18:00 Performative lecture by Ho Rui An: "Image Drive: Observations Near the End of the Road" (Z Hall, 1st floor). Registration.
If the cinematic image was invented to facilitate the observation of motion, today it appears to have itself become an object in perpetual motion. Exemplifying this development is the dashboard camera recording that has proliferated in recent years, as seen especially in the vast accumulation on the Internet of crash footage captured by cameras installed on the dashboards of vehicles the world over. Beginning with a consideration of how the road today has become the scene upon which the discontents of late capitalism are frequently made visible, this lecture investigates how this contemporary pegging of vision to machinic motion has come to constitute an optical-motor schema that continually produces observations of crisis while foreclosing the ways we can approach capitalism's abstract and invisible ongoing violence by demanding that we immediately "move on" from crisis. At stake here is the positing of each successive crisis as an interruption along a necessary drive to the end of the road, or as an instance of corruption along a global cinematic chain of production. When observation becomes increasingly subjected to the conditions of this "image drive", how might we observe otherwise.
19:00 Lecture by Beatriz Colomina: "X-Ray Architecture" (Z Hall, 1st floor). Registration
This lecture explores the impact of medical discourse and imaging technologies on the formation, representation and reception of twentieth-century architecture. Colomina challenges the normal understanding of modern architecture by proposing that it was shaped by the dominant medical obsession of its time: tuberculosis and its primary diagnostic tool, the X-ray.
Modern architecture and the X-ray were born around the same time and evolved in parallel.
While the X-ray exposed the inside of the body to the public eye, the modern building unveiled its interior, dramatically inverting the relationship between private and public. Architects presented their buildings as a kind of medical instrument for protecting and enhancing the body and psyche.
First day of the seminar "Evil Eye" with guests Ho Rui An and Beatriz Colomina.