Open call: Datatopia Summer School in the Floating University, Berlin

With Morehshin Allahyari, Alliance of Southern Triangle, Armen Avanessian, Benjamin Bratton, Beatriz Colomina, Brave New Alps, Keller Easterling, Victoria Ivanova, Olaf Nicolai, Öffentliche Gestaltungsberatung, T’ai Smith, Ida Soulard, Georg Vrachliotis, Eyal Weizman, Ines Weizman, Mark Wigley, among others.

Application Deadline:  June 20, 2018

projekt bauhaus critically examines the ideas of the Bauhaus by using its methods: in a Preliminary Course (2017), and a Werkstatt (2018), it seeks to expose the internal contradictions of the Western idea of progress and discuss alternative approaches. One year prior to the centennial celebrations of the Bauhaus founding, the chair for Theory of Architecture at KIT Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in cooperation with projekt bauhaus are delighted to invite post-graduate students and PhD candidates to participate in a 4 days summer school at the Floating University in Berlin.

Datatopia
The UN recently published a series of reports describing various applications of big data technologies for public and civil community projects, based on two remarkable assumptions: First, that data in the future will be “harnessed safely and responsibly as a public good.” Secondly, “that digital data offers the opportunity to gain a better understanding of changes in human well-being.” Contrary to the still widespread idea that big data technologies are only usable by individual companies, this points to the enormous potential of data as a freely available resource for the community and the general public. One of the UN’s central questions is therefore: how can citizens be involved in collecting community-level data and mapping their own living environments, and how can they then use this information in planning for the future? What new emancipatory possibilities might arise from such an approach? What would a digital world look like if big data technologies were indeed readily available to the general public? What would this step mean for society—culturally, scientifically, socially, and politically?  

Before this backdrop arise a set of crucial problems necessary for understanding the emerging setting for architectural and urban planning:

How will spaces of production and thus the concept of work change as certain physical and cognitive actions of humans are increasingly replaced by automation systems, artificial intelligence, and robotics?

How will mobility and everyday life in cities change if the concept of “urbanity” is no longer a synonym for a certain culture of the urban community but, in the sense of “smart cities,” stands for an efficiently regulated, permanently monitored matrix of life synchronized with a plethora of other data? And consequently, how might this change our concept of hinterland?

What kinds of spaces for health and body optimization might become necessary if aesthetic, ethical, and medical approaches to the human body lead to the increasing use of sensors to generate and automatically diagnose biotechnological data?

What kinds of spaces for education, teaching and research might have to be created if design no longer focused on creativity and the sciences no longer on hypotheses and theories, but rather on a new kind of functionalist data empiricism, in which traditional thinking in causalities were superseded by thinking in correlations?

Datatopia Summer School will build on these assumptions to explore interdisciplinary strategies and innovative design methods with select experts and young scholars from architecture, urban design, theory, history, sociology, philosophy, geography, art and the cultural studies. In addition, traditional forms of discourse and fundamental concepts will be critically discussed.

Datatopia Summer School of the chair for Theory of Architecture at KIT is looking for fresh and innovative contributions addressing these questions as a basis for intense theory production.

Datatopia Summer School is part of projekt bauhaus
After the 2017 preliminary course: from Bauhaus to Silicon Valley, projekt bauhaus revives Bauhaus’s  workshop structure in the summer of 2018 in order to explore the emancipatory potential of technologies, the decolonisation of progress and the critique of the present through design. Lead by the most engaging experts from the fields of architecture, urban planning, sociology, philosophy, computer science, political, media, technology history, as well as art and scientific theory, projekt bauhaus Werkstatt comprises a series of workshops accompanied by public lectures, exhibitions, artistic performances and informal gatherings. The Chair of Theory of Architecture at KIT is proud to contribute Datatopia Summer School to the projekt bauhaus Werkstatt.

Location
Datatopia Summer School will take place in Berlin’s unique Floating University, an inner city offshore laboratory for collective and experimental learning designed and developed by raumlaborberlin.

Who can apply?
Datatopia Summer School is aimed at post-graduate students and PhD candidates whose focus of research and personal interests are related to Datatopia’s questions.

Travel expenses to and from Berlin as well as accommodation on-site during the summer course of the selected candidates will be covered by the Summer School.

Datatopia Summer School aims at the creation of a terminology for critical thinking in a data-driven society. This index will constitute the base of the Datatopia issue of ARCH+, the leading German architectural magazine.

How to apply?
Visit projekt bauhaus website and fill out the form directly online.

The applicants must guarantee their presence during the full program unfolding from August 30 to September 2.

The deadline for application is June 20, 2018. The selected applicants will be informed in the beginning of July 2018.

More information and application requirements on www.projekt-bauhaus.de