Split Agency: form, standards, and authorship in times of variable media

Datum | 14.06.2010, 19.00 h
Ort | Akademie der bildenden Künste Wien, Schillerplatz 3, 1010 Wien, R211a, 2.OG

Vortrag von Mario Carpo im Rahmen der Vortragsreihe “Materialising Ideas in an Age of Digital Production” am Institut für Kunst und Architektur 2009|2010.

All that is digital is variable, and today CAD-CAM or BIM notations are no less variable than any other digital media object (such as texts, images or music). Next to the formal and economic implications of the digital turn in architecture, which have already been largely assessed, architects are now testing the shifting and at times uncontrollable nature of digital authorship. New forms of digitally supported, participatory agency are already taking shape, and architects are sometimes puzzled or alarmed by the devolution of authorship that these new digital tools will inevitably entail. They should not be.

Mario Carpo teaches architectural history and theory at the Georgia Institute of Technology (Atlanta, GA). He has taught and lectured in several universities in Europe and the United States, most recently at the School of Architecture of Paris-La Villette and at Yale University, and he was the Head of the Study Centre at the Canadian Centre for Architecture from 2002 to 2005. Carpo’s research and publications focus on the relationship among architectural theory, cultural history, and the history of media and information technology. Among his publications, Architecture in the Age of Printing (The MIT Press, 2001) has been translated into several languages. His next monograph, The 2 Alphabet and the Algorithm, is forthcoming in 2011 (also with the MITPress).