Architecture X Architecture: A Dialectic - Christiane Robbins

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Biographie:

Kum-Kum Bhavnani is a scholar/film-maker (Mirror and Hammer Films) who adopts a multilayered approach to analyzing inequalities and to building a more just, livable planet. Her film-making, interdisciplinary research, and teaching are shaped by the topographies of international development and equity. Through her work, she aspires to draw attention to the nodes within cultural and climate studies that resonate with critical development studies and social justice. Her feature length documentaries include Lutah: A Passion for Architecture a Life in Design, The Shape of Water, and Nothing Like Chocolate. At the University of California Santa Barbara she is a Research Professor (Distinguished Professor Emerita July 2024) and the campus Senior International Officer. She earned her doctorate at Kings College, Cambridge following her Honours degree from Bristol University (Psychology, with minors in Sociology, Politics and Philosophy), and her Masters from Nottingham University (Child and Educational Psychology). She joined the UCSB Department of Sociology in July 1991. She was Chair and Vice Chair of the University of California Systemwide Senate (2018-2020) and Chair of the Academic Senate at the UCSB (2012-2016). At present, she serves on the Chancellor's Advisory Task Force on Childcare at UCSB and on the Systemwide Fossil Free Task Force that is developing plans for the electrification of all UC campuses. Her service includes collaborating with artists, scholars, policy makers, NGOs and other community activists. She is inspired by those who create the social justice urgently needed for present and future generations and for our planet.

Aaron Betsky is a critic and teacher living in Philadelphia. Previously, he was Professor and Director of the School of Architecture and Design at Virginia Tech and, prior to that, President of the School of Architecture at Taliesin. A critic of art, architecture, and design, Mr. Betsky is the author of over twenty books on those subjects. He writes a twice-weekly blog for architectmagazine.com, Beyond Buildings. Trained as an architect and in the humanities at Yale University, Mr. Betsky has served as the Director of the Cincinnati Art Museum (2006-2014) and the Netherlands Architecture Institute (2001-2006), as well as Curator of Architecture and Design at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1995-2001). In 2008, he also directed the 11th Venice International Biennale of Architecture. His latest books are Fifty Lessons from Frank Lloyd Wright (2021), Making It Modern (2019) and Architecture Matters (2019). In 2024, his Anarchitecture: The Monster Leviathan was published by The MIT Press and Beacon Press released his Don't Build, Rebuild: The Case for Imaginative Reuse.

Bill Seaman is a media artist and a computational media researcher. Seaman is a Professor at Duke University working with the Computational Media, Arts and Cultures PhD program. He is the co-director of the Emergence Lab, Media Arts and Sciences, and is a member of the Departments of Art, Art History & Visual Studies, and Music. He earned a Master of Science in Visual Studies in 1985 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge. In 1999, he received a PhD from the Centre for Advanced Inquiry in the Interactive Arts at the University of Wales for a thesis whose title accurately sums up the meaning of Seaman's artistic practice: Recombinant Poetics: Emergent Meaning as Examined and Explored Within a Specific Generative Virtual Environment. His works may be found in numerous private and public collections, including those of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Mediamuseum, Karlsruhe. He is pioneer in the field of interactive media. In particular, hi...

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Katherine Lambert is a neoteric director, media artist and academic whose cross-displinary practice spans visual imagining, digital media, video and design. As a founding partner of Metropolitan Architectural Practice (MAP) and Director of its research division, MAP Studio, she has cultivated a body of work that redefines the boundaries of spatial, visual, and cultural production. Robbins' work interrogates the intersections of material and digital realms, leveraging the transformative potential of emerging technologies to foster innovative solutions for sustainable and socially conscious directives. Her practice engages with the disruptive impact of emerging technologies on contemporary landscape, urbanism and interdisciplinary design practices, an ethos that resonates with her latest project, Thresholds of the Frontier. Created in response to advent of generative AI, the project explores the speed of thought, the discomforting duality of visual seduction and unexpected R/L challenges posed by artificial intelligence in its many guises: from machine vision to synthetic cognition and sensation, and from the macro-economics of machine learning to the intimate realities of everyday resourcing. Drawing on concepts akin to those of theorists Jean Baudrillard and Paul Virilio, her projects examine the unexpected incongruities posed by gen AI + machine vision. The accelerating impact of AI technologies reflects Virilio's position that speed reconfigures time, space, and human experience. Robbins' work is a visualization of such dromological effects, where the speed of AI generation disrupts conventions of architectural and design practices, inventing new ways of understanding spatiality and identity.

Christiane Robbins is a neoteric director, media artist and academic whose cross-displinary practice spans visual imagining, digital media, video and design. As a founding partner of Metropolitan Architectural Practice (MAP) and Director of its research division, MAP Studio, she has cultivated a body of work that redefines the boundaries of spatial, visual, and cultural production. Robbins' work interrogates the intersections of material and digital realms, leveraging the transformative potential of emerging technologies to foster innovative solutions for sustainable and socially conscious directives. Her practice engages with the disruptive impact of emerging technologies on contemporary landscape, urbanism and interdisciplinary design practices, an ethos that resonates with her latest project, Thresholds of the Frontier. Created in response to advent of generative AI, the project explores the speed of thought, the discomforting duality of visual seduction and unexpected R/L challenges posed by artificial intelligence in its many guises: from machine vision to synthetic cognition and sensation, and from the macro-economics of machine learning to the intimate realities of everyday resourcing. Drawing on concepts akin to those of theorists Jean Baudrillard and Paul Virilio, her projects examine the unexpected incongruities posed by gen AI + machine vision. The accelerating impact of AI technologies reflects Virilio's position that speed reconfigures time, space, and human experience. Robbins' work is a visualization of such dromological effects, where the speed of AI generation disrupts conventions of architectural and design practices, inventing new ways of understanding spatiality and identity.