Ines Weizman - talk: "Data, Dust, Virus.The Matter of Architure"

This talk will discuss two current theoretical strands of thought in architectural theory. Object oriented theories help us understand materials as infused with autonomous vibrancy and agentic power, while critical digital culture opens the door to undo this materiality into codes and algorithms, invisible infrastructures, networks and databases. Dust, dirt and the prevention of infectious diseases is an obsession of modernism, promoting buildings without ornaments with clear, smooth and polished surfaces, and marshalling anything from traditional brooms to vacuum cleaners against the accumulation of dust. Modernism's preoccupation with hygiene, was also its attempt to escape the historistic pomp of the nineteenth century. While modernism sought to generate the endless present of the brand new, nothing, of course, escapes the tyranny of time, and the shiny surfaces of then are now themselves dust. Paradoxically, the dust, which modernism fought against, returned to haunt it. The only way we can return to a reading of modernism is precisely through the dust it left behind. This talk will argue that in the material world of architecture dust is also data, able to undo the singular, fetish-like qualities of objects and able to connect the problem of architecture with that of the planet.

To join, follow this zoom Link:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82682233470?pwd=RVhXeVlXUmRwa0dGMzJOZkFFbGE1QT09

Ines Weizman is Director of the Bauhaus Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture and Planning and Professor of Architectural Theory at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar. She is Founding Director of the Centre for Documentary Architecture (CDA). Weizman is the editor of the recently released publication Dust & Data: Traces of the Bauhaus across 100 Years,published with Spector Books, Leipzig (2019). In 2014, she was editor of Architecture and the Paradox of Dissidence, published by Routledge. Her book Before and After: Documenting the Architecture of Disaster, co-written with Eyal Weizman, was published in the same year by Strelka Press. Weizman has also worked on exhibitions and installations such as Repeat Yourself: Loos, Law, and the Culture of the Copy, exhibited at the 2012 Venice Architecture Biennale, as well as solo shows at the Architecture Centre in Vienna and the Buell Center at Columbia University, New York (2013). Other research and exhibition projects include: Celltexts: Books and Other Works Produced in Prison (2008, with Eyal Weizman), first exhibited at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin. In 2019, she curated the CDA exhibition The Matter of Data which was shown in Weimar, Tel Aviv and Berlin.