Image: Giulio Camillo, Theatre of Memory, 1550 (in Frances Yates, The Art of Memory, 1966)

ARC3724H F
Instructor: Petros Babasikas
Meeting Section: L0101
Wednesday, 9:00am - 12:00pm

This is a recording. It has been since Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace (1854) and Georges Mèliés first broadcast of “Trip to the Moon” (1902) until Diller Scofidio’s Blur Building (2002) and Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror (2016 - ), tipping our means of making copies in, and of the world, over our ability to do so only with our powers of memory and projection. Memories and impressions move from our mind’s eye to the inner retina. Our ability to navigate contemporary space transforms. Architecture is an avatar; androids dream of electric sheep; and the Mèliés spaceship lands in the eye of the Man on the Moon.

How are gardens related to websites, augmented spaces to memory theatres, classical monuments to cinematic sequences, collective dreaming venues to cloud computing, iconic maps to digital interfaces? What are the fundamental ways of navigating these spaces and what are the basic tropes and structures broadcasting their stories and storing their data?

This seminar explores a series of archetypal spaces and architectural devices as interfaces – mediating and connecting humans, machines and diverse realities. It investigates these spaces and devices in the history of architecture through close readings in theory – from Aristotle, Henry Adams, Walter Benjamin and Eisenstein to Frances Yates, Virilio, Flusser, James Corner and P.V.Aureli. The course further tests its questions against seminal works of modern literature – from Wilde’s “Picture of Dorian Gray” and Borges’ “Garden of Forking Paths” to Gibson’s “Neuromancer” and Casares’ “Invention of Morel” – and film – from Resnais “Last Year in Marienbad” and Marker’s “La Jetée” to Scott’s “Blade Runner,” Gondry’s “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” and Nakata’s “Ringu.”

Students are encouraged to draw connections among the above works and others within the seminar, through a series of presentations and architectural speculations. They will also be invited to engage in related actions, speculations, design or installation proposals for the Fall 2019 “New Circadia” Exhibition, at the Daniels Faculty Architecture and Design Gallery.

In response to the above, the instructor will finally propose the emergence of a media form: a series of Ghost Images that disrupt our memory, disturb contemporary form- and image-making, and restore to things, against simulation, some of their lost Aura.

Image: Chris Marker, La Jetee, 1962 (film still)

In response to the above, the instructor will finally propose the emergence of a media form: a series of Ghost Images that disrupt our memory, disturb contemporary form- and image-making, and restore to things, against simulation, some of their lost Aura.