Medium Format
Dienstag, 11.5., 18-20 Uhr, Zoom
„Medium Design inverts the typical focus on object over field, to work on the medium—the matrix space between objects, events and ideological declarations. And it disrupts some habitual approaches to the world’s intractable dilemmas—from climate cataclysm to inequality to concentrations of authoritarian power. From this perspective, solutions are mistakes, ideologies are unreliable markers, and an innovation can be a protocol for the way things combine. Rather than the modern desire for the new, designers find more complexity in relationships between emergent and incumbent technologies. Encouraging entanglement, medium design does not try to eliminate problems but rather put them together in productive combinations. It offers some additional activist tools for outwitting political superbugs and modulating power and temperament in organizations of all kinds.“
Keller Easterling is an architect, writer and the Enid Storm Dwyer Professor of Architecture at Yale. Her most recent book Medium Design: Knowing How To Work on the World (Verso, 2021) inverts an emphasis on object and figure to prompt innovative thought about both spatial and non-spatial problems. Another recent book, Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space (Verso, 2014), examines global infrastructure as a medium of polity.
Other books include: Enduring Innocence: Global Architecture and its Political Masquerades (MIT, 2005) which researched familiar spatial products in difficult or hyperbolic political situations around the world. Organization Space: Landscapes, Highways and Houses in America (MIT, 1999) which applied network theory to a discussion of American infrastructure, and Subtraction (Sternberg, 2014), which considers building removal or how to put the development machine into reverse.