July 8, 2016 Utopia and Just After: A Magnitogorsk Travelogue lunch lecture at Raumlabor I will give a talk about going to Magnitogorsk to participate in a conference on the legacies of the “Socialist City” and encountering the cities and cultures that have proceeded from the project of building an industrial utopia of total production. June 13, 2016 "Common Knowledge: An Interview with Michael Mandiberg"is out in the Berlin Art Link Futures Issue. We discuss Mandiberg's instalation Print Wikipedia: From Aachen to Zylinderdruckpresse at Import Projects. June, 2016 Out Now: “Rules for Breaking In: Squatter Handbooks as Radical Specifications,” ARPA Journal, Issue 4: Instruments of Service April 20, 2016 I will be giving a class on squatters' handbooks as part of the Aleppo/Public School for Architecture Brussels Black Market event at ArtBrussels Avenue du Port 86c, Brussels BLACK MARKET Architecture as a profession and a practice is constituted by a set of codes and conditions that embed the discipline within a regulated environment of production and exchange. What does it mean for architecture if these formal protocols are transgressed and space is produced under the conditions of an informal economy? How can architecture operate within an alternative economy and what does that imply for its users? This series of classes is organized in the context of black market, which appears in the frame of ArtBrussels 2016 as a space to display the use of black market strategies in artistic creation and to investigate the topic of circulation beneath the realm of the visible. SCHEDULE 16:00-17:00 Examples of Architectural/Design Activism Louisa Vermoere and Andrea Sollazzo The strongly hierarchical macro-structures that rule our society and contemporary cities are founded on the desire of total control and organization. This "genetic bug" of our modern world leaves behind a lot of opportunity for creativity and free expressions. It is in the cracks of our over-complex society that lay the opportunities to stimulate a debate between the different actors of the urban space. The insertion in some strategic but forgotten urban space in European cities of small design interventions will have the multiple intentions of provoking a reaction both from citizens and from the institutions and at the same time revitalize a blind corner of the city. 17:15-18:30 Rules for Breaking (In) Alan Smart In the administrative structures of building codes, planning codes, and the systems of laws and policies governing property ownership, housing distribution, etc. urban space is literally “coded” into existence. Cities are however layered with many other sets of formal and informal codes, programs and languages that script, choreograph and mediate the social relations of urban life, and the way that urban space is produced and value is produced in it. As much as the practice of Architecture involves producing objects and images, it also can be framed in terms of the code writing, scripting and choreography that operates within the semiotic structures of the city. In forms including instructions, rules to games, and ‘recipes,’ explicitly articulated scripts became a central element of performance art in the 1960s. From there, script writing was taken up by architects and others involved with radical experiments in spatial practice and built environments and would inform an array of handbooks, guidebooks, cookbooks and catalogs that communicated instructions and practical information aimed at enabling readers to do new things or live in new ways. These kind of publications are iconic hallmark utopian projects seeking to leave the city and inscribe new forms of community, but they would also play an important roll in radical urban movements synthesizing spatial and political practice. This workshop will consider the form of the “squatters’ handbook” as it has appeared in different iterations in contexts from Amsterdam to London to New York City. These handbooks, or guides will be used to frame a discussion of the relationships between publishing and media production practice, building and material intervention in the city, and articulations of politics and political practice in urban space. This discussion will consider the possibilities of imagining radical modes of architectural practice that writes into, rewrites, or hacks the various code system that create and organize the city. 19:00-20:00 Area C, System D - Dealings along the Jerusalem-Ramallah road Polina Medvedeva A screening of an excerpt from Area C, System D, a work in progress by artist and documentarian Polina Medvedeva followed by a Q and A with the filmmaker. Area C, System D Dealings along the Jerusalem-Ramallah road, ±60min, 2016 Filmed over the course of 2014/2015 in Al-Ram, Kufr Aqab and the Qalandia, Al Amari and Kaddura refugee camps, the documentary deals with informal sociopolitical structures in the area, which remains practically ungoverned by both Palestinian and Israeli authorities, focussing on the thriving grey economy and self-government along the main Jerusalem-Ramallah road, where shops and buildings are unlicensed, the cars often stolen and where the electricity and sewer lines are built on one’s own initiative. Told from the perspectives of the shopkeepers and a group of young musicians, it is a parallel narration of both daily struggle and resilience, desperation and the power of individuals, whirled in a constant bustle of vibrant enterprise and rap. REGISTRATION Black market is free and open to the public. In order to gain access to the fair you must register by emailing info@psfa-bxl.org. December 21, 2015 Review of the exhibition Regarding Spectatorship: Revolt and the Distant Observer at Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien for Berlin Art Link. December 10, 19:00 Auditorium Sandberg Instituut, Overschiestraat 188, Amsterdam I will be at the Sandberg Insitute Dirty Art Department talking about Other Forms projects and practice and the book Making Room: Culturial Production in Occupied Spaces. From a “dirty,” materialist perspective both the characteristics, and the meaning or significance of aesthetic production (art, media, culture, ect.) have a lot to do with the ways in which the production takes place. Making radical, critical or simply new things often depends on creating new ways of making things, living and “making a living.” Other Forms is a research and design collective that works between architecture, graphic design, and publishing. Other Forms takes a critical approach both to design work itself and to the material and social conditions of its practice. October 2015: Plans are being made for a trip to Magnitogorsk and Chelyabinsk in October to give a paper at The Socialist City and the Sociocultural Aspects of Urbanization conference at Magnitogorsk State University, visit archives and see some of the locations that I have written about: Ernst May's "socialist city" housing, the steel mills modeled on Gary Indiana and Cleveland Ohio, and the pit that marks where the magnetic mountain once stood. In Chelyabinsk, I will look for the factories designed by Albert Kahn and other American and Western European "specialist" architects. These factories converted steel produced in Magnitogorsk into industrial goods and war material earning Chelyabinsk the nickname "Tankograd." September 2015: "‘In the (Silicon) Gutter but Looking at the Stars': An Interview about the Nonhuman Autonomous Space Agency,"is out in the Berlin Art Link, Space Issue, in which Fred Scharmen and I discuss the roll of pictorial representation in defining the space colonies movement of the 1970s and speculate on the potentials of space being colonized by photogenic, social media friendly, cute animals. September 2015: Work is underway on an exhibition and series of discussions and events that will be held in mid September at ABC No Rio on New York’s Lower East Side. These will elaborate on the material in Making Room, add more stories from New York City and initiate conversations about the potentials of oral history and activist research and scholarship. This will coincide with Other Forms tabling with JOAAP in the Friendly Fire section of the New York Art Book Fair at PS 1. July 2015: The 2015 JVE A event series Jaw Versus Eye Attack will take place in Berlin, 28 July - 1 August 2015. On 11:15-13:00 on THURSDAY, 30 JULY there will be a presentation and panel discussion on Cultural Production in Occupied Spaces with Alan Smart, Marc Herbst, Nina Fraeser and Tina Steiger. July 2015: Building Downards a review, by Alan Smart and Lousia Corna, of Keller Easterling's book Subtraction is now online with Mute — the journal that gladly feasts on those who would subdue us. July 2015: Making Room: Cultural Production in Occupied Spaces out now! May 2015: Exhibition for Making Room: Cultural Production in Occupied Spaces at the 2015 meeting of the Squatting Europe Kollective (SqEK) in Barcelona.