Workshops

BIM INCUBATOR ARCHITECHNOPOETIC WORKSHOPS

Architechnopoetic workshops and BIRDS performance are lovingly funded by the Council on Science and Technology.  Please register for workshops here

WORKSHOP 1: DuBois’ Sci-Fi Megascope with Adrienne Brown, Farzin Lotfi-Jam, and Sharon De La Cruz.   Augmented reality workshop prototyping technology from WEB DuBois’ recently discovered  short science fiction story The Princess Steel.  Workshop takes place Saturday MAR 9 in StudioLab 10AM – 2PM with a provided lunch.   Using the freely available Unity engine, participants use video game graphics and web cameras as the base platform for operating on media and data.   Adrienne Brown is Associate Professor of English at University of Chicago and author of The Black Skyscraper: Architecture and the Perception of Race.  Farzin Lotfi-Jam is principal of Farzin Farzin and faculty in The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture at the Cooper Union.

Participants prototyped a Megascope, a technology invented by WEB DuBois in his short science fiction story The Princess Steel. The story languished in the archives unpublished for over a century, so this may be the first Megascope that anyone has ever created. Written in 1908, DuBois’ story predicts the collapse of cinematic technologies and computation, even foreshadows augmented reality. The Megascope appears in the laboratory of a sociologist, offering perception of the Great Near.

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WORKSHOP 2: Choreographing Robots to Fly with Olivier Tarpaga and Mitch McEwen.  SPRING BREAK | WORKSHOP 2: MAR 22 – 23 | Drone path planning and choreography workshop in the Labatut Glass Box from 11AM to 3PM.

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WORKSHOP 3:  Robotic Double Dutch with Amina Blacksher.  Robot-controlled jump rope, based on double dutch (ie 4 arms), staged with Universal Robots and the ABB robotic arms.  APR 5 – APR 6 | Robot workshop in ECL.   Amina Blacksher teaches at Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation and is an architectural designer based in New York City with experience at Bjarke Ingels Group, Ennead Architects, and Gordon Kipping Architects.

Robot Double Dutch with Amina Blacksher from Black Box | Princeton SOA on Vimeo.

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WORKSHOP 4: Sounding Space: dimensional design installation & workshop with beth coleman and Farzin Lotfi-Jam. APR 12 during the BIM Incubator from 1:15PM – 2:00PM at the Architecture Lab (Labatut Glass Box) .  In the advent of the surround (Harney & Moten), one finds the maroon, the escape artist and refugee, slipping away from the stated, the measured, and the brittle definition of enclosure. With this installation (the second in a series started in the mountains of the Blackfeet Nation, Blood Tribe…) participants attend to a generative architectures (Coleman, Parisi) or architechnopoetics (McEwen) that map a corollary of sound and space. It is a 45-minute workshop based on Technologies of the Surround,” an installation series Coleman started in the mountains of Banff that is a conceptual and architectural tracing of space in sound. It touches on big thematics, such as the polluted sound of almost anyplace in the post-industrial Modernist decay, as well as modest, domestic, locals. Participants will actively chart the audio contours of the Architecture Lab. This tracing will be the product of sound, gesture, and digital augments such as augmented reality and electronics.  beth coleman is a professor of Experimental Digital Media, director of the City as Platform Lab, and co-director of the Critical Media Lab at the University of Waterloo and author of Hello Avatar.  Farzin Lotfi-Jam is principal of Farzin Farzin and faculty in The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture at the Cooper Union.

———————————————————————————————–What is BIM?

BIM Incubator participants shuttle between the aesthetic and technical realms in what theorist Donna Haraway calls sympoiesis–a companioned knowledge or mode of making-with.  Traditionally, BIM as an acronym in architecture refers to Building Information Modeling, a computational method of project delivery that has been professionalized in the last 2 decades.  BIM Incubator scrambles this acronym in unexpected ways:

Black Imagination Matters

Beyond Intelligent Machines

Building Information Magic

Black Is More

Moving between these conceptual horizons, BIM Incubator brings together participants from disparate fields of knowledge to think collaboratively about blackness and black culture in relation to architecture and also produce work that expands the scope of both architecture and the African American intellectual tradition as they intersect around notions of technology, technique, media, or genre.