Investigating and Writing Achitectural History: Subjects, Methodologies and Frontiers.

The volume contains the abstracts and full texts of the 157 papers and position statements presented and discussed at the III EAHN (European Architectural History) International Meeting, Torino 19-21 June 201

Networked Collectivities: North American Artists' Groups, 1968-1978.

In the late 1960s and ’70s, hundreds of artists across North America banded together into small groupings, sometimes two, sometimes ten, seeking alternatives to the single-artist model prized since the Renaissance. Many of these “collectives” drew support and methodologies from countercultural political movements invested in feminist and queer politics, Chicano and African-American identity, ecological advancements, and new media, to name a few. This study demonstrates that, despite differences in location, media, and political views, they shared goals and strategies. Most importantly, they sought to change the networks in which their art was produced and distributed, and thereby fashion new artistic identities for themselves and interpellate different publics for their work. Taking three such groups—Asco, Ant Farm, and General Idea—as case studies, this dissertation considers several central issues relating to artistic practice in the 1970s: collaboration and artistic identity, conceptual art outside the frame of the art world, intersections of art and consumer society, and political art in the wake of an exhausted politicized subculture. By examining archival material—photographs, manuscripts, video- and audiotapes, grant applications, notebooks, reviews, props, clothing, financial records, and installations—I reconstitute these groups’ often ephemeral practices, discovering the ways in which they seized, interrupted, and re-configured the discursive networks in which contemporary art was embedded. Rather than being merely supplemental or secondary materials, as they are often construed, these forms constitute the core of their intermedial practices, an approach that significantly expanded the conception of artistic medium. Establishing new infrastructures, such as artist-run centers, independently published periodicals, and correspondence networks, they generated alternative arenas of practice and interpretation and experimented with systemic solutions to the problem of institutionalized minoritization. In arguing that collectives’ approaches changed, from the utopian premises of 1960s communal movements to an interest in developing communications networks for an increasingly global and technological society, this study offers a different lens through which to understand the supposedly “in between” decade of the 1970s. I contend that ambivalent, networked, intermedial artistic forms developed during the period, have a distinctive character, and are neither simply extensions of 1960s counterculture nor anticipations of 1980s postmodernism.Ph.D.History of ArtUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/64697/1/kolds_3.pdfhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/64697/2/kolds_1.pdfhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/64697/3/kolds_2.pd

Walking Cities: London

WALKING CITIES: LONDON explores how the temporal and spatial realities experienced through urban walking can act as a method for dialogical and empirical mapping across a range of disciplines. Through bringing together a new interdisciplinary field of artists, writers, architects, musicians, human geographers and philosophers we consider how the city walk informs and triggers new processes of making, thinking, researching, and communicating. In particular, we examine how the city contains narratives, knowledge and contested materialities that are best accessed through the act of walking. Ultimately, Walking Cities: London seeks to understand the wider significance of changing geographies to generate critical questions and creative perspectives for navigating the social and political impact of rapid urban change

Skyscraping Frontiers

As a space of extremes, the skyscraper has been continually constructed as an urban frontier in American cultural productions. Like its counterpart of the American wilderness, this vertical frontier serves as a privileged site for both subversion and excessive control. Beyond common metaphoric readings, this study models the skyscraper not only as a Foucauldian heterotopia, but also as a complex network of human and nonhuman actors while retracing its development from its initial assemblage during the 19th century to its steady evolution into a smart structure from the mid-20th century onward. It takes a close look at US-American literary and filmic fictions and the ways in which they sought to make sense of this extraordinary structure throughout the 20th and early 21st centuries. More traditional poststructuralist spatial theories are connected with concepts and methods of Actor-Network Theory in a compelling account of the skyscraper’s evolution as reflected in fictional media from early 20th-century short stories via a range of action, disaster and horror films to selected city novels of the 1990s and 2000s

Digital Theatre: A "Live" and Mediated Art Form Expanding Perceptions of Body, Place, and Community

This work discusses Digital Theatre, a type of performance which utilizes both "live" actors and co-present audiences along with digital media to create a hybrid art form revitalizing theatre for contemporary audiences. This work surveys a wide range of digital performances (with "live" and digital elements, limited interactivity/participation and spoken words) and identifies the group collectively as Digital Theatre, an art form with the flexibility and reach of digital data and the sense of community found in "live" theatre. I offer performance examples from Mark Reaney, David Saltz, Troika Ranch, Gertrude Stein Repertory Theatre, Flying Karamazov Brothers, Talking Birds, Yacov Sharir, Studio Z, George Coates Performance Group, and ArtGrid. (The technologies utilized in performances include: video-conferencing, media projection, MIDI control, motion capture, VR animation, and AI). Rather than looking at these productions as isolated events, I identify them as a movement and link the use of digital techniques to continuing theatrical tradition of utilizing new technologies on the stage. The work ties many of the aesthetic choices explored in theatrical past by the likes of Piscator, Svoboda, Craig, and in Bauhaus and Futurist movements. While it retains the essential qualities of public human connection and imaginative thought central to theatre, Digital Theatre can cause theatrical roles to merge as it extends the performer's body, expands our concept of place, and creates new models of global community