10th International Bauhaus Colloquium — Weimar 2007

The Reality of the Imaginary — Architecture and the Digital Image — Bauhaus-Universität Weimar April 19 – 22, 2007

Call for papers for young scholars and PhD candidates.

The Bauhaus Colloquium is an international conference which has been held at regular intervals since 1976. It is devoted to the theoretical, philosophical and historical investigation of contemporary architecture.

On the basis of the current debates on the digital media technologies, augmented reality and ubiquitous design the 10th International Bauhaus Colloquium will discuss The Reality of the Imaginary – Architecture and the Digital Image. It can be hardly overlooked but the new reality of the digital habitat has been unsettling architecture for quite some time. Steadily and increasingly the new image technologies are shaping the world on their terms.

Since the early 1990’s architecture theory has been shifting its theoretical focus from the linguistic sign to the digital image. For a while it even looked as if spatial imagination might be eventually absorbed by digital media. Some people even believed in a late fulfilment of the post-modern postulate of the end of architecture. But today the digital image techniques can no longer be reduced to a matterless, ephemeral and solely imaginary world. On the contrary, with the growing liquidification of the boundaries between digital images and the world of material objects, digital images do not any longer present an autonomous sphere.

The new image techniques not only interpret the world anew but actively interfere with its material and spatial practices, i.e. with its architectural constitution. In the context of today’s digital turn it seems as if especially today the imaginary digital world and the architectural material world are growing more permeable to each other.

Therefore the colloquium proposes to discuss architecture as a cultural practice that is engaged in a permanent process of border crossing between image and space, between sign and material and between the reality of the architectural space and the imaginary world of the digital sphere.

With this call for papers we are asking young scholars and PhD candidates for their application. Four
workshops will be offered. The topics of the workshops are the same as in the four plenary sessions:

• Image and Space
• Architecture and the Production of Visibility
• Urbane Image – Global Media
• Forms of Mobilizing the Gaze

Please send an abstract of maximum 300 words and indicate the workshop you think appropriate to your
work. Please attach a brief CV.

The deadline is January 12, 2007. Mail to be sent to: bauhaus-kolloquium {at} uni-weimar dot de