[url] Seminar: Aesthetics of Contact and Mobility in an era of Global Crisis Management

[Ned Rossiter]

The Laboratory on Urban Research is launching a series of monthly  
seminars. The aim of these meetings is to build a microculture of  
research external to the university where ideas can be debated and  
discussed, problems articulated and concepts created and refined.

Seminars are open to people from every field -- from artists and  
architects, media-culture theorists and scientists (and all in  
between and beyond) -- whose work addresses urban transformations  
taking place in Shanghai or other cities across China and around the  
world. Some may even be doing research on the emergence of online  
metropolitan network cultures.

Both researchers living in Shanghai and those passing through are  
welcome to attend.
.
All seminars will take place on Sunday afternoons at Xindanwei (4C,  
Bld 4 InShanghai Hub No.727 Dingxi Lu, Changning, http://xindanwei.com/)

The opening seminar will feature a presentation by Gillian Fuller +  
Ross Harley on ‘Aesthetics of Contact and Mobility in an era of  
Global Crisis Management', Sunday Oct 11 at 2-4pm.

Further details can be found at: http://urbanresearchlab.net  [also  
pasted below]

To subscribe to the mailing list announcing future seminars, along  
with postings of research papers and debate (low volume) see:
http://lists.urbanresearchlab.net/listinfo.cgi/url-urbanresearchlab.net

Anna Greenspan + Ned Rossiter

--
'Aesthetics of Contact and Mobility in an era of Global Crisis  
Management'
Seminar

Presenters: Gillian Fuller and Ross Harley

Date: 11 October 2009
Time: 2-4pm
Venue: Xindanwei, 4C, Bld 4 in Shanghai Hub No. 727 Dingxi Lu,  
Changning, http://xindanwei.com/

Abstract
Discourses of contagion, containment, crisis and immanent disaster  
are part and parcel of contemporary airport logistics. Recent scares  
over SARS, avian and swine flu highlight the wide variety of  
biometric and logistical techniques for managing urban/epidemic  
crisis. We argue that these techniques apply not only to liminal  
zones such as airport terminals, but also to the broader urban fabric  
of everyday life. The intimate relations of architecture and  
information in the global space of flows raises a set of questions  
around the aesthetics of touch and intimacy associated with  
communication networks of all kinds. The relationships between  
architecture, movement and the city have long been discussed in terms  
of regimes of vision — e.g. the ‘panoramic’ or the ‘cinematic’ city.  
This presentation tracks a genealogy/topology of mobile concepts,  
techniques and aesthetics located within the invisible waves of radio  
and an emergent logic of touch around ‘contactless technologies’. Our  
discussion will focus on implications of ubiquitous networks of  
mobile telephony, rfid tagging, bluetooth, wifi, and a multitude of  
other wireless technologies that penetrate the surfaces of bodies,  
the walls of buildings and that guide and track objects in motion.

About Fuller + Harley
Fuller + Harley are an interdisciplinary research-production team who  
fuse new media theory and practice in a variety of formats. For the  
past five years, they have been working on a multi-modal project that  
analyses the flows and network spaces of contemporary airports.  
Gillian Fuller, who trained as a semiotician and now specialises in  
new media geographies and mobile cultures, has worked in museums, and  
published in journals such as Borderlands, Fibreculture Journal and  
Social Semiotics and is co-editing the forthcoming book, Stillness in  
a Mobile World for the International Library of Sociology Series  
(Routledge). Ross Rudesch Harley is an artist and writer whose media  
work has been exhibited in venues such as at the Pompidou Centre, New  
York MoMA, Ars Electronica, and the Sydney Opera House. His writing  
has appeared in Art + Text, Convergence, Screen, Rolling Stone and  
The Australian. Their recent work, Aviopolis: A Book about Airports  
was published by Black Dog Publishing, London, in 2005. They are both  
researchers at the University of New South Wales, Sydney. For further  
information about their work, visit aviopolis.com, stereopresence.net  
and transitsemiotics.org