The earliest duck decoys, found in Ancient Egypt, were often live herons bound to ships, their presence tempting wild waterfowl to killing distance. Birds today are suspicious of their lifeless decoy counterparts, so modern versions have begun to use sensors to mimic natural movement, blurring the artificial and real. If sensors in a decoy help it mimic kin, in turn luring an animal to its death, what might it mean for an environment to use sensors in an attempt to mimic its “natural” state?
RealTimeNature brings together a diverse group of thinkers to discuss the promises and perils of environmental simulation, remote sensing, and real-time synchronizations. In the context of the current “ontological turn,” which responds to the ecological crisis resulting from modernity, RealTimeNature takes into account the philosopher Yuk Hui’s observation that the focus on nature and the non-human in this movement often overlooks questions related to technology.
Through a set of public dialogs and keynote lectures, RealTimeNature poses these questions: What happens when we consider technology as a universal fix, and how does this impact our understanding of space and time? Can we reimagine technology not as a universal concept, but as a diverse multitude?
Schedule
Friday, September 27, 2024 in Piper Auditorium, Gund Hall
Opening Remarks, Peter Galison Introduced by Ali Malkawi
9:30 AM
Uncanny Valley (Panel), Karen M’Closkey, Joe Paradiso
Andrew Witt, moderator
10:15 AM
Scales of RealTime (Workshop), Farzin Lofti-Jam 1:00 PM
Natures of Sensing (Panel), Nicholas de Monchaux, Dana Cupkova John May, moderator
2:00 PM
Exposure (Panel), Garnette Cadogan, James Enos
Mohsen Mostafavi and Annie Simpson, moderators
3:30 PM
Keynote, Daniel Barber Introduced by Charles Waldheim
5:00 PM
Speakers
Peter Galison is the Joseph Pellegrino University Professor at Harvard University. He currently directs the Black Hole Initiative at Harvard, a leading center for interdisciplinary research on black holes. His books include How Experiments End; Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics; Einstein’s Clocks, Poincaré’s Maps; and, with Lorraine Daston, Objectivity. Peter Galison’s work in writing and film explores the complex interaction between the three principal subcultures of physics–experimentation, instrumentation, and theory—and the embedding of physics in the wider world.
Ali Malkawi is Director of the Doctor of Design Studies Program and Professor of Architectural Technology at the GSD. Malkawi is an international scholar and expert in building simulation, energy conservation, and sustainability in buildings. He teaches architectural technology and computation and conducts research in the areas of computational simulation, building performance evaluation, and design decision support. He is also the founding director of the Harvard Center for Green Buildings and Cities (CGBC).
Karen M’Closkey is associate professor of landscape architecture at the University of Pennsylvania Weitzman School of Design and co-founder, with Keith VanDerSys, of PEG office of landscape + architecture. Their work focuses on the opportunities and limitations enabled by recent advancements in digital mapping and modeling and how they shape our understanding of landscapes and environments. Karen was the recipient of the 2012-2013 American Academy in Rome Prize in landscape architecture. She leads the the EMLab working group with Sean Burkholder and Keith VanDerSys and the Biodiversity working group with Richard Weller.
Joseph Paradiso is the Alexander W. Dreyfoos (1954) Professor at MIT’s Program in Media Arts and Sciences. He directs the MIT Media Lab’s Responsive Environments Group, which explores how sensor networks augment and mediate human experience, interaction and perception. His current research interests include wireless sensing systems, wearable and body sensor networks, sensor systems for built and natural environments, energy harvesting and power management for embedded sensors, ubiquitous/pervasive computing and the Internet of Things, human-computer interfaces, space-based systems, and interactive music/media.
Andrew Witt is an Associate Professor in Practice of Architecture at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, teaching and researching on the relationship of geometry and machines to perception, design, assembly, and culture. He is also co-founder, with Tobias Nolte, of Certain Measures, a design and technology studio that prototypes the future. Trained in both architecture and mathematics, Witt has a particular interest in a technically synthetic and logically rigorous approach to form.
Farzin Lotfi-Jam is an architect whose work explores the politics of technology and cities. He is an assistant professor in architecture at Cornell University where he directs the Realtime Urbanism Lab. The lab uses and invents new spatial media and technologies to visualize and simulate how algorithms, models, and notions of ”real time” govern urban life. He is also director of Farzin Farzin, an interdisciplinary design studio working across architecture, urbanism, computation, and media. From modeling the control matrices of smart cities to spatializing the cultural logics of social media, his individual and collaborative projects are research based and multimediatic.
Nicholas de Monchaux is Professor and Head of Architecture at MIT. Until 2020 he was Professor of Architecture and Urban Design, and Craigslist Distinguished Chair in New Media at UC Berkeley, where he also served as Director of the Berkeley Center for New Media. De Monchaux is the author of Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo (MIT Press, 2011), an architectural and urban history of the Apollo Spacesuit, winner of the Eugene Emme award from the American Astronautical Society and shortlisted for the Art Book Prize, as well as Local Code: 3,659 Proposals about Data, Design, and the Nature of Cities (Princeton Architectural Press, 2016). His work has been supported by the MacDowell Colony, the Santa Fe Institute, the Smithsonian Institution, the Hellman Fund, and the Bakar Fellows Program. He is a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome.
Dana Čupková is a Professor at Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Architecture and the graduate Track Chair for the Master of Science in Sustainable Design (MSSD) program. She directs EPIPHYTE Lab, a design and research collaborative that was recognized as the Next Progressives design practice by Architect Magazine in 2018. She is a recipient of the 2019 ACADIA Teaching Award of Excellence, the 2022 ACSA Creative Achievement, and a 2022-23 Fulbright US Scholar. Additionally, she is a member of the Editorial Board of the International Journal of Architectural Computing (IJAC).
John May is founding partner, with Zeina Koreitem, of MILLIØNS, a Los Angeles-based design practice. Their recent work includes completed and ongoing projects in California, New York, Boston, Germany and Beirut. Recently selected as the winner of an international competition to reimagine the west wing of I.M. Pei’s Everson Musum, in Syracuse, NY, MILLIØNS’ experimental work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions at Friedman Benda Gallery, the Storefront for Art and Architecture, The Architecture + Design Museum of Los Angeles, and Jai & Jai Los Angeles, among others. Their essays have appeared in Harvard Design Magazine, e-flux, Flaunt magazine, I.D., a+t, and in a catalog of their work on experimental collective living, New Massings for New Masses: Collectivity After Orthography (MIT, 2015).
Garnette Cadogan is the Tunney Lee Distinguished Lecturer in Urbanism at the School of Architecture and Planning at MIT. His research explores the promise and perils of urban life, the vitality and inequality of cities, and the challenges of pluralism.
James A. Enos is an Assistant Professor of Art and Chair of Studio Core at the University of Georgia. His research engages issues of process, architecture, and social artist practice in an effort to understand how public culture responds to change. He received a BS from Purdue University, a M. Arch from The NewSchool of Architecture, and an MFA from the University of California, San Diego. Enos is a recipient of the 2013 San Diego Art Prize, and has served as artist, director, and founder for several public projects including The Periscope Project, Drone Readymade, Exploring Engagement, Port Journeys, HyperCultural Passengers, WeTrees and Social Logistics.
Mohsen Mostafavi, architect and educator, is the Alexander and Victoria Wiley Professor of Design and Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor, and served as Dean of the GSD from 2008-2019. His work focuses on modes and processes of urbanization and on the interface between technology and aesthetics.
Annie Simpson works via sight-/site-based investigation to make videos, photographs, and essays. For the 2024-2025 academic year, she is a Doctoral Fellow with the Harvard-Mellon Urban Initiative.
Daniel Barber is Professor and Chair of Architecture Theory and History at TU Eindhoven. He is an architectural historian researching the relationship between the design fields and the emergence of global environmental culture across the 20th century. Daniel received a PhD in Architecture History and Theory from Columbia University, and a Master of Environmental Design from Yale University. He currently holds a Fellowship for Advanced Researchers from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, which he is spending in residence at the Rachel Carson Center in Munich, Germany, and at the Max Planck Institute for the study of the Human Sciences in Berlin, over the summer until 2022. In March 2017 he was be a Visiting Fellow at the Sydney Environmental Institute, University of Sydney, Australia; in 2015-2016 he was the Thomas A. and Currie C. Barron Visiting Professor in the Environment and Humanities at the Princeton Environmental Institute, hosted by the Princeton School of Architecture. He has also held a post-doctoral research fellowship at the Harvard University Center for the Environment and Graduate School of Design, and has been a visiting professor at Oberlin College, Barnard College, and the University of Auckland, New Zealand. In February 2015 he was the Terra Foundation for American Art Visiting Professor at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London.
Charles Waldheim is the John E. Irving Professor of Landscape Architecture, Director of the Office for Urbanization, and Co-Director of the Master in Design Studies program at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. He is an American-Canadian architect and urbanist. Waldheim’s research examines the relations between landscape, ecology, and contemporary urbanism. He is author, editor, or co-editor of numerous books on these subjects, and his writing has been published and translated internationally. Waldheim is recipient of the Rome Prize Fellowship from the American Academy in Rome; the Visiting Scholar Research Fellowship at the Study Centre of the Canadian Centre for Architecture; the Cullinan Chair at Rice University; and the Sanders Fellowship at the University of Michigan.
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