Prof. Thomas E. Mical from Auckland University of Technology in New Zealand will give a lecture entitled Sense, Data and Psyche in Modern Spaces for students and employees of the University of Silesia in Katowice. The meeting, which will be held remotely, is organised as part of project entitled „Towards Innovative Education of the Future and Research Excellence: international cooperation project with Prof. Thomas Mical (Auckland University of Technology)”. The initiative has been co-funded by Metropolis GZM within the framework of Metropolitan Science and Assistance Support Fund for 2019–2022. The funding amount was PLN 21,007.
The broadcast will be available on the YouTube channel of the University of Silesia. The lecture will be given in English.
Description of the lecture
This talk will trace a brief history of techniques of sensing and perceiving spaces in the modern and hypermodern periods. We will learn how the movement of the eye and the body through specific sites and contexts. The talk will question how buildings, spaces, and environments come to appear and surround us. This question is best answered through the visual languages of representation. These representations include images and after-images, which follow the hidden laws of erasure in mass media. Subjective perception can be best understood through references to drawings, paintings, and photography. We will look at specific examples of the representations of architecture within urbanism, considered not as real estate but as propositional generators of sense. Buildings and spaces can be understood as solid structures and objects, but we will consider them as processes, flowing and streaming sense impressions of people and data. We will come to understand how the sensory impressions of our spaces influence our use of those spaces. In this, we are immersed in the sense we create of our environments in real time. To understand this immersion we will also consider how the qualitative data formats our understanding of the lived spaces. There will be some new information and knowledge demonstrated in the areas of modernity, transparency, and the optical basis of sense and sensing. The lived spaces today are increasingly flexible and transitive, as the design disciplines are shifting from functionalism and formalism into other new models of flow and transformation. We will draw forms of evidence about the present day sense of space using analytical tools from realism, phenomenology, existentialism, even surrealism and cognitive capitalism. The audience will encounter a great range of forms of evidence to further understand the complex relations operating in the smooth spaces of the immediate world.
Prof. Thomas E. Mical
Photo from the private archive
Thomas Mical is a Professor of the Auckland University of Technology, Academic Professor at the University of Southern Australia, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (USA) and Carleton University (Canada). He has a Master of Architecture degree from the Harvard University GSD and PhD degree in architectural theory from the Georgia Institute of Technology. He cooperates with the Faculty of Architecture La Cambre Horta at the Université libre de Bruxelles. He is currently the Dean in the School of Architecture at the Jindal Global University in Dehli. He has conducted research and classes in broadly understood design, as well as many courses in media and culture studies to support the advanced design education and the problems of artificial intelligence.
The international cooperation project implemented together with Prof. Thomas Mical concerns both innovative education and research excellence. The activities in this respect will be carried out by the Institute of Culture Studies at the University of Silesia and Faculty of Architecture at the Silesian University of Technology.
Researchers and doctoral students of both units can take part in consultations, whereas students and doctoral students will be able to participate in classes to discuss the problems of broadly understood design and architectural theory, architectural heritage and the impact of culture and new media studies on the processes of designing and creating architectural objects and urban spaces. Some of the meetings will also be available for the Silesian architects, urban planners, land use planners and representatives of cultural institutions.