. We investigate the spatial consequences of a city developed “from the data up”, like Toronto Quayside by Sidewalk Labs (a subsidiary of Google/Alphabet). What ideologies and rules underlie this total rewriting and reprogramming of our cities’ software, which generate—top-down as well as bottom-up—a bundle of networks as it moves toward a new global “accidental megastructure” (Benjamin Bratton)?
Another focus will examine whether the increasingly immaterial protocols, programming, and image politics, which are redefining architectural spaces, call for strategies of visualization and spatialization as a form of criticism, also in order to make complex systems legible.
This raises the question: Can a reflexive approach toward display issues, as developed especially in the post-conceptual practices of institution-critical art, open the way for an arts-based research practice, which attempts a contemporary rethinking of the Constructivist Laboratories or Otto Neurath’s visualization strategies?
Saturday, September 21, 2019, 11 am
BrunchTalk
Project presentation: User Environments in the Interface City, Christian Frieß
Video screening: Total Living Industry II, Christian Teckert
Respondent: John Cheney-Lippold
In the presentations two forms of arts-based research practices are put up for discussion in which the mechanisms of an algorithmic culture are examined on the basis of specific patents and places:
In Christian Frieß and Benjamin Gerdes’ folding map titled User Environments in the Interface City a series of patents for the interactive control and efficient flow of subjects forms the starting point for an artistic mapping of smart environments. As a catalog of specific aspects of digital regulations, this map defines a new way of representing the immaterial layers of the city.
In Christian Teckert’s video Total Living Industry II an array of “dividual” spaces are explored along a “drift” through a day in a contemporary metropolis, in which the impact of algorithmic processes unfolds—invisible but ever the more efficient. As a collection of generic architectures of a city transformed by feedbacks, evaluations, and individualized profiles, the video raises the question of the role design can still play as part of a social agenda.
Algorithmic Territories
Film screening and talk: Manu Luksch with Marie-France Rafael
July 18, 2019, 7 pm, halfway
© Manu Luksch, Third Quarterly Report, 2017
Algorithmic decision making, infrastructures increasingly serving the ends of mass surveillance, commercial profiling—the management of cities, society, even of our own daily desires is being aided more and more by intelligent systems, which are promoted as a measure to safeguard our living standards, security, and efficiency, despite scarcity of resources. But what does this changed digital environment imply for political decision-making processes? And which kinds of alternatives, types of resistance are even still possible in a “smart” world, which constantly learns more about you and your motivations?
In the framework of halfway’s discourse on the interdependencies between digital systems and spatial production, along with their impacts on subjectivity concepts, the artist and Open Society Fellow Manu Luksch and curator Marie-France Rafael discussed two of Luksch’s recent works: For the double projection piece Third Quarterly Report (2017) she managed to gain access to one of the biggest players in the field of smart city technologies—Cisco Systems. The rap musical Algo-Rhythm (2019), winner of the Zonta award of the 65th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, examines how democracy is hollowed out by automated propaganda and microtargeting.
T-Serai – Textile Systems for Engagement and Research in Artistic Impact
Lecture and Talk by Azra Akšamija / The Future Heritage Lab
July 17, 2019, 7pm
halfway – Halbgasse 3-5, 1070 Vienna
© Azra Akšamija / The Future Heritage Lab
The event T-Serai: Lecture and Talk by Azra Akšamija / Future Heritage Lab on 17 July 2019 unfortunately had to be canceled for reasons of illness!
The T-Serai outlines a cultural approach to humanitarian intervention through the creation of modular tapestries that can be assembled to form mobile cultural shelters. These tapestries are produced through workshops aimed at fostering transcultural exchange and collaborative design with displaced communities. The T-Serai is inspired by the tent traditions of the MENA region. Historical patterns and textile crafts are reinterpreted in "reverse appliqué" technique using recycled clothes. The overproduction of the global textile industry is seen as a resource for new forms of cultural preservation: the T-Serai tapestries can be used for storage, insulation, and recording of personal memories. The textiles are also used to set up storytelling tents that activate textile motifs from different regions towards immersive social gatherings and knowledge sharing across borders. Produced across USA, UAE, and Syrian refugee camps in Jordan, the creation and use of the T-Serai allows for establishment of civic spaces in conditions of containment and cultural deprivation.
The T-Serai challenges the economy and life as bios approach of the humanitarian aid system by proposing a new paradigm: culture first! The T-Serai project is funded through exhibitions that showcase T-Serai prototypes, while supporting the community-driven creation of T-Serai pavilions in refugee camps. The educational format in the camps combines training in textile fabrication methods with lessons in history of nomadic architecture and textile design. The project is developed in refugee camps Zaatari and Al Azraq in Jordan, in partnership with humanitarian organisations CARE and NRC, with a seed funding from the Sharjah Museum.
Book presentation MIGRANT JOURNAL NO.6 'FOREIGN AGENTS' with Michaela Büsse
June 25, 2019, 7pm
halfway – Halbgasse 3-5, 1070 Vienna
We are happy to announce the presentation of MIGRANT JOURNAL NO.6 ‘FOREIGN AGENTS’ on June 25 2019, at 7 pm at halfway. Michaela Büsse, as editor of MIGRANT JOURNAL, will be here to present and discuss the 6th edition of MIGRANT.
This event is part of the chapter Migration of Forms / Forms of Migration. This chapter of our arts-based research project Curating the Urban addresses conditions of (ex-)change and thus the dimension that is a fundamental prerequisite for contemporary (individual) subjectivity and spatiality.
We Hope this Does Not Make Us Sad
Urban Subjects (Sabine Bitter, Jeff Derksen, Helmut Weber)
5. – 22. June 2019
Opening: June 4 2019, 7 pm
Brunch-Talk and guided “City Tour” with Urban Subjects, Barbara Mahlknecht, Ralo Mayer and Andreas Spiegl
Saturday, June 8 2019, 11 am
halfway, Halbgasse 3-5, 1070 Vienna
halfway.at
Open by appointment: info@halfway.at
© Urban Subjects: Skizze #1, 2019
We are happy to announce the exhibition We Hope this Does Not Make Us Sad by Urban Subjects (Sabine Bitter, Jeff Derksen, Helmut Weber) as part of the chapter Architecture of Economy / Economy of Architecture at the project space halfway. This chapter of the research project Curating the Urban addresses the economic dimension of spatial production, in which different forms of the speculative allow for a decisive turn of the urban discourse.
Using the example of the Canadian city Vancouver Urban Subjects developed a spatial intervention for the project space halfway, that builds a discourse on the question of ownership in relation to urban space. In the research project, Vancouver serves as membrane for the attempt to visualize the complex and near invisible relations between a globalized economy and the spaces of everyday life. Vancouver serves as a backdrop to question an economy of image-production in which the impact of private investment capital has hardly ever been so thoroughly translated spatially into the urban texture. Yet on the other hand this relationship remains uncannily invisible and difficult to grasp. The production of an urban image via the skyline forms the surface for an urban model, where the radical redefinition of boundaries of the urban archipelago is strongly felt and made tangible by real estate values and prices. This project by Urban Subjects addresses the politics of representation in a city which renders itself visible only for privileged subjects: The Plutocratic dividual.
Performative situation with Anita Fuchs and Sonia Leimer
April 12, 2019, 7pm
halfway – Halbgasse 3-5, 1070 Vienna
Credits: links: Anita Fuchs, rechts: Ingo Wagner, dpa/picturedesk.com
Weltraumsalat and Space Junk – Sonia Leimer
Lecture and Intervention, April 12th, 2019, halfway
In her lecture Weltraumsalat (Space Salad) Sonia Leimer will cover a range of topics, from space debris and artificially cultured “space salad” to the transformation of the traditional Marlengo Apple Crown. Through this broad spectrum of themes it becomes evident how forms and objects from different cultural and historical contexts migrate, change, and thereby make societal and spatial transformations tangible. Her sculpture Space Junk—part of the spatial setting in halfway—is based on a piece of space debris that crashed down in Saudi Arabia in 2001. In this uncontrolled collision of material the structure of geopolitical power relations becomes just as visible as the paradoxical physical weight of global infrastructures, which produce the apparently so smooth and immaterial networks of our digital environment.
Traveller's Tree – Anita Fuchs
Intervention, April 12th, 2019, halfway
The work Traveller’s Tree by Anita Fuchs linked and deformed three different plants and their habitats: the overly cultivated urban grove of the halfway building complex, a Traveller’s Tree from a coastal region of Mexico, and a woodland outdoor workplace on the Austro-Hungarian border. In this idiosyncratic overlap the plants themselves became protagonists that spoke of fashions, aesthetics, and political relations.
Imaginary Display(s)
March 29, 2019, 7 pm
halfway, Halbgasse 3-5, 1070 Vienna
halfway.at
Screening of Imaginary Display(s) by Marie-France Rafael with the performance I call it a museum by Romain Gandolphe, followed by a roundtable talk.
Exhibition view Imaginary Display(s) – Exhibition as Film / Film as Exhibition, 2018 [Philipp Gufler, Romankreisen (Detail), 2017, Courtesy: BQ, Berlin; Klaus vom Burch, Voodoo Tapete, 2014; Kalas Liebfried, Ambient Variation for a Bunker (Detail), 2018; Richard John Jones & Camilla Wills, Borrowed Body] Photo: Dominik Gigler
On March 29 2019 the art historian/curator Marie-France Rafael will address her exhibition Imaginary Display(s) – Exhibition as Film / Film as Exhibition, that took place at BNKR Munich in 2018, in a performative dialogue together with the artist Romain Gandolphe. This is the starting point for a discussion on contemporary methods of artistic research and the spatial production of the “exhibition” as part of the project Curating The Urban. On Spatializing Urban Conditions.
Contemporary exhibitions present artistically constructed situations and displays. Thus, we encounter more and more often an art that has adopted the character of a display i.e. of a display situation. The display itself becomes then a work-constituent and perception-processual prerequisite as well as precondition to the artistic process. This is one of Marie-France Rafael main theses in her latest monograph Reisen ins Imaginativ. Künstlerische Displays und Situationen, that led her now to expand her theoretical research into the realization of a performative exhibition: Imaginary Display(s) – Exhibition as Film / Film as Exhibition at BNKR Munich (as part of Stop making sense, it’s as good as it gets.: a 15month long program developed by Ludwig Engel and Joanna Kamm).
Marie-France Rafael will present her thoughts and give an insight into the exhibition that puts on display everything that is usually hidden from the audience: the development process of an exhibition and the production of a film. In a recursive gesture exhibition and film are turned into elements thus creating new situations in time and space. For this she invited the artist Romaine Gandolphe, who already participated in the exhibition in Munich.
For his performance I call it a museum, Romain Gandolphe will describe the topography of an imaginary museum built without any door and from which we can’t exit. He will then seek to think of another way out, inventing new passages through the works and furniture.
Spatialization 1 at halfway, Halbgasse 3-5, 1070 Vienna
9.1. – 19.1.2019
Opening: 8.1.2019, 7 pm
Opening hours: Wednesday – Saturday, 3 pm to 6 pm
halfway, November 2018, © Wolfgang Thaler
Dividuality of Spaces / Spaces of Dividuality is the first chapter of „Curating the Urban. On Spatializing Urban Conditions”. A project by Christina Nägele, Heidi Pretterhofer and Christian Teckert with Linda Lackner.
Collaborations with Jorge Almazan and Urban Subjects (Sabine Bitter, Jeff Derksen, Helmut Weber).
Works by Bêka & Lemoine, Helen Knowles, Marlene Maier.
Further contributions by Ryo Abe, Edwina Hörl & SO-BA, John Cheney-Lippold, Esperanza Miyake, Peter Mörtenböck & Helge Mooshammer, Lina Morawetz, Roman Seidl, Astrid Seme, Felix Stalder, Eszter Steierhoffer, Wolfgang Thaler, Roemer van Toorn, Ignacio Valero, Sarah Widmer.
Film screening and artist talk: 10.1.2019, 7 pm:
Helen Knowles: Helen Knowles: The Trial of Superdebthunterbot (2016; 45min)
Dividuality of Spaces / Spaces of Dividuality deals with architectural and urban phenomena which are symptomatic of an increasingly dividual form of contemporary subjectivity. Dividual Spaces represent a fundamental transformation of spatial concepts, where divided and divisible spaces correspond to "prosumer" subjects and their multiple roles, which increasingly seem to be algorithmically pre-determined.
Yoshiharu Tsukamoto and Jorge Almazan defined Dividual Spaces as characterized by temporal and commercial on-demand access, spatial compartmentalization and the outsourcing of a multiplicity of formerly private functions, resulting in market-driven and permanently monitored, evaluated, modulated and increasingly algorithmically designed architectural typologies. The phenomenon of spatial dividuality is part of a fundamental re-structuring of urban environments defined by neo-liberalism, an economy of debt, and a culture of technology-based anticipation. The subsequent radical gaps and fissures in society increasingly manifest themselves in sometimes extreme difference in (access to) architectural space.
Dividuality of Spaces / Spaces of Dividuality gathers elements of research, investigation, artistic productions, spatial settings in an attempt to create a platform and spatialize a discourse on contemporary urban questions.
Preview on October 12, 2018, 12am-10pm
halfway, Halbgasse 3-5, 1070 Vienna
halfway is a site for the spatialization of acute urban phenomena with methods of artistic research. It is the laboratory for the two-year research project Curating The Urban. On Spatializing Urban Conditions by Christina Nägele, Heidi Pretterhofer, and Christian Teckert together with Linda Lackner, which is based at the Institute for Art and Architecture of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and funded by the PEEK program of the Austrian Science Fund (FWF).
On October 12, 2018 we invite you to a preview. From 12:00 noon to 10:00 pm halfway is open for discussions, visits, allusions, arguments and insights.
10 hours we would like to share with you!
We look forward to your visit,
Christina Nägele, Heidi Pretterhofer, Christian Teckert and Linda Lackner