EVENT LAUNCHES

Networked Cultures:

Parallel Architectures and the Politics of Space

Screening and roundtable with Peter Mörtenböck, Helge Mooshammer, Christine Shaw, Eric Cazdyn, Gita Hashemi, Luis Jacob and Adrian Blackwell.



Tuesday May 6th, 2008

6:30PM, Room 066

al&d, University of Toronto

230 College Street





Politics of Connectivity

A lecture by: Peter Mörtenböck and Helge Mooshammer 



Wednesday May 7th, 2008

6:30pm

Toronto Free Gallery

1277 Bloor Street West, Toronto



Political conflicts, humanitarian disasters, wars and migrations, we live in an age of global unrest and discontinuity. While official reactions consist in the search for means of stabilization and restraint, the dynamics of deregulation are giving rise to a situation characterized by global parallel systems: parallel architectures, parallel societies, parallel lives. The book, Networked Cultures: Parallel Architectures and the Politics of Space, offers an insight into the complex spatial and social realities of globalization, from city-like informal markets in Moscow and the post-war self-urbanization in Kosovo to the border economies of the Mediterranean and the parallel worlds of today’s burgeoning megacities.





For more information contact adrian.blackwell@utoronto.ca; (416-978-0869).





PARTICIPANTS



Peter Mörtenböck is Professor of Visual Culture at Vienna University of Technology and Visiting Fellow at Goldsmiths, University of London. Helge Mooshammer is Research Fellow at the International Research Center for Cultural Studies (IFK) in Vienna. Together, they initiated the international research platform Networked Cultures.



Christine Shaw is a curator, educator and writer, whose work focuses on the ethics, politics and aesthetics of participatory processes, networked culture and creative pedagogy. She organizes public events with Toronto School of Creativity & Inquiry and teaches Visual Culture and Communication at the University of Toronto.

Eric Cazdyn is professor of globalization and cultural theory at the University of Toronto. Author of The Flash of Capital: Film and Geopolitics in Japan, he is currently completing a manuscript on illness and time in the twenty-first century. 

 

Born in Iran, Gita Hashemi is an interdisciplinary artist, activist, curator and educator who has engaged for thirty years in the politics and poetics of social change and emancipation through participatory, collaborative and networked art-making.

Luis Jacob is a Toronto-based artist for whom experimentation with alternative forms for the creation of social interaction and participation plays a central role.

Adrian Blackwell is an artist, urban researcher and designer, whose work focuses on the spaces of uneven development produced through post-Fordist processes of urbanization. He teaches architecture and urban design at the University of Toronto.

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Event launches Networked Cultures: Parallel Architectures and the Politics of Space edited by Peter Mörtenböck and Helge Mooshammer; NAi Publishers, Rotterdam sponsored by: Austrian Cultural Forum; Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design, University of Toronto; Toronto Society of Architects.