"The new city would be a projection of intersubjective projects."
Vilèm Flusser
"In Search of Dialogue Spaces" explores the potentials of collective and
intersubjective spaces of action, event and communication within,
through and across existing material and immaterial urban structures -
emphasizing the specific problem of territory as emerging in European
cities.
Seeking Out the Urban. At a time when urbanity is becoming a potential
quality of all sites, Dialogue Spaces sets out in search of
interstitial places, interactive movements in which urban relations take
on diverse forms, articulating social relationships culturally and
socio-politically. What view is required today to grasp the urban, to
discern images beyond the flow of data in space, images which show the
complex fields of tension arising between space and society.
Territories of the Urban. The structural change of urban forms and
functions has led to the formation of new localities and the concomitant
separation of symbolic meaning, function and the social appropriation of
space. The globalizing structures of economy and cultures, on the one
hand, and the socio-cultural differentiations and fragmentations, on the
other, result in an "asymmetrical space of the flows of communication"
(Castells). While in this space everything is economically geared to
motion, energy, dynamics and permeation, social differentiation along
fields of constituting identity produces microcosms, which involve a
demarcation process and hence a dissolution of known cultures of
lifestyles and forms of communication.
Projections of the Urban. In this context, can Dialogue Spaces be viewed
as unexpected intensities bringing things into focus? - Material or
immaterial, planned or emergent spaces of action and event within
current everyday urban life, in which conflicting positions, orders,
voices are knotted up into provisional utopias; spaces in which
difference and otherness are not neutralized, but constantly
renegotiated in their relation to one another; reflexive spaces within
the system of flows, in which the other can come or be brought to light.
In this largely networked world in which real time, tele presence and
intersense form our knowledge of the other, In Search of Dialogue Spaces
examines locations of interrelations, sites of dialogue and urban
interaction. The objective of Dialogue Spaces is to focus on the
position of the individual with regard to the conditions of cultural
production and to reflect on the emergent structures and communicative
forms in terms of their interactive potential.
-- film + arc. grazhttp://xarch.tu-graz.ac.at/filmarc/ ------------------------------------------------------------- a forum on spatial articulations, perspectives, and procedures texts are the property of individual authors for information, email majordomo@forum.documenta.de with the following line in the message body: info blast archive at http://www.documenta.de/english/blasta.htm or http://www.documenta.de/deutsch/blasta.htm documenta X Kassel and http://www.documenta.de 1997 -------------------------------------------------------------