In spite of all the summery soccer Italy thrills (!) and Brazil & Germany dismay (???), the New York Times report of yet another governmental surveillance program, and the continuing stream of unspeakable news from Iraq, do you still have some passion left to engage in (or follow) a vital debate?

A three-month long discussion will prepare the Architecture and Situated Technologies Symposium (October 19-21, 2006 NYC) that I am co-organizing with Mark Shepard and Omar Khan.

We hope that you will be able to make it to the event. To check out if the particular debate that we will set up is of interest to you, sign up for the list, then contribute or observe the discussion that has just started.

<http://mailman.thing.net/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/idc>

A few words about the symposium:

Architecture and Situated Technologies
This symposium, organized around the notion of an "encounter," will articulate new research vectors, sites of practice, and working methods for the confluence of architecture, art, and situated technologies.

What opportunities and dilemmas does a world of networked objects and spaces pose for architecture, art, and computing? How might this evolving relation between people and "things" alter the way we occupy, navigate, and inhabit the built environment? What is the status of the material object and the embodied human relationships in a world privileging networked relations between "things"? How do distinctions between space and place change within networked media ecologies? What post-optimal design strategies and tactics might we propose for an age of responsive environments, smart materials, embodied interaction, and participatory networks?

While there is an explosive growth of mobile devices, the social uses of technologies are not sufficiently studied in terms of architecture. What distinguishes the emerging urban sociality enabled by the Wireless Internet? How do these dynamics, including (non-)affective giving destabilize rationalized 'use case scenarios'?

These are just a few urgent questions that the symposium will raise.

Through a combination of public and closed segments (workshops, presentations, and panel discussions), the symposium will stage a set of encounters between invited participants, an audience encouraged to participate, and the City of New York.

<http://cva.ap.buffalo.edu>
<http://distributedcreativity.org>
<http://www.archleague.org>

List facilitators:

July: Trebor Scholz
Topics: Networked Public Sphere, Autonomous Uses of Situated Sociable Media

August: Omar Khan
Topics: Performance Paradigms, Responsive Architecture and Artificial Ecologies

September: Mark Shepard
Topics: Locative Media, Tactical Urbanism, Situated Aesthetics

[This symposium is a co-production between the Center for Virtual Architecture at UB, The Institute for Distributed Creativity, and the Architectural League of New York.]