When the pandemic is over and as venues reopen, what will be the state of the performing arts? Will there be a return to the old normal or, instead, will some of the lessons and experiments that were undertaken under pandemic conditions begin to shape a new and expanded concept of performance, liveness, streaming as a medium, and the like? [Read more]
Tag: architecture
It is often the most modest media that prove successful, adaptable, and resilient over the long term. Such is the case of the podcast, a mode of communication born in the early 2000s, derived from radio, whose monthly US audience has now grown to around 90 million and whose global audience reaches well into the hundreds of millions. Even more striking are the numbers behind the numbers: a content production pipeline, for instance, that counts…
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Isaac Asimov’s 1950 classic I, Robot is remembered for many things, but especially for its formulation of the “Three Laws of Robotics” (sometimes referred to as “Asimov’s Laws”). They run as follows: A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. A robot must protect…
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It’s easy to poke fun at some of the tics and tropes that have come to define TED over the course of its 32 years of “spreading ideas that matter.” But the fact remains that TED has had an enormous impact and the TED stage is one of the world’s leading communications and innovation platforms, now fully global, interconnected with a multiplicity of television, radio, and web-based channels, and followed by audiences that number in the…
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On April 9, 2016, BZ ’18-’45 was awarded a “special commendation” in the Council of Europe and European Museum Forum’s European Museum of the Year competition. The award specifies that it was granted for an “exhibition that reintegrates a controversial monument, which has long served as the focal point of battles over politics, culture, and regional identity. The project is a highly courageous and professional initiative to promote humanism, tolerance, and democracy.” For fully three years I…
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The Boston showing of metaLAB’s documentary/web documentary COLD STORAGE at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design took place in early February of this year, but we are now preparing for the film’s European premiere in Paris. The presentation will take place at 4:30 pm on Wednesday, September 30, in the Petit Auditorium, at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Quai François Mauriac, within the setting of the conference Vers une littérature mondiale à l’heure du numérique?. The…
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In their celebrated 1972 critique of modernist architecture, LEARNING FROM LAS VEGAS, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown summoned architects, designers, planners, and policy makers to learn from what, at the time, seemed like the most improbable of urban models: the Las Vegas Strip. Of course, learning from Las Vegas meant more than simply scrutinizing the Strip or appreciating it as a work of Pop Art. It meant reappraising the top-down ideology of modern(ist) urban…
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An interview with Troy Conrad Therrien came out today in issue 2 of the ARPA Journal, a lively public forum for debate based at the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. The issue in question is largely framed around the question of search engines, past, present, and future; but broader questions of archiving and knowledge design arise in the course of the conversation, which dialogues indirectly with the lead piece in the issue:…
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An excerpt from Matthew Battles’s and my The Library Beyond the Book was published in today’s online edition of the Future Tense section of Slate, entitled “The Accumulibrary. Forget the Dewey Decimal System, Libraries Should be Lawless.” (The neologism is ours; the title is of Slate‘s devising.) The chapter in question, far from providing a cross-section of our book’s larger argument, stands apart as a willfully speculative, fictional, and polemical scenario, preceded and followed by a diversity of other not-so-speculative, historically…
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The Library Beyond the Book is finally out with Harvard University Press in the newly launched metaLABprojects series. Here’s the first review that has come in: While iPad-bearing soothsayers banish print books to dustbins, coauthors Schnapp and Battles, both insightful provocateurs from Harvard University, envision dynamic and fluid architectural spaces warehousing paper as well as pixels. In a spirit of refreshing experimentation, they ask: What flexible qualities from the past can accommodate tomorrow’s information consumers…
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With my friends and collaborators Elisabetta Terragni (Studio Terragni Architetti; Como/New York) and Daniele Ledda (xy comm; Milan), I’ve been musing over how to install our Panorama of the Cold War project at the MAXXI in Rome for the upcoming exhibition MIGRANTI. The show in question will be concerned with the migratory patterns of contemporary Italian architecture and its impact on the design process and product. In our case the focus is on our transatlantic…
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