Guest Professor Dr. phil. habil. Kari Jormakka
Studies in the subject of design and architectural theory broach the issue of
the new alliance between architecture, media and the city, as it is shaped by
the general medialisation of today’s culture. The digital paradigm shift,
however, has its previous history in the technological, and productivity-oriented
paradigm shift in the early twentieth century. Similar to digital technology,
machine technology, new construction and production processes and the accompanying
societal revolutions in the beginning of the twentieth century led to a “massive
disruption of the establishment […], which is the downside of the current
crisis and renewal of mankind”, as Walter Benjamin wrote with respect
to the artistic Avant-garde in modern times. A similar explanation is brought
forth by the need for theory development in the age of digital media technology.
If it was it the productivity-oriented paradigm shift in the early twentieth
century, today it is new media technology that leads to the disruption of the
established self-image and forces a new conceptualisation of the discipline
in the interdisciplinary context. If the interest of architectural theory in
the modern age lied mainly in salvaging the autonomy of the discipline as art,
it has been changed today with the omnipresence of the digital media. Through
new media technology architecture assumes a new relationship with the other
cultural practices. In the transition of the dominance of the symbols (linguistic
turn) to the dominance of the images (iconic turn) we are dealing with a new
image awareness. Today images structure more and more the wide field of our
visual perception and likewise the social space. Where these openly coquette
with the pseudo-realisation of concreteness we are confronted with a new state
of being of architecture (Fellmann). With the displacement of the value aesthetic
by a theory of the aesthetic experience and medial space the question concerning
the state of architecture will have to be newly posed. Up for discussion is
architecture as a »stretched-out mixed media experience« (Hays),
in which it is a part of new ways of visualising and perceiving and sensualistic-aesthetic,
the cultural and technological moment of our world experience is intertwined
in a new way with theoretical reflection: Architecture as a mixed media experience.
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