Metropolis > Program > Seminars 2011 > Alexander Pilis
Architecture Parallax : Blind Spot SEMINAR
Alexander Pilis
A theoretical cabaret to visually entertain urban academics.
Sometimes visuality is too blinding to explain, so fiction interprets it.
Within a 3-day theoretical cabaret, students will not be required to construct a project, but simply to hear, taste, see and talk, and to open up questions about cities—how we see and perceive them through analytic methods and architectonic apparatuses as mediators to establish urban cultures.
The cabaret will explore an interdisciplinary praxis that poses questions about visual literacy and cognition, and the modernization of vision that is woven through the built environment, architecture, art, perception, science and the city.
The focus of the theoretical cabaret resides in the investigation of ideas; placed in the gap between what you see and what you think you are seeing. A blindness of reason, or an epistemological disability, cancels the visual references of the observer by shifting them into the x-ray vision, into epiphenomenon darkness. The theoretical cabaret opens an epistemological alternative, to go beyond the critique of the ‘naturalist fallacy of vision’ and the politics of representation of the unseen. Instead, the optical epistemologies of blindness will be explored; an approach and strategy that can be described as a blind person recovering their vision; a metaphor for the production of thoughts on visuality within the urban condition.
We will tap-and-dance with lights and optic apparatuses, crack the brain and “section” the eyes to see how it all works. We will have an aperitifs with Derrida’s Memoirs of The Blind, dinner with Rembrandt’s Eye (Simon Schama, Penguin 1999), gobble the desert with Lev Manovich’s “What is Visualization?” And then chill out with “The Man with the X-Ray Eyes,” the 1963 motion picture directed by Roger Corman.