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EXCESSIVE / Hernan Diaz Alonso


image: Tabakalera New Media Art -Competition 2008

How boring has perfection become?

Every Year the program will focus on a specific topic that would provide means to the advance and mutation of the emerging paradigms of Aesthetics as the main vehicle for the evolution of the autonomy of the discipline. Special workshops and guest will support the effort of the studio.The studio proposes to re-examine the possibilities of form generation as an autonomous entity. In the context of these conditions, the studio will focus in the generation and production of mutant micro behaviors that will accumulate to create species from systems.This program is comprised of three semesters, nevertheless, it is not compartmentalized in three topics, and instead it will be organized as a continuous played out in three acts.

Evidence of this lies in the fact that our contemporary design obsessions are based on an appreciation for the perversity of mutant form, a taste learned from the movies and set to work on architecture. It is produced in the act of design – in the focused sensation of pointing and clicking that is more like painting than engineering. Image-forms are the product of speed up and slow down, slice and blend, fuse and separate – repetitions of scenic rhythms learned from a lifetime of being awed by cinematic affect.

The Strategies of “the EXCESSIVE program” is a 3 semester post graduate course in architectural design. Working in a laboratory environment, students will develop knowledge by investigating and applying the possibilities of emerging theories, as well as testing new design territories such as scripting, biogenetics, genetic codification, new materials, and cellular systems. Studio projects, alongside related design workshops and seminars, will focus on the challenges of developing and expanding the domain of emerging technologies in the design and production of architecture.

Mirco-techniques for combining the thresholds of the horrific-becoming-beautiful and the beautiful-becoming-horrific (grotesque) have imprinted themselves as visual-temporal cues on the current design retina. Monstrosity is the new sex. Lust still rules the empire of desire, only the desires are more elaborate – multiple, complex, intelligent, emotive. The importance of the multiplicity has finally opened the door for mutation as a permanent state of the present. We are becoming monsters – a species aroused by non-perfect images coming from perfect methodologies. Here is where the true transformation is happening. We are subverting the logic of perfection: what used to be about mastering the result of a non-perfect process is now about the production of monstrosity and the grotesque thought the mathematical perfection of an evolutive mechanism.

Being located in Vienna, the studio will take full advantage of the possibilities that such a rich environment offers, at the same time all the classes will highly interact with the seminars at the school at large, the Universität für Angewandte Kunst Wien is indeed an ideal environment of design experimentation, where some of the most prominent architect in the world, such as Wolf Prix, Zaha Hadid, and Greg Lynn give the school its unique character and superb design standard.

Course starts end of June 2009!