Architectures of Learning ? Learning Architectures: Eva Díaz

13.06.2016 | Eva Díaz | New York | Spaceship Earth and Space Race 2.0

Eva Díaz is currently at work on a book called The Fuller Effect: The Critique of Total Design in Postwar Art, which explores the legacy of R. Buckminster Fuller in contemporary art practices. In this presentation Díaz will share some of her research on how Fuller?s notion of Spaceship Earth and his project World Game (1961/69), the latter designed as a heuristic device to encourage college students? participation in managing global resources, shades into issues of nomadic habitation, capsule architecture, space colonization, and space tourism. In particular, Díaz will trace the reception of Fuller?s attempt to foreground the vulnerability of the planet, and his call to exceed the envelope of the Earth by colonizing extraterrestrial sites, in a study of work by contemporary artists Matthew Day Jackson, Mary Mattingly, and Aleksandra Mir, Tom Sachs, and Tomás Saraceno, among others.

The Fuller Effect book-in-progress grows out of Díaz?s recent book The Experimenters: Chance and Design at Black Mountain College (University of Chicago Press, 2015), which examines how an interdisciplinary group of artists proposed new models of art practice around the concept of experimentation. The Experimenters focuses on three key Black Mountain teachers in the late 1940s and early 1950s: Josef Albers, John Cage, and Buckminster Fuller, and analyzes the risks and possibilities of using the concept of the ?test? as a lens to produce, teach, and understand art.

Eva Díaz is Assistant Professor in the History of Art and Design Department at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. Díaz?s recent book The Experimenters: Chance and Design at Black Mountain College has been released by the University of Chicago Press. Professor Díaz?s writing appears in magazines and journals such as The Art Bulletin, Art Journal, Art in America, Cabinet, The Exhibitionist, Frieze, Grey Room, October, and Tate etc. and she is a regular contributor to Artforum. She was recently awarded a Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation Art Writers Grant to research for her book about Buckminster Fuller?s work, titled The Fuller Effect: The Critique of Total Design in Postwar Art. [pratt.edu]