TRANSFORMING SPACES:
THE TOPOLOGICAL TURN IN TECHNOLOGY STUDIES

- an international conference to be held in Darmstadt, Germany, March
22-24, 2002

- organized by the post-graduate school "Technology and Society"
at the University of Technology Darmstadt
(http://www.ifs.tu-darmstadt.de/gradkoll/index.html) with financial support

from the German Research Council

This conference will problematize the spatial character of the relationship
between technology and human beings. It addresses two interrelated
questions: To what extent do machines and media organize society
three-dimensionally--thus ordering the spaces in which modern life takes
place? And, conversely, to what extent do material and communicative
structures open up new mental and physical spaces--thus transforming the
boundaries of daily life? To denote our explicit concern with spatiality we
propose the mathematical term "topology."

The days are gone, when "technology" meant only the material means used by
rational human seeking goals in accordance with principles of maximum
efficiency and economic return. Today, scholars in the interdisciplinary
field of "technology studies" emphasize the symbolic and discursive
character of our artifact-saturated universe, as well as the machine's
subtle perpetuation of social inequalities and political conditions. These
scholars have begun to discuss technology as a medium, as a human-created
"ambience" that infiltrates interpersonal relations and permeates society.
Focusing on the spatial dimension of materials and media, this conference
intends to shape developments in the field.

Technology has become a kind of second nature in modern life. For instance,
cell telephones, computers, and the internet enable us to become more
independent of physical location. The death of distance has been declared.
Simultaneously, however, they have influenced mobility and cognitive
patterns, as well as re-drawn the boundaries between the private and public
spheres. By bringing out the spatial character of modern technology, the
conference takes seriously its "topological" natureboth on a physical and
discursive level. And, by focusing on urban structures, simulation
techniques, and visualizing media in daily life, it intends to investigate
the spatial character of technology in various settings and from various
theoretical points of view.

Technologies, we argue, are far more than passive physical presences. They
mediate between human beings, they bridge physical distance, and they
contribute to the transformation of individual identities. They allow
people to interact at new places, they open up new mental spaces, and they
help us to visualize new arenas for action. The spatial character of the
human-made world is not limited to computers and other information
technologies. Machines and media also impose on the world a certain
multi-dimensional "order of things." In urban settings especially,
buildings, streets, and lighting systems make up a set of material
"dispositives" that strongly define what "degrees of freedom" citizens may
enjoy.

The conference will be divided into four sections, each consisting of one
45-minute plenary speech and two parallel paper sessions, each of which
will include four presentations. There will be 20 minutes scheduled for the
oral presentation of each paper, followed by 15 minutes discussion. To
guarantee insightful introductions to the various topics, four
internationally outstanding plenary speakers have already accepted the
invitation; cf. program below.

One-page abstracts for papers, accompanied by a one-page CV,
may be sent to

Professor Mikael Hård, Department of History, Technical University
Darmstadt, Schloss, DE-64283 Darmstadt, Germany,
[log in to unmask],
before Nov. 1, 2001.


PROGRAM

Section 1:
Coping with Urban Places: Physical Structures and Daily Life in the Modern
City

Plenary speaker 1:
Thomas J. Misa, Illinois Institute of Technology: Creating the Vertical
City: Skyscrapers as Socio-technical Milieus

Section 2:
Coping with the Dimensions: Visual Technologies and the Re-Ordering of
Spaces

Plenary speaker 2:
David Gugerli, Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zurich: Visualizing the

Human Body

Section 3:
Virtual Entertainment, the Arts, and Emerging Lifestyles

Plenary speaker 3:
Lev Manovich, University of California at San Diego: Image-Space: a Case
Study in Post-Media Aesthetics

Section 4:
The Spatial Dimension of Human--Non-human Interaction

Plenary speaker 4:
Kevin Hetherington, Lancaster University: Relationality, Topology and the
Disposal of Space






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