The School of Architecture presents a symposium and exhibition, SEE-ING: The Environmental Consciousness Project, curated by Assistant Professor of Architecture Catty Dan Zhang.
Our obsession with vision is increasing in these days of evolving imaging techniques and sophisticated display systems. SEE-ING is a project that, for a moment, both questions and celebrates the presence of technological facts and the profound joy of experiencing their effects. It brings together a diverse group of architects, artists, designers, and theorists looking at how transformed notions of "vision," "visual," or "the visible" inspires creative practices in a number of areas, including new typologies of space, representational methods, material practices, prostheses and byproducts of systems and machines, atmospheric mediums, neuroesthetics, and emotion. Here, seeing is not limited to the typical concept of visualization, but instead refers to a range of multilayered interfaces between people and their environment.
The symposium begins at 1:00 pm and features two distinguished lecturers. Dr. Sandra Rodriguez (speaking at 1:45 pm) is Creative Director of the Creative Reality Lab at EyeSteelFilm and a visiting scholar in the Comparative Media Studies Department at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); Dr. Mark B.N. Hansen (speaking at 4:00 pm) is the James B. Duke Professor of Literature at Duke University.
A multimedia dance performance, Captured Creatures, will take place at 3:00 pm in Rowe Recital Hall.
The exhibition, which will be on view in Storrs Gallery through November 16, includes the work of 11 artists and architects from across the globe:
Carl Lostritto, assistant professor of architecture and Graduate Program Director at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD)
The duo Ibañez Kim: Simon Kim, associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania and Director of the Immersive Kinematics Research Group and Mariana Ibañez, associate professor at MIT School of Architecture and Planning
Chai Mi, visual artist
Andrew Witt, assistant professor of architecture at Harvard Graduate School of Design and co-founder of Certain Measures.
Can Büyükberber, visual artist
Penelope Haralambidou, senior lecturer at The Bartlett School of Architecture at University College London and coordinator of Unit 24
Bernardita Devilat, co-founder of Devilat Lanuza Architects
David Benjamin, assistant professor at Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation and Founding Principal of The Living.
Sean Lally, associate professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago School fom Architecture
Allen Sayegh, associate professor in practice of architectural technology at Harvard Graduate School of Design and co-founder of INVIVIA
Their work will be displayed within the context of an immersive installation, VENTS, created by Catty Dan Zhan. VENTS uses articulated forms of airflow to construct environmental experiences. The installation consists of a “ceiling” of sixty-nine modules that produce a rain of air puffs that are based on an input that hybridizes real-time local wind speeds and the recorded data sets of Hurricane Florence during a seven-day period. These invisible “breezes,” felt on the skin, will also become visible as rings of colored droplets of light.
Penelope Haralambidou, Between the Retina and the Dome (film still)