OSU Homing the Machine Symposium
Sasa Zivkovic gives a lecture titled “The End of the Machine - and its Means” at the Ohio State University Homing the Machine symposium, organized by Galo Canizares and Zach Cohen.
“In the last two decades, architectural designers have identified, problematized, hacked, and mastered the rules, constraints, and performances of digital fabrication technologies. This expansive experimentation has revealed a broad spectrum of conceptual approaches to digital fabrication, yet the field is still taxonomized according to its toolkit—by what tools we use instead of how we use them. Architectural design, on the other hand, is defined not by the tools at its disposal but the ways in which those tools are deployed in design processes. This friction has made it difficult to locate digital fabrication’s place within the architectural discipline: Is it merely another tool? Or is it a design technology? A way of thinking? A construction technique? A new form of craft? A discipline within the discipline? How do we—as architectural practitioners, researchers, thinkers, and educators, as well as active participants in this nascent discourse—approach digital fabrication? And, further, how do we envision our approaches will contribute to architectural design innovation?
This symposium is an invitation to step back from the entanglement of architect-machine configurations; to survey our various trajectories thus far; to situate ourselves and our work in particular social, political, and environmental contexts and their limits; to specify our audiences; to reorient, and perhaps rephysicalize, the machine. Here, we will reflect on recent work in digital fabrication in order to orientate its discourse around the how and why—not the what. From this new starting point, we will aim to discern what guides and grounds our current and future positions in a field that is fixated on moving forward. Which themes, patterns, habits, or curiosities should we choose to advance? Which should we choose to revisit? What should be our evaluative criteria for making these choices? And to what extent should these criteria be informed by the discipline of architectural design? “
More information on the symposium here.