Prototyping Paradise

If we rehearse producing the affect “joy”, will we generate “paradise”? A question, too naive, absurd and lofty to be contemplated as an applicable strategy for place-making.

However, affect as a constituent material agent has been studied extensively in philosophy and critical theory and is one of the central concerns of New Materialism (Spinoza 1992; Bergson 1998; Deleuze 1988, 1992; Massumi 2002; Brennan 2004; Thrift 2007; De Landa 2006; Braidotti 2013).

While theories of affect have become an integral part of today’s discourse in art, (Bishop 2012; Ranciére 2009), the ethical and spatial implications involved in the application of a post-human ontology through the production of affect have not been sufficiently exploited yet through architectural practice.

In the wake of current global challenges, how do we engage in the production of space? What is the role of contemporary architects – is s/he a social reformer, environmentalist, artist,

9.00–14.00

Margit Brünner

GLC

GEOGRAPHY LANDSCAPES CITIES

inventor, builder, acrobat, politician, entertainer, civilian, poet, alchemist or all at once?

While the scientific world has long been confronting us with a fundamental participatory reality, it still comes as a shock to most perceptive faculties long conditioned by Aristotelian logic, Euclidian geometry, and Newton’s mechanical universe. We could accept the invitation to move beyond the mind’s persistent dream of being all by itself and make ourselves available to more cosmic bandwidths. Thinkers like Bruno Latour and Peter

Sloterdijk repeatedly emphasised the need for other strategies to get closer to the heart of our problems. Decided optimism, empathy and co-creativity might be helpful tools to respond to the current global, ecological, economic and socio-political crisis. We become and coemerge in relation to (other) environments and the course of our becoming matters.

We will engage in experimentation with joy productions and their material configurations, and explore how joy-based exercise enables us to access the faint levels of creativity. Protoyping Paradise asks critical questions about performance as a research tool and a way of translating embodied experiences into tangible constellations of “paradise”. What happens spatially and materially if joy is given priority?