Phantasmography

14.00—18.00

Michael Hirschbichler

ADP

ANALOGUE DIGITAL PRODUCTION

Spirits, spectres, ghosts and phantoms have come to play a central role in contemporary discourse and imagination. This may in part be explained by the new unfamiliarity and uncanniness of nature, by rapid technological developments, and by political, economic and cultural constructions that often transcend the realm of the rational. The logics of global financial markets, recent scientific discoveries and man-made “natural” disasters similarly challenge Western rationalism and its clear distinction between nature and culture, humans and non-humans, active and passive matter, secular and non-secular, the real and the imaginary.

In order to engage with contemporary spaces and landscapes that are characterized by the erosion of such established categories, we want to develop the approach of a “phantasmography”.1 Phantoms and phantasms have always been situated in between the clear-cut areas of space and thought, and thus offer powerful concepts to rethink our complex reality from a different vantage point. Understood in a very general sense, phantoms and phantasms are invisible or hard-to-grasp agents – real or imaginary – that nonetheless shape our material world. They can be formerly existing persons or species, very small or very big things or beings, mental images and sociocultural narratives, neglected pasts and imagined futures (of progress or ruination?), hopes, dreams and fears.

The practice of “phantasmography”, as we envision it, is concerned with tracing and uncovering the phantoms and phantasms that we need to better understand and design the present. In order to do so, we will combine methods and techniques from architecture, art and anthropology. Employing a multisensory set of media and various forms of writing and drawing, we will investigate concrete places in and around Vienna in fieldwork.

In the summer semester we will thereby focus on spaces of extraction – on places and landscapes that are defined by acts of removal: of resources, of former structures, habitats or inhabitants, of planned futures or forgotten histories. This investigation necessarily has a speculative dimension and therefore depends on interpretation and invention. Moving between research and design, modern and non-modern perspectives, and facts and fictions, we aim to develop strong experimental projects that curiously engage with the environment around us.

Theater of Combustion (Sumqayıt), Michael Hirschbichler, Lukas Raeber, 2017 1 Building upon, but largely diverging from: Robert Desjarlais, “Phantasmography”, in American Anthropologist 118 (2), pp. 400-407