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- Van Toorn, Roemer, 1960-
(författare)
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City State Dubai, a text-image essay : Society of the And
- 2012
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Annan publikation (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Society of The And : Text-image photo researchWith the traveloque of images in the photobook the Society of the And the viewer is challenged to carry out a montage. A dialogue full of ambiguities, contradictions and positions should set itself into presence. While the viewer is invited to look to the facts, I hope s/he start to see beyond the stereotypical, beyond the world of stupifying banality, routine and mechanical reproduction. The format of the images is chosen not only that you decode, that you decipher what you "read" (as in the television news), no, you are also invited to see the free play, the unfinished pieces, the juxtapositions, gaps and openings within the Society of the And. The challenge is to extract a genuine image from the Society of the And, free the visual from any prior program, or fixed gaze (theatricality), to release ourselves from the suffocation of the cliché.A new spectre is haunting the world – the spectre of And. It is the spectre of urbanity, the one of the multitude that haunts society. All the cultural, technological, economical and intellectual powers in the world – both on the left and the right – have embraced this spectre. Formerly the dominant forces were separation and specialisation, the struggle for clarity and the reduction of the world to calculable proportions; now we talk about One World based on simultaneity, mobility, migration, fluidity, multiplicity, reflexivity, individualism, risk, urban warfare, uncertainty, chaos theory, hybridization, diaspora, the state of exception, schizophrenia, privitization, heterotopia, immersion, the space of flows, the culture of sprawl, cyborgs and so on. The Either-Or world in which we lived and acted became increasingly an illusion. Our modernity no longer develops mainly in instrumental, rational and linear terms; instead it takes its direction from the rules of side-effects. In a certain sense Modernity might be considered more ideological while the Society of the And (2nd Modernity) is more pragmaticThe above mentioned fieldwork of text-images on Dubai, photographing the current conditions of globalization, is undertaking parallel to an inroductionary article on The Society of the And, funded by the Swedish Research Council Formas, Architecture in Effect.
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| 2. |
- Ozmin, Janek, 1975-, et al.
(författare)
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The Extraordinary Life of Elements Review Exhibition, UMA School of Architecture, October November 2014 : UMA Research Group Review of the 2014 Venice Biennale of Architecture: Elements of Architecture.
- 2014
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Annan publikation (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The Extraordinary Life of Elements Review Exhibition Editor Professor Roemer van Toorn, Professor Jüri Soolep, Sepideh Karami, Katja Hogenboom, Hannes Frykholm and Janek Ozmin, UMA School of Architecture, October 2014 consists of six separate reviews collated into a single exhibition. The content was captured on site at the Biennale including record conversations by the review group, interviews with Biennale exhibition contributors, collected media, photographs, sound recordings and videos by the authors. The collated work formed a pluralist, dialogical platform from which the Biennale Exhibition can be viewed. Alongside the printed review panels and video installations, a round table format was used to present various printed media, Biennale exhibition catalogues, and media from participating country pavilions and maps. This table then formed the basis for a debate on the Venice Biennale Exhibition by participating researchers. The Exhibition was mounted in Umeå School of Architecture and formed part of the Arts Campus Open House Research Days November 2014.
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| 4. |
- Van Toorn, Roemer, 1960-
(författare)
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The Cruel Architecture of Apartheid, Israel. Text-Images essay : Society of the And
- 2013
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Annan publikation (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Society of the And: Text-Image researchIn the Society of the And life can be characterised by a complexity that tends to become ever more chaotic. In one way or another conflicts and liberating experiments emerge that cut a path beyond all Either-Or polarities. The near and the far intertweave; the local and global blend and impact each other. Everything is infused with, and dependent on everything else; what counts isn’t two or three or however many, it is the conjunction And. The global, diffuse and formless character of the And rocks not only all relations, it rocks all kinds of earlier identities based on the verb “to be”. The And is not simply a collection of elements but a sytem of complex relations in space ochestrated by different time rhythems. The relationships between the various elements may consist of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, cultural differences, philosophical, moral and economic propositions, and so on. With time of communication imploding and shrinking to the no-size of the instant, space and spatial markers cease to matter, at least for those whose actions can move with the speed of the electronic message. We live apparently in a fragmented world of collages of images, signs, imaginations, functions, and activities with myriad ways of connections and intensities that coexist with each other. While we complain about the loss of dominant form and the abundance of junkspace, we enjoy the advantages of being more and more mobile. Efficient and comfortable spaces of interconnection interweave paradoxically with the worlds of exclusions and disconnection within the same fabric. If there is coherence and integration within the Society of the And, it comes from the circulation of power within the technological infrastructure, of interlocking, interdependent agencies, practices and knowledge on a global scale. One thing is for sure the binaries oppositions that defined Modern conflict have been blurred. The dialectic logic, which helped Modernism to navigate in the world; of objectivity versus subjectivity, of the near versus the far, of fact versus value, of the city versus the countryside ensured that we could not understand reality as being both real And virtual, human And non-human, utopian And dystopian, local And global, heterogenious And homogenious. The new paradigm of power in the Society of the And rules through differential hierarchies of the hybrid and fragmentary subjectivies. The heterogeneous nature of the And, and its effects are not necessarily predictable, that means that a wide range of both positive and negative outcomes can be generated through development without attributing these to a metanarrative, or requiring that we solely see imposition at play. At the same time, though, such ensembles operate to achieve overall effects thereby serving a dominant strategic function within our corporate global world. The paradigm of difference, fluidity and hybridity within The Society of the And – so much celebrated by contemporary advocates of emancipation –, is today very much part of the colonization strategies of corporate globalism too. Although the urban, capitalist, and modern everyday is pushing towards increased homogeneity in daily life, the irreconcilable disjunctions born in the And full of anachronistic interstices still make it impossible to think of modernization as only negative. Nothing is never fully coherent in the Society of the And: its cultures are always already partial and full of hybrid formations. Michel de Certeau’s work confirmed the impossibility of a full colonization of everyday life by late capitalism and stressed that potential alternatives are always available, since individuals and institutions arrange resources and choose methods through particular creative arrangements. Instead of searching for a position outside the Society of the And it is better to enter the terrain of the And and confront its homegenizing and heterogenizing flows in all its global complexity.The above mentioned fieldwork of text-images in israel, photographing the current conditions of globalization, is undertaking parallel to an introductionary article on The Society of the And, funded by the Swedish Research Council Formas, Architecture in Effect.
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| 5. |
- Van Toorn, Roemer, 1960-
(författare)
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Zabbaleen Community, Monqattam Village, Cairo, Egypt. text-Image essay : Society of the And
- 2012
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Annan publikation (populärvet., debatt m.m.)abstract
- The Arabic Multitude - A spectre is roaming the Middle Eastt. The spectre of the multitude.The beauty of the historical moment - th epeople in Egypt and elsewhere revolutionzing against the status quo - is that it has no leadership. It might also prove its fatal weakness, but that does not contradict its beauty and importance. It was the people rising up against the tyranny and the authoritarian governments. Of course youngsters and schooled people – doctors, engineers, etc. took the lead, but from the beginning in Tunisia it was the multitude at work. It is a revolution that stands for a series of social demands about work and life, not only to end dependency and poverty but to give power and autonomy to an intelligent, highly capable population, and not religion; as neo-conservatism want us to believe.In this phase of late-capitalism the whole metropolis becomes the arena of production and resistance. It is a system that is bio-political, with the whole of life as politics. New practices have to be developed in this bio-political context of what I call the Society of the And.Our task is to investigate the organizational framework of antagonistic subjectivities that arise from below, based on the indignation expressed by subjects in the face of unfreedoms, exploitation and expropriation. And there exists a communality of work characterized by the immateriality, cognitive contents, networking and communication implicit in all areas of work under capitalism. This requires a radical shift in how we conceive the organization of social change (as already indicated in the opening quotes above). It is – as already stated - a horizontal network that has no single leader. The multitude is able to organize itself without a centre.The swarm intelligence, of this Arabic Revolution consists of at least two interrelated logics of the informal: one being the virtual reality our global media allows to occur through Twitter, Facebook, Skype, YouTube and other digital media. Another logic of the informal is at stake too, namely the real spatial one of the informal city: the routes, places and street where they collectively demonstrate through temporal actions and constructions, and the network of informal (and hidden of view) places where they work and live (including their global connections). These two interrelated networks of the virtual and the real make up for this new collective arising at the horizon through what we call the multitude.In the workshop and fieldresearch done in Zabbaleen we are not going to map how the multitude – through its virtual reality (both being virtual and real) of oppression and resistance – generated the Arabic revolution. That would have been a very intriguing studio, but time did not permit us to do so, but we didn't leave the multitude behind. We documented how the multitude - as rhizome, self-routing and auto-developing system operates and works on an everyday bases (every moment of the day, at home, at work, in the city, in the teahouse, the street, at its darkest -, and even at its beautiful moments, in and through its different spatial formation of domesticity, work and infrastructure. In short the question has been: What kind of human and spatial logic of the multitude makes this world of the Zabaleen society a success? What can we learn from them, and how can we help to improve their situation by creating and mobilizing new public infrastructures (parks, schools, social and spatial networks, etc.) through the studio with the students?We did not primarily document its failure. What did interest us (at most) is how the multitude at Zabaleen – through its hybrid logic of contradictions, gaps, holes, voids, limits, shadows, dirt, garbage, margins, openings, routes full of movement and interstitial spaces (including the interaction between digital (virtual) and real life) could give the architect a beginning to generate (parasitical) emancipatory interventions within the self-organizing rhizomatic fabric of Zabaleen society itself.The above mentioned fieldwork of text-images in Egypt (the city of "garbage", Zabbaleen, Cairo), photographing the current conditions of globalization, is undertaking parallel to an introductionary article on The Society of the And, funded by the Swedish Research Council Formas, Architecture in Effect.
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| 6. |
- Van Toorn, Roemer, 1960-
(författare)
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Making Architecture Politically : Spring lecture series 2013 and UMA newspaper
- 2013
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Annan publikation (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Making Architecture PoliticallyWith the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the collapse of Eastern European communism, the emergence of Third Way politics, and the subsequent rise of neo-liberalism, society became post-political. Discourses and practices of architecture not only suffered, but also enhanced this culture of de-politicization. The problem today is clearly not to make political architecture – neoliberal architecture is everywhere today –, but to make architecture politically. Now that the current economic crisis acts as late capitalism’s moment of truth architects should develop new visions, and help create projects that activate emancipation, surpassing the failure of neoliberalism. What we look for is a new beginning, an optimism - not another pessimism - of the architect as public intellectual that engages the optimism of the will and opens doors towards new social practices.Architecture cannot, of course, conduct parliamentary politics. Spatial constellations can deliver no advice on how to vote or convey messages about social and political problems, but architecture is political precisely because of the distance it takes from these functions. Architecture is political in the way in which, as a space-time sensorium, it organizes being together or apart, and the way it defines outside or inside. Architecture is political also in the manner in which it makes the many controversies of reality visible by means of its own spatial and aesthetic syntax, and can enacts new spatial and aesthetic formations of sociability from within. What we need in order to make room for the civil in our society is, according to Ariella Azoulay, ”the capacity known as political imagination, that is to say, the ability to imagine a political state of being that deviates significantly from the prevailing state of affairs“ What kind of political imagination – rethinking the political – can the practice and theory of architecture mobilize when it makes architecture politically is the focus of the UMA Spring lecture series of 2013.The lecture series was organized by Roemer van Toorn in collaboration with Peter Kjaer, Oren Lieberman, Albert o Altés Arlandis, and Cecilia Andersson.
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| 7. |
- Van Toorn, Roemer, 1960-
(författare)
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Staging the Message : the Architecture of Communication
- 2013
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Annan publikation (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- With the autumn lecture series and the ResArc course "Staging the Message. The Architecture of Communication" the UMA School of architecture will especially investigate - besides a series of other relevant curriculum lectures - how mediated research can establish a pro-active relation with its audience. In reaction to the virtual realism of the spectacle dominating mainstream media - which prevents a substantive use of word and image, the lecture series and course deals with textual, visual and spatial practices that further more refined, complex and argumentative forms of communication and foreground the constructed nature of their messages in order to solicit the active interpretation of the viewer/reader. To paraphrase architect Stefano Boeri we are in need of interactive antennas that counter a geopolitics that destroys any chance of communicative action. It is for this reason that the lectures and course focuses on the practices of a narrative language use in text, image, spatial and electronic media with emphasis on the potentialities and richness of the 'reflexive' or 'dialogic approach'. It tries to recuperate the specificity of its progressive and participatory practice - due to its role in the socio-cultural context producing meaning and symbolic values - by concentrating on the editing and making process. Which is to say that the course will introduce a way of directing that structures the collection of information and its editing in such a way that the staging, the 'mise-en-page' of the message gets the complementary sensitivity its content deserves. The lectures are organized by Roemer van Toorn, Professor Architectural Theory, in collaboration with the Swedish research school ResArc, the Laboratory of Immediate Architectural Intervention (LiAi) run by Professors Oren Lieberman & Alberto Altes Arlandis, and the Laboratory of Sustainable Architectural Production (LSAP) run by Professors Walter Unterrainer and Jüri Soolep at UMA.
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| 8. |
- Van Toorn, Roemer, 1960-
(författare)
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Towards a Relational Architecture : Research at the Faculty of Architecture, Umeå University
- 2011
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Annan publikation (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Towards a Relational ArchitectureResearch at the Faculty of Architecture, Umeå University The theme Relational Architecture relates to the ambition at the architecture faculty to critically think through Modernity and its political, economical and social consequences in order to show that the works and methods we develop and discuss will have different cultural implications than the ones handed down by the prevailing order. The programme and its lecture series, therefore is emancipatory, striving for opening up space for original participation and dialogue rather than closing it off through functionalism and its descendant The International Style of Architecture.IntroductionParadigm ShiftIt follows from this that the global is not used here to describe the movement of discrete units in fixed time and space - it is not that objects are made and then distributed, as either commodities or gifts- , rather the notion of global describes how it is that objects in movement make and mark time and space.Scott Lash, Celia LuryWe live in a time where our relationship with things and the enviroment is undergoing a rapid and radical change. Globalization has given the culture industry of design, architecture and art a fundamentaly different mode of operation. After the 2nd world war till the 70ties culture was still fundamentally a superstructure. As a superstructure, both domination and resistance took place in and through superstructures – through ideology, through symbols, through representation. When culture was primarily superstructural, cultural entities were still exceptional. What was mostly encountered in everyday life were material objects from the economical infrastructure (form follows function). This was true in 1945 and still so in 1975. But in 2011, cultural objects are everywhere; as information, as communication, as branded products, as financial services, as media products, as transport and leisure services in our designed world. The spread of suburbanization, which began to take off at the end of the Second World War, allowed an extraordinairy increase in social exchanges, as well as greater indivdual mobility (thanks to the development of rail and road networks, telecommunications and the gradual opening up of isolated places, which went hand in hand with the opening up of minds. Culture today is so ubiquitous that it, as it were, seeps out of the superstructure and comes to infiltrate, and then take over, the infrastructure itself. It comes to dominate both the economy and experience in everyday life. Culture no longer works primarly as superstructure in regard to resistance or domination. In our emergent age of a global culture industry, where culture starts to dominate both the economy and the everyday, culture, which was previously a question of representation, becomes “thingified”. In the classical culture industry – both in terms of domination and resistance – mediation was primarly by means of representation. In the global culture industry instead it is about the mediation of things – through innovative, interactive and creative design.From the 50ties till the 70ties the cultural industry determined their audiences through a fixed set of identities, like the proper place of home for the nuclear family living in Modern housing blocks. The objects of the global culture industry are not determinated from above, but as social subjects we relate to them in an indeterminate mode. This does not mean that capitalism is not reproducing on a global scale, it only means that it is reproduced differently. Now the much less determinate objects of our global culture industry encounter the characteristically reflexive individuals of today’s informational society. Determinacy is a question of “identity”. Interderminancy is a question of “difference”. In the culture industry, production takes place in the Fordist and labour-intensive production of identity (through commodities). In global culture industry, it takes place in the post-fordist and design-intensive production of difference (through branding). While the commodity works through reproduction of identity, the brand becomes operational through the evermore production of difference. Hence goods become informational, work becomes affective, property becomes intellectual and the economy more generally cultural. Culture, once in the base of the superstructure, takes on a certain materiality itself. Relational TurnRelational aesthetics tries to decode or understand the type of relations to the viewer produced by the work of art. Minimalism addressed the question of the viewer’s participation in phenomenological terms. The art of the ‘90s addresses it in terms of use. Tiravanija once quoted this sentence from Wittgenstein: “Don’t look for the meaning of things, look for their use.” One is not in front of an object anymore but included in the process of its construction.Nicolas BourriaudAgainst the background of the above mentioned transformations of our global cultural industry the art-curator and theorist Nicolas Bourriaud introduced the concept of relational aesthetics for the modern art museum Palais de Tokyo designed by the architects Lacaton Vassal in 2002. Art became an interactive process; where a set of practices take as their theoretical and practical point of departure the encounter with the whole of human relations and their social context, rather than the assertion of an autonomous and private symbolic space. Instead of clean white walls, discreetly installed lighting, and wooden floors, the interior of the new museum was left bare and unfinished in order to stress that a work should be open ended, interactive, and resistant to closure, and often appearing to be work-in-progress rather than a completed object. The museum became a laboratory, a site under construction, for action, participation and live experiences. While we will stress the importance of relational thinking, understand space and its (designed) object within the global cultural industry and as interactive relational network that mediates and needs to communicate with the world at large and its users, we will not argue for projects that are itself to be in perpetual flux. With our understanding of global cultural reality through the notion of the relational turn we like to formulate an appeal far more than a description of our global reality. It doesn’t prescribes nothing but wants to underline a consciousness that derives its coherence from another consciousness: one that is aesthetic, ethical and political.Towards a Relational ArchitectureIf modernism was a return to the origin of art or of society, to their purification with the aim of rediscovering their essence, then our own century’s modernity will be invented, precisely, in opposition to all radicalism, dismissing both the bad solution of re-enrooting in identities as well as the standardization of imaginations decreed by economic globalization. To be radicant today: it means setting one’s roots in motion, staging them in heterogeneous contexts and formats, denying them any value as origins, translating ideas, transcoding images, transplanting behaviors, exchanging rather than imposing.Nicolas BourriaudIt is becoming clear to architects, designers and artist that space is more complex and dynamic than previous formal models allowed. Ideas about spatiality are moving away from physical objects and autonomous forms towards the variety of territorial, political and pychological social processes that flow through space. The interrelationships amongst things in space, as well as the effects that are produced through dynamic interaction, are becoming of greater significance to intervening in urban landscapes than soley compositional arrangement of objects and surfaces. Now that relationality, networking, connectivity and other dynamic experiences in our heterogenous time effect the nature of the architectural (art and design) project – its conception, procurement, construction and use but also its shape, materiality and aesthetics – we have to start to analyse (map), judge and create projects on the basis of the inter-human relations they represent, produce and enact in our global cultural industry.Although the urban, neoliberal, and modern everyday is pushing towards increased homogeneity in daily life, the irreconcilable disjunctions born in our generic city full of anachronistic interstices make it impossible to think of modernization as only negative. Michel de Certeau’s work confirmed the impossibility of a full colonization of everyday life by late capitalism and stressed that potential alternatives are always available, since individuals and institutions arrange resources and choose methods through particular creative arrangements from within their generic condition. It are precisely these unpredicatable situations of co-existence that should be of interest for the relational architect, designer and artist. It is here where modernity revolutionizes itself through the complex overlapping of co-existing realities. It are these realities the relational architect, designer and artist wishes to engage with, without ever wishing to finalize them. We, as space makers, should ask ourselves the essential question what “modern” could mean in this complex global culture. Or in other words, how we as architects, designers and artist could help create conditions of “situated freedom” for both the collective and the individual now that globalization is total, and neo-liberalism has no answers to confront the disasters it created on the level of the city, the landscape (ecology) and humanity as a whole. Don’t Excavate. Change Reality! As citizens of a free society, we have a duty to look critically at our world. But if we think we know what is wrong, we must act upon that knowledge.Tony JudtWe were not looking for origins, even lost or deleted ones, but setting out to catch thin
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