Forming Publics: Technologies of Assembly

VIS 2491 Subject & Catalog Number

Description

Technology of Assembly (n.) A cultural, spatial, institutional, or mediated practice through which strangers become publics and publics become capable of collective life.

Before building comes assembly. Before buildings, institutions, and infrastructure take form, there are the conditions through which people gather, negotiate, listen, remember, and act together. This seminar investigates these pre-building conditions through the idea of technologies of assembly: the practices that transform individuals into publics and make collective life possible.

Taking sonic and oral traditions as the point of departure, the seminar begins by exploring sound as one of humanity’s earliest technologies of assembly. Oral traditions, collective listening, music, performance, and acts of public address have long organized relationships, transmitted knowledge, and shaped shared realms before they became formalized through building. Rather than treating these practices as peripheral to design, the seminar considers them as fundamental forms of spatial production that reveal how culture precedes, informs, and continually reshapes the built environment.

From this starting point, the seminar expands to examine a wider ecology of technologies of assembly, including ritual, archives, exhibitions, governance, legislation, civic institutions, digital platforms, and other forms of collective organization. Collectively; these practices raise a broader question: how do strangers become publics, and how do publics become capable of shaping the spaces, institutions, and infrastructures they inhabit?

Bringing together perspectives from architecture, urbanism, performance, sound studies, political theory, and public policy, the seminar introduces students to a range of critical frameworks through which to investigate the relationship between culture and spatial practice. Readings may include the work of Édouard Glissant, Paul Gilroy, Fred Moten, Saidiya Hartman, Tina Campt, Brandon LaBelle, Pauline Oliveros, Tania Bruguera, and others whose work challenges conventional understandings of public life, relation, and design.

Structured as a collaborative research seminar, the course operates as a shared testing ground for this space of inquiry. This seminar is an experiment in developing a new profile of the technologies through which culture is assembled. Students are invited to explore the impact of these technologies primarily through listening, archival research, critical writing, discussion, and design experimentation. Each participant will develop an independent project investigating a technology of assembly through the medium most appropriate to their inquiry. Outcomes may include spatial proposals, films, performances, exhibitions, publications, sonic works, institutional prototypes, policy frameworks, or other forms of public intervention.

Rather than asking what designers should build, the seminar asks what designers might assemble first. By investigating the pre-building conditions of collective life, the course explores designs methods in cultivating the relationships, solidarities, and publics from which meaningful buildings, institutions, and cities emerge.