Designs of Destruction

Between 1943 and 1945, the Allied Air Forces produced aerial photographs of 79 Italian cities, annotated them with the location of monuments, and appended them with elaborate instructions for aerial bombers on “how to miss cultural sites.” Similar lists and maps of monuments were produced by the Allies for almost every country in Europe, expanded or shrunk to fit various phases and types of fighting. The longest German list was 150 pages; one map of 23 monuments for the whole of France was once made.

 What kind of media were these? To what use were they put; how did they partake in the technologies of precision on which Allied aerial strategy hinged, and how did they help inaugurate a new global regime of cultural preservation?

Lucia Allais draws from her book, Designs of Destruction: The Making of Monuments in the 20th Century (Chicago: 2018). The book chronicles the triumph of the cultural monument as a modern and global building type between the 1930s and 1970s.

Tue, 11/27 · 5:00 pm—7:00 pm · N107 School of Architecture 

M+M Program in Media and Modernity

http://soa.princeton.edu/#2259

Reading Matters' Conference 

      

      Schedule of Events. The three-day conference is organized around a series of presentations prepared by teams of speakers. The first, kick-off event will commence on the evening of November 29, 2018, with a film screening and discussion, followed by two days of panel presentations.

Introduction + Panel I : 

Reading as Terrestrial Operations

Jane Bennett • bio

Raviv Ganchrow •  bio

[ + more info ]

https://readingmatters.princeton.edu/schedule-of-events   

From Damocles to Socrates, the classics in / of Hip-Hop

From Damocles to Socrates, the classics in / of Hip-Hop  

Growing up in 1990s Harlem, I couldn’t have escaped hip-hop if I’d wanted to. The streets bumped with it: the boombox action on the corner and in the park, the speakers screaming from apartment windows, the cars reverberating with bass. On the way home from school every weekday, a nerdy Dominican boy listened to the beats and was mesmerized. None of that loud music in our house, my mother would always say — but I itched to bump the beats at home on our radio. Sometimes, if Mom had stepped out to the store and I was feeling brave, I’d tune in to Hot97 and live a few minutes of glory.

It wasn’t only the sonic architecture of the bass that snared me. The allure was in the verses themselves with their mighty torrent of words: sharp and cutting, smooth and coy, boisterous and threatening. And the prolifically inventive rhyme schemes! When, at the innocent age of twelve, I first heard the Notorious B.I.G. rap “Escargot, my car go / one sixty, swiftly” I had no clue what escargot was and had to look the word up — but even before receiving enlightenment from the dictionary I knew the verse was a gem. As much as the books I devoured at the local library, the rap game expanded my cultural horizons.

https://eidolon.pub/from-damocles-to-socrates-fbda6e685c26  

Text by Dan-el Padilla Peralta 

Definition of Adrift

                  Leigh Stein, Definition of Adrift 

Talisman-images Gather the Cosmos and Press it to Your Body

Practiced in medieval Islamic and European cultures, talismans were like apps that appealed to the planets and other powers to intercede into precise earthly problems. In this lecture, Dr. Laura Marks will argue that in our seemingly disenchanted times, it is still possible to re-fold the universe, grasping the points of disparate histories and places and drawing them together. We see this at work in movies, digital media works, and objects. Dr. Marks will focus on the affective results using such media to connect from the body to the cosmos.

https://humanities.princeton.edu/event/thinking-cinema-laura-u-marks/

A Sculpture is What you Bump Into by Accident and You’re Okay

One does not have to look up to the sky as a jay-walker in order to stumble. Sometimes, all it takes is to be in a gallery, enjoying the artwork, until you bump into a sculpture. This was at least the view of one of the most important thinkers and painters of American abstract art, Barnett Newman, who had said that “sculpture is what you bump into [i.e. by accident] when you back up to see a painting.” And yet our contact with sculpture’s blatant materiality--accidental as it may be--also prepare us to accept the aggravating conditions of a life in a constant struggle with its own imperfections and defects. 

Location: Hamilton 616
Title: A Sculpture is What you Bump Into by Accident and You’re Okay 
Speaker: Kostis Velonis (Princeton University)
Respondent: Rebekah Rutkoff (New Jersey Institute of Technology)
Time: 6:00-7:15pm

November 14 at Columbia University

thrown off a cliff

thrown off a cliff, 2018 

Marble, wood, acrylic 

19 x 33 x 19 cm