This special issue of AI & Society concerns the implications for the built environment posed by emerging technologies from computational media, mechatronics, sensors, ubiquitous and pervasive computing and sensate or active materials, combined with techniques from more conventional technologies of architecture and theater. While a lot of contemporary architecture is focused on capital intensive applications with special emphasis on security, utility, and work, we propose to take a different tack and speculate on alternative opportunities for poetry, poiesis, and, to deliberately recuperate a term from Weber, enchantment. Contemporary conceptual architecture often exudes relentlessly modernist or post-modernist form. We propose alternative modes of architecture in minor key that enact modes of dwelling and becoming rather than illustrate non-living, unlivable concepts. We do this by a combination of means: artist's descriptions of their own architectural experiments, historical context, conceptual argument, and socio-technical critique.
We speculate on the potential for poetic architecture afforded by the emerging technologies of what we call "soft architecture," though of course, we will discuss what one could mean by "softness," "responsivity," and "soft architecture." As a beginning point, soft architecture refers to built environments that respond flexibly and pliantly in three scales of energy: the micro-scale of small moments of sensor data or textures of sound or light or air and other physical materials, the meso-scale of bodies in motion, and the macro-scale of social movements and urban plans.
Specifically, the themes we will explore include: liveness of space, peripheral awareness, tactile perception (e.g. manual chronostasis), sense of presence (e.g. in sleep paralysis), felt awareness of corporeal vulnerability, and distributed material agency.
Contributors include:
Sha Xin Wei, Introduction: minor architecture
Ron Broglio, Thinking about stuff: Posthumanist phenomenology and cognition
Christoph Brunner, Nice-looking obstacles: Parkour as urban practice of deterritorialization
Erik Conrad, Soft architectures in everyday life
T. Hugh Crawford, Minor houses / minor architecture
Karmen Franinovic, Architectures of play
Elena Frantova, Elizabeta Solomonova, Timothy Sutton, Extra-personal awareness through the media-rich environment
Flower Lunn, Patterns of Growth and Perception: The Site, the City and the Wild
Jean-François Prost, Adaptive Actions
Harry Smoak, Machinic articulations: Experiments in non-verbal explanation
Elizaveta Solomonova, Elena Frantova and Tore Nielsen, Felt presence: Uncanny encounters with the numinous Other.
CONTACT:
Sha Xin Wei, Ph.D.
Canada Research Chair, Media Arts and Sciences
Associate Professor • Fine Arts and Computer Science • Concordia University
EV06-769, 1515 Ste-Catherine West • Montréal, Québec • H3G 2W1 • CANADA
1-514-817-3505 (m) • 1-514-848-2424 x 5949 (art) • x 7801 (cs) • 1-514-848-4252 (fax)
Old: Sources 100421, Sources 091111, Sources with images
Manuscript submission instructions for authors
Sample articles, Wearables Issue