Image: Alex Shuper (2023)
The 2023–2024 ASCA Cities seminar will approach the city through the lens of materiality. Taking up the theme of ‘Material Cities’, we are interested in how making the city is both a material and immaterial process. From ‘natural’ construction materials to the traces of technological infrastructures, we will consider how larger questions of care, belonging and community, but also of access and power – quite literally – materialize in the urban. In the first session on Friday 9 Feb. 2024, 3-5pm in room 0.16 (E-lab), Turfdraagsterpad 9, Amsterdam, we will engage with three texts that approach materiality from different theoretical and methodological perspectives.
Readings
– Parks, Lisa. “‘Stuff You Can Kick’: Toward a Theory of Media Infrastructures.” In Patrik Svensson and David Theo Goldberg, eds., Between Humanities and the Digital (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015), 355-73.
– Mattern, Shannon. “Ether and Ore: An Archaeology of Urban Intelligences” in Laura Kurgan and Sare Brawley, eds., Ways of Knowing Cities (New York: Columbia Books on Architecture and the City, 2019), 120-30.
Optional reading:
– Diecke, Josephine, Bregt Lameris, and Laura Niebling. “On Materiality.” NECSUS_European Journal of Media Studies 11.2 (2022): 1-19. https://necsus-ejms.org/on-materiality/
The readings can also be accessed via this link.
Following Sessions:
Fri. 16 Feb. 2024: Letizia Chiappini (Universiteit Twente), “The Urban Digital Platform: A Glitch between Digital Login and Urban Logout”, Time: 3-5pm, Location: room 0.16 (E-lab), BG1 Media Studies, Turfdraagsterpad 9, Amsterdam, Time: 3-5pm.
Fri. 15 Mar. 2024: Joseph Heathcott (The New School), “Lava and Concrete: Spatial Production in the Pedregal de Santo Domingo”, Time: 3-5pm, Location: room 0.16 (E-lab), BG1 Media Studies, Turfdraagsterpad 9, Amsterdam, Time: 3-5pm.
Fri. 19 Apr. 2024: Maria Vélez-Serna (University of Sterling), “Infrastructural and tactical cinema practices: A view from Scotland”, Time: 3-5pm, Location: room 0.16 (E-lab), BG1 Media Studies, Turfdraagsterpad 9, Amsterdam.
Fri 31 May 2024: Yuriko Furuhata (McGill University), “Self-Portraits of Coral: Visual Archives and Radiation Ecologies in the Anthropocene”, Time: tbc, Location tbc.
Co-organized by Carolyn Birdsall, Linda Kopitz and Alex Gekker. For more information and registration, please contact Linda Kopitz (l.kopitz@uva.nl)