Seminar: Special Questions in History of Art and Architecture, Prof. Dr. Philip Ursprung, ETH, 2018
live is an experimental teaching format. Every student gets a personal webcam, which streams images of 24 hours of their life on a website.
Our perception of space has changed since digital monitoring, since the personal computer and social media. How would spatial design and architecture change if it took these developments into account?
Questions such as: Can webcams that record and monitor the space, trigger new design processes? Is architecture more concerned with definitions of private, public and virtual space? How do we achieve media competency, which is not only constantly changing new updates. Spaces today are often planned, measured and viewed virtually. In the design process this is usually done in an abstract way. In the seminar, we try to understand the everyday space by monitoring. Due to the burden of carrying a personal webcam constantly and to be responsible for the automated streaming of pictures to the Internet, quite different questions arise to the conditions of the space.
How do we deal with concepts such as: privacy and the public? What happens when we turn the skewer and use our own monitoring elements? How could this affect spatial perception and spatial planning? What happens behind the camera, is there a blind spot? The responsibility for the published image lies with the students and is under discussion.
