While legal and cultural scholars have labeled the third part of the 20th century – with its particular attention to testimony – as the “era of the witness,” the emergence of forensics in legal forums and popular entertainment signifies a new attention to the communicative capacity, agency, and power of things. This material approach is evident in the ubiquitous role that science and technologies now play in shaping contemporary ways of seeing, knowing, and communicating. Today’s legal and political decisions are often based upon the capacity to display and read DNA samples, 3D laser scans, nanotechnology, and the enhanced vision of electromagnetic microscopes and satellite surveillance. From mass graves to retinal scans, the topography of the seabed to the remnants of destroyed buildings, forensics is not only about the diagnostics, but also about the rhetoric of persuasion. The aesthetic dimension of forensics includes its means of presentation, the theatrics of its delivery, the forms of image and gesture. The forensic aesthetics of the present carries with it grave political and ethical implications, spreading its impact across socioeconomic, environmental, scientific, and cultural domains.

Etymologically, forensics refers to the “forum,” and to the practice and skill of making an argument before a professional, political, or legal gathering. Forensics has always been part of rhetoric, but its domain includes not only human speech but also that of objects. In forensic rhetoric, objects can address the forum. Because objects do not speak for themselves, there is a need for “translation” or “interpretation” – forensic rhetoric requires a person or a set of technologies to mediate between the object and the forum, to present the object, interpret it and place it within a larger net of relations.

The lectures and roundtable discussions by the participating artists, scholars and curators investigate these issues in a series of “forums” organized around a number of disputed objects.

Follow the links to detailed event schedules: DAY ONE and DAY TWO.

Presented by the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School and co-sponsored and co-organized with Cabinet Magazine, The Forensic Architecture ERC Project at The Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths, University of London, and The Human Rights Project at Bard College, on occasion of the Vera List Center’s 2011-2013 focus theme “Thingness.”

Beyond the Super Square: On the Corner of Art & Architecture is a three-day conference designed to draw attention to an important historical period of modernist architectural production in Latin America and the Caribbean that, 40 years later, continues to resonate among many contemporary artists. Opening on October 28, the conference contextualizes the impact of modernist architecture throughout these regions through a series of panels and presentations by scholars, urban planners, students, and contemporary artists, and strives to enrich the dialogue on Latin American architectural tradition, a topic rarely discussed in the United States.

In lieu of a traditional opening night lecture, Eva Franch i Gilabert, Director of Storefront for Art and Architecture, and artist Pedro Reyes inaugurates the conference with the first ever Architecture Challenge! Our charming hosts put the conference participants to test and grill them on the most obscure architectural facts. This evening of game and celebration is conceived by Reyes, organized by the Bronx Museum of the Arts, in collaboration with the Vera List Center for Art and Politics.

Introduction:
Holly Block, Executive Director, The Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York City

Hosts:
Eva Franch i Gilabert, Director, Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York City
Terence Gower, artist, New York City
Pedro Reyes, artist, Mexico City

Contestants:
Carlos Brillembourg, Principal, Carlos Brillembourg Architects, New York City
José Castillo, Principal, arq911sc, Mexico City
Felipe Correa, Co-founder, Somatic Collaborative, New York City
Ana Maria Duran, Co-principal, Estudio A0, Quito
Belmont “Monty” Freeman, Principal, Belmont Freeman Architects, New York City
Alejandro Hernández Gálvez, architect, Mexico City
Javier de Jesús Martínez, Associate Dean, Pontifical Catholic University of Puerto Rico, Ponce
Ligia Nobre, independent curator, Sao Paulo
Jorge Pardo, artist, Los Angeles

Coney Island USA and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School present a roundtable discussion focusing on how artists and art organizations have taken lead roles in the economic redevelopment of New York City and other urban centers. Leaders of local arts organizations from the Bronx, Coney Island, Gowanus, and the Lower East Side discuss how small business creation and community outreach contribute to economic development.

Arts organizations have long been identified as ideal partners for redeveloping neighborhoods seeking interim plans, due to their ability to draw crowds, activate storefronts, and launch activities in a relatively fast-paced manner. Concerned community leaders and local arts organizers consider how the arts have transformed their communities, and how these transformation yield new ways of  government and arts organization partnerships for economic redevelopment and neighborhood preservation in New York City and nationwide.

Moderated by Kevin McQueen, Assistant Director, Community Development Finance Lab, Milano The New School for Management and Urban Policy.

2001 Vera List Center Fellow Margarita Gutman speaks with leading urban scholars William Morrish and Saskia Sassen about her new book Buenos Aires: Itinerant Images of a Metropolitan Future in the First Centennial. This is the first book that comprehensively examines the imagination of the urban future in Buenos Aires. The volume contains close to two hundred images selected from over seven thousand publications which circulated in Buenos Aires between 1900 and 1920. The diversity, creativity, and humor of the images express what the citizens of Buenos Aires expected from a promising urban future. Moderated by David Scobey.

The event is co-sponsored by The New School for General Studies, Bachelor Program.

Buenos Aires: El Poder de la Anticipacion. Imagenes Itinerantes del Futuro Metropolitano en el primer Centenario.
(Buenos Aires: The Power of Anticipation. Itinerant Images of a Metropolitan Future in the First Centennial).
Buenos Aires: Ediciones Infinito, 2011.

Presenter:
Margarita Gutman, Associate Professor, Urban Studies and International Affairs, The New School for General Studies

ByProduct is a new book that assembles the commentaries of artists, activists, curators, and interdisciplinary thinkers on cultural projects “embedded” in industries, the government, and other non-art sectors. Situated deeply in such institutions – and incorporating their architecture, language and much else – these projects produce meaning contingent on their host, becoming a “byproduct” of their existence. Whether the works are explicitly polemical, indirectly critical or instrumentalized by the host institutions is up for debate, and evokes old and new questions around political efficacy, and tactical media.

A new initiative co-organized with the School of Art, Media, and Technology and the Fine Arts Program Parsons, this lecture series captures the increasingly trans-disciplinary nature of scientific, academic, artistic and cultural practices and, in particular, focuses on the complex cross-disciplinary settings for art’s production in contemporary life. Clustered around specific subjects such as geophysics, system theory, economics, and the physics of time, the lectures are presented in thematic pairs, one week apart from one another. Members of The New School’s acclaimed faculty alternate with external scholars, experts and artists. All lectures are open to the public.

Kim Knowlton discusses how climate change impacts public health and how energy production alters landscapes and lives. She explores the story of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill to shed light on the far-ranging impacts of energy choices we make today on near-term and future environmental and health consequences.

This lecture is paired with a talk by artist Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle on October 12, 2010, who will talk of his recent works on natural and constructed phenomena, including climate change.

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Kim Knowlton, PhD, is senior scientist with the Health and Environment Program at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), where she leads the Global Warming and Health Project. She is also Assistant Clinical Professor in the Department of Environmental Health Sciences at the Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University, and chair of the Global Climate Change and Health Committee of the Environment Section at the American Public Health Association. She was among the scientists who participated in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fourth Assessment Report. She works at NRDC on communicating the health impacts of global warming, and on advocating for public health strategies to prepare for and prevent these impacts. Her published research has looked at heat- and ozone-related mortality and illnesses, as well as climate change’s effects on pollen, allergies and asthma, and infectious illnesses. She attended Cornell University and Hunter College/CUNY, and received a doctorate in public health from Columbia University. She was a postdoctoral research scientist at Columbia, and a Mellon Foundation Teaching Fellow in Barnard College’s Department of Environmental Sciences before joining NRDC.

CALL: Inaugural Lecture, Speculating on Change
The inaugural lecture on “Speculating on Change” was delivered by Michael A. Cohen, Director, The Graduate Program of International Affairs at The New School on October 16, 2009. Cohen discussed cities both as sites of the greatest impacts of global change, but also as sites providing solutions to some of the challenges that result from such change. Four specific “paradoxes” – dealing with issues of economy, geography, politics, and sustainability – provided entries to a discussion of cities as both spaces of hope and sites of vulnerability.

RESPONSE: William Morrish
The response is offered by William Morrish, Dean of the School of Constructed Environments at Parsons The New School for Design. Trained as an architect, Morrish comes to Parsons from the University of Virginia School of Architecture, where he taught and led research in the areas of sustainable urban infrastructure, new housing models, and global urbanization and climate change. In that role, he focused on interdisciplinary work addressing what he calls the “second generation of sustainability”: the design of cultural ecologies. He is a nationally recognized urban designer whose practice encompasses inter-disciplinary research on urban housing and infrastructure, collaborative publications on human settlement and community design, and educational programs exploring integrated design, which are applied to a wide range of innovative community-based city projects.

Michael Cohen’s lecture focused on the discrepancy between emerging ideas on sustainable urban development and the realities of implementing them on the ground, in the growing global city. The four points of his lecture identify the reasons that capacity cannot be delivered, namely the lack of adequate research, tools and models. His lecture points to the disturbing fact that most of our urban development skills are based on outdated concepts that identify master plans and large projects as the cure for urban ills. Cohen began to sketch the challenge faced when transferring stimuli for change from to the top to a middle zone, where local economic, social and ecological activities can aggregate into more sustainable urban networks of support. The sobering conclusion of his lecture was that we have little time to change practice and behavior. As the polar ice caps melt, cities are being flooded with new social, cultural and environment realities.

Yet within this maelstrom of global urban change, communities such as Bogotá, Columbia, and Rosaria, Argentina, are overhauling the old the rules of planning, governance and management procedures. Civic leaders and neighborhood activists are learning how to turn the principles of sustainable development into new models of integrated design, inclusive operations, and regenerative practices. These transformations focus on the mid-size scale of the cities and combine it with basic everyday economic and social transactions, for instance by expanding mobility options, connecting micro-business networks, and designing open and transparent civic facilities as cultural centers.

Refuting all notions of serious scholarship, Mitrasinovic and Kuoni tackle three big ideas–time, place and word–in little over an hour’s time. From their respective fields of architecture and urbanism (Mitrasinovic) and art and politics (Kuoni), each presents three case studies for the audience’s delight and their counterpart’s contemplation. The quick exchange will present examples of interdisciplinary practices that take into account current ideas about public space and social engagement.

Miodrag Mitrasinovic is an architect, author and Associate Professor at The School of Design Strategies, Parsons The New School for Design, where he currently serves as Dean and was previously the Chair of Urban and Transdisciplinary Design. His professional and scholarly work has been published internationally, including the Journal of Architecture and Building Science of the Architectural Institute of Japan, L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui, and Metropolis. He is the author of Total Landscape, Theme Parks, Public Space (Ashgate 2006), and co-editor of Travel, Space, Architecture (Ashgate 2009).

Carin Kuoni is director of the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School. From 1998 to 2003, she was director of exhibitions at Independent Curators International (iCI), and from 1992 to 1997 director of The Swiss Institute. An independent curator and art critic, Kuoni has curated many exhibitions of contemporary international art including “The Puppet Show” (co-curated with Ingrid Schaffner, 2008) and “OURS: Democracy in the Age of Branding,” presented at Parsons The New School for Design in 2009.

Presented as part of “Streaming Culture / Art & Politics,” a new interdivisional initiative organized by Victoria Vesna, Visiting Professor (UCLA) and Director of Research, School of Art, Media & Technology, Parsons The New School of Design, in collaboration with the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School.

About Streaming Culture / Art & Politics
The New School comprises eight different schools with hundreds of programs in the visual and performing arts, design, the humanities, public policy, and the social sciences. This lecture series pairs faculty from the various schools and their guests, to discuss some of the pressing issues facing their fields, and to explore common grounds between aesthetic and political practices. Hailing from all New School divisions, the speakers will inspire students, colleagues and the public to connect across disciplines.

If you are not able to join us in person, log on to The New School’s Ustream channel.

Presented on occasion of the Vera List Center’s 2009/2010 program theme “Speculating on Change.”