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PRAXX studio
is excited to extend a call for participants for a hands-on transdisciplinary research seminar. Extending over six sessions, between the end of April and early July 2018,
the seminar will
explore the constellations of knowledge, design, security practices that cement around the figure of the bunker.
Bunkers
The bunker has encapsulated, molded, and stunted the imaginaries of the 20th century as an architectural by product and illegitimate
spawn of aerial war, cabin ecology, cybernetic systems, and modernist brutalism.
But, far from being abandoned, the current return of looming apocalyptic futures lets new lives crawl and move into the empty spaces
and deep figures of underground shelters. While humans are still the beneficiaries of the security of these spaces, other less fleshy kinds are increasingly making their way in: knowledge, information, data are all crowding into the narrow niches of old and
new shelters.
Bunkers nowadays are meant to protect, hide, manage and make accessible the circulation of knowledge. These spaces represent a useful
vantage point to consider current articulations of theories and practices of knowledge, and their various materialities. While modernity relies on its profession of faith in the immateriality of information - especially in the excitement of the coming singularity,
it simultaneously grounds itself in very specific and solid material infrastructures. Attending to the contemporary transformations of bunkers as part of these infrastructures, the seminar will focus on this figure, object, and space to unfold the ways in
which knowledge is materialized today; and will ask what these materializations do to modernity, and how playing and tinkering with them might allow us to undo modernity.
Sessions
The first three sessions will be dedicated to building a shared conceptual infrastructure to approach this theme. We will read accounts and explorations of the convergence of ideas and practices of knowledge, design, security and access
that will help us elaborate a theoretical toolkit to approach (data) bunkers. Following this more conceptual phase, three more sessions will be devoted to specific cases - also with the help of invited speakers. These will emerge from the discussions and interests
of the group, but will also include cases like the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, CyberBunker, the bunkers of the UvA collections, or other examples of encounters between data and bunkers. The aim of the seminar is to develop the conceptual and material tools
to rethink the articulations of knowing, designing, protecting, accessing and bunkering, that will be assembled in a collaborative virtual exhibit-repository.
Info and practicalities
Duration: end of April - July 2018 (6 sessions)
Location: PRAXXstudio, Singel 425, Amsterdam
We encourage those seriously interested in these themes, from a variety of disciplines and practices –from design, architecture, data management, arts, to anthropology, history, archaeology, critical heritage studies, science studies –
to contact us for more information at [log in to unmask]
About PRAXXstudio
In 2017 Tjitske Holtrop, Filippo Bertoni and
Jeltsje Stobbe started a research initiative named PRAXXstudio. The studio functions as a pilot project for the central library of UvA on hosting transdisciplinary and artistic research lab initiatives. For more info on the studio,