An interesting symposium will take place tomorrow at the Ecole Nationale Superieure d’Architecture de Paris Malaquais. (14 rue Bonaparte, 75006, Amphithéâtre des Loges)
Among the intervenants: Pier Vittorio Aureli, Matteo Pasquinelli, Jose Perez de Lama.
Here’s the program online.
Here’s a pdf with the program.
Here’s a bio of all the intervenants.
As a concluding event for the 10th Anniversary of the creation of the Ecole nationale supérieure d’architecture Paris-Malaquais (ENSAPM) the conference Computational Politics and Architecture: From the Digital Philosophy to the End of Work will focus on recent developments in which computation has redefined more and more human activities. Such moves cannot be understood only through an inquiry into what has been called digital, numerical or computational architecture, neither through the sole survey of the shift towards network societies. As shown by Giuseppe Longo, those evolutions have taken the shape of a “new symbolic universe” with infinite ramifications. This universe, made of computation conceived as a symbolic form, blends together abstract activities such as philosophy as well as very concrete ones, like labor, whether or not in the realm of an industrial context. By its double quality of symbolic universe and of scientific apparatus, it bears on our philosophical conceptions – the shift in our relation to nature, now mediated by computer simulations, has already become a deep phenomenon – as well as on our daily practices and so called necessities. Among those, the one of labor, which has a lasting history of critic and opposition, precisely in some XXth century architectural avant-garde, has recently appeared as an ideology instead of an inescapable natural fact. New theoretical endeavors in that direction are available, such as the ones of Anselm Jappe, Robert Kurz et al. with their Manifesto against Labour (Gruppe Krisis, 1994). The novelty of those critics is that they do not attempt to revamp the end of work on the premises of an umpteenth technological utopia, but they participate in a lucid analysis of a series of contradictions linked to the evolution of contemporary technologies and their political consequences. It goes without saying that these consequences, presented long ago by Norbert Wiener to unions in the U.S, are still of utmost actuality. Thanks to the diversity of the speakers, who all have developed lines of thought articulating technological and scientific transformations with stakes larger than those transformations, the conference will open important paths to students in order to enhance a rigorous theorization of contemporary architecture and its relationship with the global environment.
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