Constant's new Babylon : The hyper-architecture of desire

Henri Lefebvre on Space: Architecture, Urban Research, and the Production of Theory

............................................................................................................................ i DECLARATION ................................................................................................................... iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ................................................................................................. xii ABBREVIATIONS ............................................................................................................. xiiii LIST OF FIGURES ............................................................................................................... xv LIST OF TABLES ............................................................................................................... xvi

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Aetherspheres : spatial sensitivity and self awareness in food and social media prosuming practices

This thesis is about space, law and control: how their relationship unfolds in the contemporary city, and how normative orderings emerge out of the urban mess, with particular attention to how this occurs in the extraordinary spatio-temporal context of mega events. The work is premised on the elaboration of an original spatial ontology through the notions of life, materiality and event, which culminates with the introduction of the notion of atmosphere and rhythm, and their folding into the concept of urban tuning. This understanding allows for re-thinking the spatiality and materiality of the urban from a non-dichotomous, immanent perspective, thus providing a novel way to investigate the spatiolegal configurations and the form they assume in the present-day city. Consequently, the thesis explores the exceptional relation between law, space and justice in modern and ‘post-modern’ times, by looking at contemporary forms of control and their on-going reformulation of urban space according to the twin requirements of consumption and immunity. Through this approach, I wish to push forward the urban and legal geographical debate, exploring the evolution of the spatiolegal into new, potentially oppressing logics of control, as well as delineating a radically material, ethico-politically worthwhile and strategically adequate concept of justice. Since I conceive urban mega events as paradigmatic contexts to investigate urban processes, I employ the 2010 World Cup in South Africa as the empirical testing ground for my conceptualisations.

Exceptional tunings: controlling urban events

This dissertation examines the development of kinetic art—a genre comprising motorized, manipulable, and otherwise transformable objects—in Europe and the United States from 1955 to 1968. Despite kinetic art’s popularity in its moment, existing scholarly narratives often treat the movement as a positivist affirmation of postwar technology or an art of mere entertainment. This dissertation is the first comprehensive scholarly project to resituate the movement within the history of performance and “live” art forms, by looking closely at how artists created objects that behaved in complex, often unpredictable ways in real time. It argues that the critical debates concerning agency and intention that surrounded moving artworks should be understood within broader aesthetic and social concerns in the postwar period—from artists’ attempts to grapple with the legacy of modernist abstraction, to popular attitudes toward the rise of automated labor and cybernetics. It further draws from contemporaneous phenomenological discourses to consider the ways kinetic artworks modulated viewers’ experiences of artistic duration. Structured around case studies of four artists, the chapters draw from archival material and close examinations of artworks to elucidate diverse approaches to the kinetic. Chapter One examines Jean Tinguely’s early motorized reliefs, modeled on the paintings of the historical avant-garde, and argues that their shifting compositions enact an intensifying doubt about the principles of abstract composition. Chapter Two addresses Pol Bury’s exploration of perception in his slow-moving objects, linking the intense experiences of anticipation and suspense they generate to their Cold War context. Chapter Three treats Gianni Colombo’s flexible rubber and Styrofoam artworks, connecting them to the burgeoning field of Italian design and Umberto Eco’s nascent concept of the “open work.” Finally, Chapter Four investigates Robert Breer’s Float sculptures, and demonstrates how these works parody Minimalist principles while also intervening into cybernetic debates about behavior and intentionality in self-driven objects. While grounded in the postwar period, this project intersects with contemporary scholarly interests in performance, animation, and materiality. Degree Type Dissertation Degree Name Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Graduate Group History of Art First Advisor Christine Poggi

https://repository.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4139&context=edissertations

The Animate Object of Kinetic Art, 1955-1968

This dissertation is an interdisciplinary
investigation of the indeterminate political role played by the
inhabitants’ spatial practices of misuse in the social production
of urban space in contemporary Istanbul. My argument is that both
established and emerging hegemonic representations of the city of
Istanbul presume a normative definition of the capitalist
production of urban space based only on the use and exchange values
of space; and they fail to consider what I propose to call “the
misuse value of space.” I define the misuse value of space as a
potential value that is activated by the spatial practices of
misusers. Considering the ways in which the normative definition of
the production of space in Istanbul is complicated by the
inhabitants of the city through their spatial practices of misuse,
I find that the inhabitants are not merely passive consumers of the
spaces of the metropolis but they have an active and constitutive
role in molding the shape of urban social space. This entails a
discussion on spatial authorship, which is normatively supposed to
belong to the authorities including urban designers, real estate
developers and the state. To show how the spatial practices of
misusers are also implicated in the production of space in
Istanbul, I turn to a set of vignettes, which I call ethnographies
of spatial authorship. Finally, I focus on the art collective Oda
Projesi and their public artworks which take inspiration from
actual misuses in Istanbul. I explore the ways in which the public
art of Oda Projesi rely on an activation of the misuse value of
space. My dissertation closes with a demonstration of how Oda
Projesi demonstrates the political possibilities that generate from
this activation.

Constant's new Babylon : The hyper-architecture of desire

Citations

Henri Lefebvre on Space: Architecture, Urban Research, and the Production of Theory

Aetherspheres : spatial sensitivity and self awareness in food and social media prosuming practices

Exceptional tunings: controlling urban events

The Animate Object of Kinetic Art, 1955-1968

The misuse value of space: Spatial practices and the production of space in Istanbul

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The situationist city