Spring Symposium: SPATIOTEMPORAL
This symposium tackles both a methodological question (how to integrate filmmaking into architectural education and everyday design practice) and a theoretical one (how to evolve the role of the diagram as a generator of ideas in contemporary practice).
Most discourses on the reciprocity between film and architecture tend to overlook the abstraction of the experimental film genre in favor of the spatiotemporal immediacy inherent to narrative and documentary film. This symposium focuses squarely on the spatiotemporal abstraction inherent to experimental film—its critical distance from the reality that it represents.
As technological innovations, global crises, and social agenda increasingly capture the attention and imagination of the discipline, new ways of seeing & new modes of knowledge-building are essential. Experimental film has held this potential for decades—this symposium will unleash it.
featured guests
Ernie Gehr, Filmmaker, New York City
Tomonari Nishikawa, Filmmaker/Professor, Binghamton University, State University of New York
Deborah Stratman, Filmmaker & Artist/Professor, University of Illinois at Chicago
Amy Murphy, Architect/Professor, University of Southern California
Faculty, Students, and Alumni of David R. Ravin School of Architecture
Symposium organized by Thomas Forget, Associate Director/Associate Professor, David R. Ravin School of Architecture.
SCHEDULE
From Monday, March 10, to Friday, March 14, the SoA will host an Experimental Film Exhibition, showcasing canonical works, films by featured guests, and recent projects by students and local filmmakers. The exhibition will be open daily from 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM, Monday-to-Thursday in the Lambla Gallery and Friday in the Storrs Salon. Admission is free and open to the public!
Thursday, March 13: Screening of Experimental Films and Roundtable Discussion
Dubois Center Auditorium & Atrium (320 E 9th St, Charlotte, NC 28202)
6:30-7:00 PM | Pre-Screening Meet-and-Greet, with non-alcoholic beverages (Dubois 256: Second Floor Atrium; capacity 300)
7:00-8:30 PM | Public screening in Uptown Charlotte of films by participating experimental filmmakers and student competition winners (Dubois 201: Auditorium; capacity 300)
8:30-9:00 PM | Post-Screening Q&A (Dubois 201: Auditorium; capacity 300). Participants: Ernie Gehr; Amy Murphy; Tomonari Nishikawa; Deborah Stratman; moderated by Thomas Forget
Friday, March 14: Master Classes & Panel Discussions
Storrs Hall, UNC Charlotte Main Campus (9115 Mary Alexander Road, Charlotte, NC 28223)
10:00 AM-12:00 PM | Master Classes: (contact tforget@charlotte.edu if interested in more information)
2:00-3:30 PM | Visual & Aural Abstraction (presentations and panel discussion); Storrs Salon
3:30-4:00 PM | Coffee Break; Storrs Salon
4:00-5:30 PM | The Abstraction of Information (presentations and panel discussion); Storrs Salon
Friday participants include featured guests Ernie Gehr, Amy Murphy, Tomonari Nishikawa, Noushin Radnia, and Deborah Stratman; David R. Ravin School of Architecture Faculty Nathaniel Elberfeld, Thomas Forget, Matthew Gin, and Alexandra Waller; UNC Charlotte student competition winners; local filmmakers; and more guests TBA!
Invisible Cities, The Movie: A Student Competition!
Current and recent students enrolled in any regional institution are invited to submit a short video that may be selected to be included in the Thursday evening screening, alongside the works of the featured guests. If you are enrolled in a high school, college, community college, or university in the Carolinas region (or have been over the past few years), you are eligible to enter.
Calling all filmmakers: Show your work at Spatiotemporal
To complement the student competition, Spatiotemporal is inviting regional experimental filmmakers (established and aspiring) to submit a short work (roughly 5-minutes or less) for inclusion in the week-long exhibition of experimental films. This may be a new work that you make for this event, or a recent work that fits our theme of abstraction-in-film. Submissions that include innovative ways to represent the built environment will be especially welcome!
To be considered, please send a streaming or download link (and any questions) to tforget@charlotte.edu ASAP, and no later than Sunday, March 9, 11:59 pm (the sooner the better because the exhibition opens on Monday, March 10, but we will try to add late entrants). Films will be screened on monitors with internal speakers.
Participants will be invited to participate in the master classes scheduled for Friday, March 14th with our esteemed guests!
More about the symposium
The disciplines of film and architecture have intersected each other in three primary ways over the first century of their coexistence:
1.
Filmmakers have visualized built environments (real and imagined) with the intent to tell stories, document histories, analyze conditions, and posit possibilities.
2.
Theorists have drawn connections between the psychosocial phenomena of cinematic perception and our lived experience of the built environment.
3.
Designers have applied inspirations found in cinematic depictions of buildings and cities toward their practices.
The last frontier is to integrate filmmaking into design practices more literally. The democratization of film production in the digital age overcomes the technological and economic obstacles that historically impeded such efforts, but aspect blindness continues to hinder integration: conventional understandings of what film is (and what it isn’t) are ingrained in the collective consciousness, and expectations regarding how architectural representation operates (and how it doesn’t) remain stubbornly traditional.
Not unlike many conventions of architectural representation, in particular the diagram, experimental film dissects, isolates, and interrogates spatiotemporal qualities, albeit without (as of yet) the intention of architectural and urban designers. What if designers exploit the potential of this genre on their own terms in order to augment their already heightened perspective of the built environment? The capacity of film to produce spatiotemporal knowledge is acutely underutilized in design practice, and the realm of the diagram offers a testing ground for potential applications.
This symposium is co-sponsored by AIA Charlotte.
Banner video: Shibuya – Tokyo (2010), Tomonari Nishikawa