[Reader-List] relay

…

It’s been two months and nine days since I landed here in Bangalore. Can I
say I have arrived here? Not yet. Not yet.

Bangalore is a city of different time-spaces (or so I have concluded it to
be). Different areas in the city live in different time-spaces and time
practices. Koramangala is a different time-space and the town area, mainly
M. G. Road, is a different time-space. The area I live in, Thilaknagar, is
a different time-space. Each of these areas lives in a time-space of its
own – historic time and present time. I fathom historic time from the
architecture and built form of the buildings and surroundings. But that’s
not all. The built space, the history of the area have something to do
with people’s time practices of that area. Present time I see from
people’s everyday life and practices as well from new built form. And
there is continuous interaction between historic time, people’s practices
located in that time, present time and people’s practices of the present
time.

I don’t know in what ways this city has transformed but it sure has is
what everyone here says. For one, everybody agrees that the traffic on the
roads has increased. I have come from Mumbai, a much more dense city.
There, density produces a different experience of space. Bangalore is not
at all dense. And so the experience of space here is quite different.
Bangalore is just rushed and moving at close shaves, as I have experienced
as a pedestrian trying to walk on the streets. Every movement is a close
shave …

I see a lot of burkha-clad Muslim women on the streets and around the
spaces of Bangalore. Each sight of a Muslim burkha-clad woman in each
space brings in the experience of a certain historic time. You might think
I am suggesting that burkha-clad Muslim women are symbolizing some kind of
pre-modernity, but I don’t know what modernity itself is. What I am simply
saying is that each time I see a burkha-clad Muslim woman in the public
bus or squatting by the side of the pavement or simply walking on the
streets, through each of these sights I experience a city that suddenly
lives in a different time-space. I don’t know the time-space of a space
such as the Electronic City, what people’s time-space practices there are.
But when I watch burkha-clad Muslim women, I realize that different people
in this city are living in different time-spaces or rather different
groups in this city are living in different time-spaces and these
differences in time-spaces are not necessarily historic, but also very
much located in the present, in the everyday of the here and now!

Let me speak of where I live, that interesting space called Thilaknagar. I
am told Thilaknagar is one of Bangalore’s most successful slums, by what
standards and what benchmarking, I don’t know. At 5 AM in the mornings, I
sometimes watch queues of women waiting for something. I have guessed that
that something is sometimes fair-price shop kerosene and sometimes that
something is water. The times when I have watched these patient yet
seething queues, I have shuddered to think of the implicit violence that
this practice carries with it – that contest for basic resources. (Have
you ever waited for rationed water?)

Thilaknagar consists of Tamils and Muslims. The Muslims here are largely
Tamil-speaking. I live on some kind of urban mental boundary. This area is
also known as Jayanagar 4th T block. Now here is where the urban mental
boundary is (if you are with me uptil now). As you walk out South from
where I live in Thilaknagar, South-West towards Sanjay Gandhi hospital,
what you will witness is a gradual transformation of not just physical
space, but of the urban experience itself. From the unclean, messy
Thilaknagar to Jayanagar 4th T Block, onwards to 4th block, the shift is
both gradual and sudden. From some kind of messiness to some kind of
ordered affluence. Everything changes, including the relationships which
characterize the time-space.

Time-spaces don’t operate in a vacuum. Time-spaces also emerge from the
relationships which people share with one another, with the space itself
and the elements which constitute the space (including capital, territory,
land and identity, ethnicity, etc.) Out here in Thilaknagar, the
relationships are both antagonistic as well as existing. Since the last
few days, in the Southern part of Thilaknagar, there are calls from the
mosques given that Ramzaan has begun. And then, last night, in the North
Western part, there were pandals of excitement and festivity, celebrating
the nine days of Dussehra. Perhaps here is where the antagonistic
relationships exist. The Muslims and the Tamilians are historic enemies
here, but they exist. And the interesting thing is that both the Tamils
and the Tamilian Muslims are very similar in their essential personalities
– just different communal lines.

The other day, someone shit inside the gate of my stairways. When I saw
the little pile of excreta, I felt disgusted. Just about who would dare do
this? In a fit of irritation and anger, I brought out the broom and began
to clean, creating more mess than what was before. I gave up, left the
broom by the side of the gate, locked the gate and went away. When I
returned in the evening, the broom was gone. Then just a few days ago one
morning, I carelessly left the Chinese lock hanging by the gate. When I
got down in the afternoon, the lock was gone. I wondered who would have
taken it away. Irritated. Disgusted. No sense of property here. I checked
with the shopkeeper by the street. While he spoke, he also mentioned that
he lived about ten kilometers away from Thilaknagar. Curious, I asked him
why that far. “The kids enter your house; they scamper around; no sense of
privacy. I don’t think my house people would have liked this. I moved.”
And I curiously try to understand notions of property, space and private
and public ‘spheres’ in this curious time-space.

Let’s get back to the city. I was walking by the 4th block post office
this evening. The air was full of moisture. It seemed like the impending
dawn of another winter. I felt I re-discovered words that were lost. No, I
don’t own this city. I am a stranger here. I find it strange. I am trying
to prove my identity in every sphere as I attempt to settle in here
(before I can leave again) – identity for opening a bank account, address
proof for obtaining an LPG connection. I thought my sense of self came
from my words and all this while I felt a loss of sense of self because my
words were lost. But in the everyday life of the city (including
bureaucracy, state, government, etc.), self has to be proved existing
through address proofs. Ah, what futility! What futile words!

…



Zainab Bawa
Bombay
www.xanga.com/CityBytes
http://crimsonfeet.recut.org/rubrique53.html

Via: tenzin tsetan

Via: m

xxxxx_at_piksel

13-14 October, Cinemateket USF,Bergen, Norway

Two days of seminar, discussion and highly practical interrogation of expanded
software and the impact of the executable on necessarily open hardware as a
political act.

xxxxx crashes into the intent of open hardware, eviscerating software; the
blunt realm of the user as cynical economic motif. After Artaud, the CPU
(central processing unit) and its double mimes The Theatre and its Double. On
the one hand, there is the System or entropic operation of a necessarily
cynical machine for living, an atrocity exhibition, on the other hand the
specification of an artistic CPU for life coding. The data sheet will be
examined as to its operational codes (day one), new (simulation) models will
be constructed (day two).

Confirmed participants:
Wilfried Hou Je Bek, Martin Howse, Jonathan Kemp, Aymeric Mansoux, Bruno
Marchal, Otto Roessler, Tom Schouten, Marloes de Valk, Eva Verhoeven,
Valentina Vuksic

Produced by BEK and ap/xxxxx:

ap/xxxxx[1] was founded in 1998 to necessitate the code-terms expansion
implied by a growing and politically active free software movement. With
wilfully avant-garde intent, and through intervention, performance, staged
events, seminars, hardware constructions and readily accessible software,
ap/xxxxx examines through live descriptive process software (culture and
history), embedding auto-destruction. Software is viewed as substance.

Piksel[2] is an annual event for artists and developers working with open
source audiovisual software. Part workshop, part festival, it is organised in
Bergen, Norway, by the Bergen Centre for Electronic Arts (BEK)[3] and
involves participants from more than a dozen countries exchanging ideas,
coding, presenting art and software projects, doing workshops, performances
and discussions on the aesthetics and politics of open source and free
culture. This years event - Piksel06[4] – continues the exploration of
audiovisual code and it's myriad of expressions, but also brings in open
hardware as a new focus area.

Information:

xxxxx_at_piksel[5] will take place 11am to 3pm 13 October, 11am to 5pm 14
October at Cinemateket USF[6], Bergen, Norway as part of the Piksel06
festival.

Admission is free but with a limited number of seats. For reservation send a
mail to: piksel06@bek.no

About the participants:

**Wilfried Hou Je Bek (NL)

Applying scientific rigour and an eminently wide-ranging frame of
crytsalpunk reference, socialfiction.org protaganist Wilfried Hou Je
Bek plays out the expressively elegant and digressional expansion of
software across all (literalised) domains, for example algorithmic
psychogeography.

**Martin Howse (UK)

Speculative and necessarily open hardware explorer Martin Howse
proposes a denuded artistic CPU (an elaborated, auto-destructive
bachelor-culture machine) running heavily promiscuous code and
operating on a noise terrain. Latest plans include the staging of the
xxxxx research institute in Berlin.

**Jonathan Kemp (UK)
Performer, theorist, ap/xxxxx collaborator and visual artist, Jonathan Kemp
applies the refined instruments of his adoptive stoneworking to excavate the
esoteric thought matter of characters such as Emmanuel Swedenborg and
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz.

**Bruno Marchal (BE)
Bruno Marchal is currently occupied with refining his supremely elegant,
code-based theories of COMP at the IRIDIA AI labs in Brussels. COMP has
precise consequences, for example that physics is necessarily a branch of
computer science; the implication being that "if you were in a perfect
simulation you wouldn't know it."

**Otto Roessler (DE)
German biochemist Otto E. Roessler occupies the rare contemporary position of
a scientific and artistic polymath with noted significant contributions to
chaos theory, under his original attractor, and the fresh science of
endophysics. His current major project, Lampsacus, proposes a truly free
networked informational society.

**Eva Verhoeven (NL)
The original work of artist and theorist Eva Verhoeven proposes a concise and
well defined series of laboratory-style experiments and interventions which
elaborate a trajectory from noise/interference within existent (computer)
systems towards totally speculative hardware.

**Valentina Vuksic (DE)
Former student of both essential economics and computer science, Valentina
Vuksic explores a highly individual articulation of hard and software
mediation; the processes in such intermediate space as action thus implying
actors rendered audible through novel intrusion.

**Tom Schouten (BE)
Artist and independent software developer. He is the author of PDP, an
extension for Pure Data, which adds building blocks for image and video
processing, and other media oriented applications, tightly integrated to the
computer music system which hosts it. Currently he is developing Packet
Forth, a stand-alone application / scripting language for media processing
and BADNOP, an interactive FORTH compiler for Microchip Picmicro
microcontrollers.

**Aymeric Mansoux (FR)
Since the mid-nineties, Aymeric Mansoux has taken part in many artistic
experiments based on the internet and the emergence of networks. Traceroutes,
network packets, digital feedbacks and piped logs become a new clay that can
be used to develop autonomous artistic processes. Currently an mphil/PhD?
student at the creative technologies department of the University of
Huddersfield, his most recent artistic projects include a residency at the
Mediacentre of Huddersfield, a collaboration with Chun Lee within the live
electronic music group 0xA, and Metabiosis, a project on non-carbon based
pseudo live forms in distributed computing and peer-to-peer networked
ecosystems with the Dutch artist Marloes de Valk.

**Marloes de Valk (NL)
Dutch audiovisual artist, currently based in the UK. She studied Sound and
Image at the Royal Conservatory in the Hague, specializing in abstract
compositional computer games, HCI and crashing computers. Starting out as a
visual artist who played violin, she ended up bringing the worlds of sound
and image together by building her own digital instruments in which sound and
image are of equal importance, created real-time, simultaneously, influencing
and distorting each other. Currently she is collaborating with French artist
Aymeric Mansoux on Metabiosis, a project investigating the ups and downs of
datapackets living in a world of connected ecosystems. Marloes is part of the
Digital Research Unit at the University of Huddersfield.

Via: "mahmood farooqui"

CALL FOR APPLICATIONS FOR DIRECTORSHIP OF JAHANGIRABAD MEDIA INSTITUTE


Jahangirabad Media Institute has been set up by Jahangirabad Education
Trust under Jahangirabad Institute of Technology as one of its
centers of excellence in electronic media.
JMI aims to train and shape highly skilled professionals for the
video, television and advertising industry. Its broad mission is to
impart a holistic education It aims to stimulate creative potential of
students and to cultivate a scientific temper, carry out research in
media and communication and encourage the students to creatively e
xplore the audio visual medium for social change.
To achieve above objective the institute is currently imparting post
graduate diploma to prepare its students for a leading careers in TV
channels, production houses, advertising firms, MNC's, media research
and educational institutions, non-governmental organizations, more
courses are planned soon.

This premier institute of higher learning is located in the fort of
Jahangirabad, a 19th century palatial monument, built across the
serene and picturesque environs of more than 30-acre campu s at
Barabanki district, is about 35 kilometers from Lucknow City .

The institute is loo king for Director,

The candidate will be a Dynamic media professional with a vision &
passion to shape the Media Studies and set global benchmarks. The
ideal candidate will have proven track record as a leader and of
handling academic, administrative and financial matters. He/She will
have excellent contacts in the media & government agencies.

The position carries competitive emoluments as well as appropriate ac
commodation on the campus.
The interested candidates are requested to send their detailed resume
in confidence along with a 'Vision Paper' to:

The Chairman
Search Committee for Director Media Institute
Jahangirabad Institute of Technology
Jahangirabad Fort.
District Barabanki
UP."

Via: "Shivam Vij"

Protest against burning of the works of Dr. B R Ambedkar at AIIMS on
29 September 2006

To protest against the burning of Dr Bhim Rao Ambedkar's literature by
doctors of the AIIMS, 15 Dalit organisations plan to hold a
demonstration outside the main gate of AIIMS (opposite the Safdarjang
Hospital gate) at 12 noon on Friday September 29, 2006. The act of
burning demonstrates the fact that even educated doctors can be so
much insolent towards the constituional ideals of social inclusion,
social cohesion and protection of human rights through affirmative
action.

Please consider joining the protest and support the cause of inclusion

Rajni Tilak

Via: "arshad amanullah"

Madaris-e-Ahle Hadis: Ek Tarikhi Dastavez (Directory of the Ahle Hadis Madrasas
In India)
Compiler: Khalid Haneef Siddiqui
Publisher: Markazi Jamiat Ahle Hadis, Delhi
Year : 2004
pp. 622+xvi
INR: 200.00
Reviewed by: Arshad Amanullah


The Ahle Hadis, pejoratively known as 'Wahhabis', though emerged like
several other sects as a response to the crisis of the slippage of
political power from the Muslim ruling elite to the British, the sect,
unlike others, has a well-documented history as a group which offered
armed resistance to the Raj. The British suppression of the sect made
its ulama introvert and forced them to maintain a low profile. This
also gets reflected in the body of the academic literature available
on this section of the South Indian Muslims. There is absolutely no
serious empirical or sociological investigation about the people and
ulama of the sect in Independent India. By putting a first hand data
about several important aspects of madrasas of the sect in public
domain, Siddiqui seeks to fill a very
important gap in our understanding of Muslim religious groups and
ulama activism after 1947.

This directory, report of the survery conducted under the aegis of
Markazi Jami'at Ahle Hadis, Hind, provides important information
regarding 1636 out of about 2500 Ahle Hadis educational institutions,
including boys and girl madrasas, secular schools, technical
institutes and tibbiya colleges all over country. In arranging the
data, the compiler has observed the following method: names of states
and districts are in alphabetical order; it divides the madrasas in
five categories (Fazilat, Alamiyat, Sanaviya, Motawassita and
Ibtidaiyya) ; each district starts from the highest level of the
madrasas i.e. Fazilat it has. Here he does not observe the
alphabetical order.

The section on every state begins with a brief but useful note on its
geography, demography and literacy rate in general. It points out
names of the districts which have the concentration of the Ahle Hadis
population and, as a result, that of the educational institutions. It
vaguely talks about the status of literacy and the economic condition
of the sect-members in a particular state. It places special emphasis
on mentioning names of the girl madrasas of the state. Moreover, it
mentions names of the Ahle Hadis magazines coming out of the state.
Libraries and publication houses of the sect also find place in the
note.

The directory furnishes the following details regarding every
institution it enlists: year of establishment; name of founders;
present general secretary and principal; level of education; number of
the students(boys and girls) enrolled, whether they are day scholars
or avail the boarding facilities; number of academic and
administrative staff; nature of curriculum(religious, secular or a mix
of both); whether it is affiliated to any board or university; source
of revenue, whether it gets any financial grant from the government,
annual budgets; details of the land and the premises; number of
books available in the library if there is any; registration number(
if registered) and the full postal address with phone numbers. None of
them carry email address.

Though the directory is a remarkable shift in terms of the
presentation and content from its prototype Jama'at-e-Ahle Hadis Ki
Tadrisi Khidmaat (Contribution of the Ahle Hadis Sect to the Field of
Education, Jamia Salafia, Varanasi, 1984) by Maulana Azizur Rahman
Salafi, Siddiqui's compilation also leaves much to be desired. As the
maps enclosed in the beginning of the section on every state do not
bear any coloured or graphic representation of the presence or
concentration of the population and educational centers of the sect in
a particular region, they do not serve any purpose. Like most of the
Urdu publications, this directory does not have any alphabetical
index. However, towards the end, it incorporates two exclusive
indexes: one for those madrasas which provide education upto the
Fazilat level and another for the girl madrasas. The last page
contains names of 88 institutions on which no information is provided
in the directory. It ends with the promise to include them in the
second edition. Using deftly the available data, the compiler could
have made it more user- friendly. Like he could have very easily
inform the users about the number of people employed in the
unorganized sector of the madrasas as every madrasa had mentioned
total number of its staff. Moreover, the directory divides the
curriculum of a certain madrasa into two categories: dini (religious)
and asri (modern). One needs to know what they stand for as they have
not been explained anywhere.

Despite its limitations, very few books have proved as timely as is
the case with this directory. It is a must for scholars interested in
the South Asian Islam as it is an invaluable contribution to the
madrasa studies which has flourished so rapidly in the wake of rise of
Taliban and fall of twin towers.


arshad amanullah
35,masihgarh,
jamia nagar
new delhi-25.

Via: "PUKAR"

Via: "Nalaka Gunawardene, TVE Asia Pacific"

This news story also appears at: http://www.tveap.org/news/0609baq.html

Media for Cleaner Air in Asia:
Journalists invited to apply for BAQ 2006 media scholarships

Manila/Colombo, 21 September 2006: A major new initiative was announced
today for engaging Asian media professionals to cover the region’s quest
for cleaner air.

Two dozen journalists from across developing Asia will be granted media
scholarships to attend Better Air Quality 2006 (BAQ 2006,
www.baq2006.org) to be held in Yogyakarta,
Indonesia, from 13 to 15 December 2006. They will also benefit from skills
training on clean air issues on 11 to 12 December 2006 at the same city.

BAQ 2006 will be the year’s largest regional gathering of industry,
research, government and civil society representatives committed to cleaner
air in the world’s largest region, the Asia Pacific.

The media scholarship programme is a joint effort by the Clean Air
Initiative for Asian Cities (CAI-Asia,
www.cleanairnet.org/caiasia) and TVE
Asia Pacific (TVEAP, www.tveap.org) – two regional
organisations committed to promoting better media coverage of clean air issues.

“BAQ 2006 is a great opportunity for the national, regional and global
media to understand important air pollution issues experienced by Asian
cities and meet the people from each country who are the sources of
information on these issues,” said Cornie Huizenga, Head of Secretariat of
CAI-Asia.

“Polluted air has been a concern of the Asian media for years,” says Nalaka
Gunawardene, Director and Chief Executive Officer of TVE Asia Pacific. “But
some efforts for cleaning up the air seem to be happening below the media’s
radar. We hope our scholarship winners will highlight these and also focus
on remaining challenges.”

CAI-Asia and TVEAP will select up to 25 journalists from developing Asia
(list of eligible countries given at the end) on an open, competitive
basis. These journalists are to be drawn from print, broadcast and online
media. As part of the scholarship, each journalist is expected to produce
at least three (3) items (newspaper articles, radio/TV items, or online
articles) using information and material gathered during BAQ 2006.

Spending a working week in Yogyakarta, they will first attend a 2-day
training workshop (December 11 – 12) on ‘Covering Asia’s quest for Cleaner
Air: Where are the stories?’ that will be organized by TVE Asia Pacific.
This will involve a mix of presentations by air quality experts and media
specialists, discussion sessions, and viewing ‘best practice’ media
products from around the world.
Journalists will then be able to attend BAQ 2006 events of their choice
during December 13 - 15, conducting their own investigations and
interviews. The media specialists will remain available for on-site advice
and support. Television journalists will be provided the free, shared
services of a professional camera crew and basic non-linear editing
facilities.

CAI-Asia and TVEAP expect that these inputs will result in a higher level
of coverage – both in terms of quantity and quality – on clean air related
issues and concerns that will be highlighted at BAQ 2006.

Applications will be accepted from mid-career journalists until 16 October
2006, and selections are to be announced by mid November 2006.
* * * * *

The Clean Air Initiative for Asian Cities (CAI-Asia,
www.cleanairnet.org/caiasia) is a multi-stakeholder network of institutions
and individuals committed to improving air quality management (AQM) in
Asia. It was launched in February 2001 to address the growing problem of
air pollution that threatens public health, productivity, and overall
quality of life in the region. ADB is a founding member of the initiative
and, along with the World Bank, jointly hosts the CAI-Asia Secretariat. Its
mission is to promote and demonstrate innovative ways to improve the air
quality of Asian cities by sharing experiences and building partnerships.

TVE Asia Pacific (TVEAP, www.tveap.org) is a regional not-for-profit
organisation that uses television, video and Internet to raise awareness on
sustainable development and social justice issues. Established in 1996, and
governed by an international Board of Directors, TVEAP operates as an
editorially independent, journalistic organisation. Working with experts
and media professionals from across the region, TVEAP: produces and
distributes TV programmes; trains TV professionals; consults on
communications strategies; and networks with governments, civil society and
educational institutions.

Note:
Media scholarships are available to full time journalist and regular
freelancers engaged in the print, radio, television or online media in any
of the following countries: Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Cambodia, Hong
Kong, India, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Mongolia, Nepal, Pakistan, People's
Republic of China, Philippines, Sri Lanka, Singapore, Thailand and Viet Nam.


For further information/clarifications on this press release, contact:

Glynda Bathan, Clean Air Initiative for Asian Cities Secretariat
Phone: + 63 2 632 5151; Fax: + 63 2 636 2381; Email:

Nalaka Gunawardene, TVE Asia Pacific (Television for Education – Asia Pacific)
Phone: + 94 11 4412 195; Fax: + 94 11 4403 443; Email:

More information and application forms available at:
http://www.tveap.org/baq2006/index.html
http://www.cleanairnet.org/baq2006/1757/propertyvalue-26756.html









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Via: Aarti Sethi

Via: Trebor Scholz

The Center for Virtual Architecture at the University at Buffalo, the
Institute for Distributed Creativity, and The Architectural League of
New York present:

ARCHITECTURE AND SITUATED TECHNOLOGIES
October 19-21, 2006
@ The Urban Center & Eyebeam
New York City

http://www.situatedtechnologies.net

A 3-day symposium bringing together researchers and practitioners
from art, architecture, technology and sociology to explore the
emerging role of "situated" technologies in the design and
inhabitation of the contemporary metapolis.

Organized by Omar Khan, Trebor Scholz, and Mark Shepard

Participants: Jonah Brucker-Cohen, Richard Coyne, Michael Fox, Anne
Galloway, Charlie Gere, Usman Haque, Natalie Jeremijenko, Sheila
Kennedy, Eric Paulos, Karmen Franinovic, Mette Ramsgard Thomsen,
Kazys Varnelis

Contact: Jessica Blaustein - blaustein@archleague.org

Since the late 1980s, computer scientists and engineers have been
researching ways of embedding computational intelligence into the
built environment. Looking beyond the model of personal computing,
which placed the computer in the foreground of our attention,
"ubiquitous" computing takes into account the social dimension of
human environments and allows computers themselves to vanish into the
background. No longer solely virtual, human interaction with
computers becomes socially integrated and spatially contingent as
everyday objects and spaces are linked through networked computing.

Today, researchers focus on how situational parameters inform the
design of a wide range of mobile, wearable, networked, distributed
and context-aware devices. Incorporating an awareness of cultural
context, accrued social meanings, and the temporality of spatial
experience, situated technologies privilege the local, context-
specific and spatially contingent dimension of their use.

Despite the obvious implications for the built environment,
architects have been largely absent from this discussion, and
technologists have been limited to developing technologies that take
existing architectural topographies as a given context to be augmented.

At the same time, to the extent that early adopters of these
technologies have focused on commercial, military and law enforcement
applications, we can expect to see new forms of consumption, warfare
and control emerge.

This symposium seeks to occupy the imaginary of these emerging
technologies and propose alternate trajectories for their development.

What opportunities and dilemmas does a world of networked "things"
pose for architecture and urbanism? What distinguishes the emerging
urban sociality enabled by mobile technologies and wireless networks?
What post-optimal design strategies and tactics might we propose for
an age of responsive environments, smart materials, embodied
interactions, and participatory networks? How might this evolving
relation between people and "things" alter the way we occupy,
navigate, and inhabit the city? What is the status of the material
object in a world privileging networked relations between "things"?
How do distinctions between space and place change within these
networked media ecologies? How do the social uses of these
technologies, including (non-) affective giving, destabilize
rationalized "use-case scenarios" designed around the generic consumer?

Through a combination of presentations, discussions, and performative
design scenarios organized around the notion of "encounter" with the
city, this symposium will explore how architecture might contribute
to the development of situated technologies, and how a critical
engagement with these technologies might extend architecture beyond
itself.

+++

Architecture and Situated Technologies is a co-production of the
Center for Virtual Architecture, The Institute for Distributed
Creativity, and the Architectural League of New York, as part of the
League's celebration of the 125th anniversary of its founding.

Architecture and Situated Technologies is supported by the J. Clawson
Mills Fund of the Architectural League and is supported in part by
the School of Architecture and Planning and the Department of Media
Study at the University at Buffalo.

+++

The Center for Virtual Architecture at the University at Buffalo
http://cva.ap.buffalo.edu
The Center for Virtual Architecture¹s research is located at the
intersection of architecture, new media and computational
technologies. We are interested in the possibilities offered by
computational systems for rethinking human interaction with (and
within) the built environment. Our focus areas include learning
environments, design environments, responsive architecture and
locative media. Computational technology provides both a means and a
medium for this research: an operative paradigm for conceptualizing
relations between people, information, and the material fabric of
everyday life.

The Institute for Distributed Creativity
http://www.distributedcreativity.org
The research of the Institute for Distributed Creativity (iDC)
focuses on sociable media and media theory with an emphasis on social
justice. Its mailing list is a vivid discoursive platform for the
social implications of emerging forms of networked sociality. The iDC
is an international network that combines collaborative research,
events, and documentation.

The Architectural League of New York
http://www.archleague.org
The Architectural League of New York is an independent forum for the
presentation and discussion of creative and intellectual work in
architecture, urbanism, and related design disciplines. Founded in
1881, the League promotes excellence and innovation in architecture
and urbanism by furthering the education of architects and designers,
and by communicating to a broad audience the importance of
architecture in public life. Through an active schedule of programs,
the League provides a venue for contemporary work and ideas,
identifies and encourages the work of talented young architects,
creates opportunities for exploring new approaches to problems in the
built environment, and fosters a stimulating community for dialogue
and debate. All of the League¹s work is shaped by its ongoing
commitment to interdisciplinary, intergenerational, and international
exchange, and by its concern for the quality of architecture and city
form as critical components of a vital and dynamic culture.