Real Time: symposium on the architecture of packets, pixels, and neurons

A one-day symposium organized by Assistant Professor of Architecture Farzin Lotfi-Jam with coordination by Design Teaching Fellow Ekin Erar.

Consider an everyday occurrence: a person sits at their computer and presses a key, launching three parallel events at cascading speeds. The first sends a packet through telecommunication networks to an intercontinental server and back within two hundred milliseconds. The second pushes a pixel to the computer screen through peripheral, system, and display devices, with a combined latency of one hundred milliseconds. And the third stimulates neurons in the person’s brain as a result of changes to their visual field, processed in as little as thirteen milliseconds. Herein lies the vast and intimate scales of realtime—an ad-hoc planetary megastructure directing the movement of packets, pixels, and neurons.

“Real Time,” the semester’s second Preston Thomas Memorial Symposium, scheduled for April 13 in Milstein Auditorium at Cornell AAP, brings together artists, designers, and scholars to examine the spatial politics of realtime—a term returning to contemporary importance with new applications like realtime gaming engine visualizations, realtime digital twinning, realtime metaverse interactions, realtime military strikes, and realtime urban sensing. The symposium examines the translation of computational technocracy into the infrastructures, data-collecting practices, modeling paradigms, and information visualizations connecting war games to video games to urban games. “Real Time” locates the history of realtime control and capitalization by looking at its applications in military, entertainment, and urban spheres, with a particular focus on the marginalized communities and migratory populations that are often the targets of realtime surveillance and containment. Importantly, the symposium amplifies practices of realtime media production that offer more just spatial and temporal orders.

The program consists of three panels followed by a keynote: Liveness asks what the value and creative possibilities of instantaneity are in an era of on-demand media entertainment, digital asset libraries, and persistent virtual worlds; Fidelity explores the role of temporal and spatial resolution in the production of informational authority; and Transmissions asks what histories, presents, and future imaginaries are allowed and foreclosed by regimes of record collecting. Ultimately, the symposium asks if it is possible to disassemble the uneven architectures of realtime and, in their place, reassemble more ethical and equitable computational concepts of space, time, and being—to imagine the movement of packets, pixels, and neurons beyond the purview of military, security, and financial interests.

View the full symposium schedule and plan to attend virtually or in person.

Schedule
9:15am: Welcome
Farzin Lotfi-Jam, Assistant Professor of Architecture, Cornell AAP

9:30am: Panel I Liveness
Pegah Pasalar, Interdisciplinary Artist, Filmmaker, and Film Editor
Kidus Hailesilassie, Designer, Creative Technologist, and World Builder
Ainslee Alem Robson, Film Director, Writer, and Media Artist
Damara Inglês, Metaverse Designer and Strategist
Paul Ramírez Jonas, Moderator, Professor and Chair of the Department of Art, Cornell AAP

11am: Panel II Fidelity
Chaewon Ahn, Assistant Professor of Social Sciences (Urban Studies), Yale-NUS College
Leanna Mei Humphrey, Assistant Professor of Architecture, Hampton University
Biayna Bogosian, Assistant Professor of Architectural Technology, Florida International University
Marco Ferrari, Cofounder of Studio Folder; Head of MA in Information Design, Design Academy Eindhoven
Jenni Minner, Moderator, Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies, Department of City and Regional Planning, Cornell AAP

1:30pm: Lunch

2:30pm: Panel III Transmissions
Elise Misao Hunchuck, Curator and Editor, Transmediale
Jordan H. Carver, KPF Visiting Scholar in Architecture, Yale University
Samaneh Moafi, Assistant Director of Research, Forensic Architecture
Nora Akawi, Assistant Professor of Architecture, Cooper Union

5:15pm: Keynote
Shaka McGlotten, Professor of Media Studies and Anthropology, Chair of the Gender Studies and Global Black Studies Programs, Purchase College-SUNY

6:30pm: A Recursive History of Urban Simulation
Exhibition opening and reception. Curated and Designed by Farzin Lotfi-Jam at John Hartell Gallery, Cornell AAP