In Context: Tomas Skovgaard. © MAS Context.
This contribution is part of “In Context,” a series that features guest curators who browse the archives of MAS Context, uncovering new relationships between articles and establishing new topics.
New trends and new times, new market conditions and newer communicational means are also creating, it seems, new modes of architectural production-consumption and along with them, an allegedly new type of professional with skills suited for an era where communication primes.
News spreads at an increasingly faster rate, generating an exponential inflation in the informational corpus: news and texts are forwarded, commented on, cut/cropped/quoted/linked and disseminated in the blink of an eye, and we, internauts brought up on a steady diet of continuous feedbacks, updates and comments, have quickly grown dependent upon the continuity of the flux. We require a constant nourishing perpetuating the dynamics of a performative informational experience, which has become the default setting. […] The rise of the contemporary starchitectural system reflects very vividly this situation, where architects stand in the spotlight not only according to the quality of their (classically considered) architectural production, but also corresponding to their qualities as performers, or even due to their ability to keep a network of gossip circulating around them.
Might it be — I can hear Roger Waters singing — that Architecture is communicating itself to death?
—…architect and cartoonist Klaus asks in Modern Talking [don’t you…forget about me]
For this piece of In Context, I wanted to highlight the thread through resent issues of mixed contexts and, in particular, the recurring thread of online curations [communications typologies] as trajectories that operate through both time and memory, and inform the financialization of the everyday life. They are splits between a present that passes, and a past which is preserved traversing the online world economy, and crystallizing new measures of autonomy from biopolitical mornings.
Browsing the archive of MAS Context—cutting / cropping / quoting / linking—from Jack Henrie Fisher’s “Lines of Reading” to Michael Hirschbichler’s “Notable Realities: Balancing from world to world”—I’ve selected five pieces of all types that confront and examine the thread of curation as a critical practice in architecture.
… Forward / comment / cut / crop / quote / link, disseminate… + enjoy…
In the end, what’s important is not to affect networks of gossip circulation around oneself, nor not to communicate at all, but to liberate critique from what is communicated — communication itself…
LINES OF READING
Artwork by Jack Henrie Fisher.
Issue 7 | INFORMATION FALL 10
BLURRED
Essay by Antonio Petrov.
Issue 15 | VISIBILITY FALL 12
MODERN TALKING [DON’T YOU…FORGET ABOUT ME]
Essay by architect and cartoonist Klaus.
Issue 14 | COMMUNICATION SUMMER 12
FROM XEROGRAPHY TO HTML
Ethel Baraona Pohl and Cesar Reyes from dpr-barcelona interview Beatriz Colomina.
Issue 9 | NETWORK SPRING 11
NOTABLE REALITIES: BALANCING FROM WORLD TO WORLD
Essay by Michael Hirschbichler.
Issue 14 | COMMUNICATION SUMMER 12