the Cooper Union School of Art Interdisciplinary Seminar
Victor Burgin
Architecture and the Uncinematic
This lecture took place on September 15th, 2011 at 6:00 pm in the The Rose Auditorium at the Cooper Union
Lecture introduction
Architectural theory, practice and pedagogy have long been served by the assimilation of the promenade architecturale to cinematic montage. Nevertheless, the analogy is strictly appropriate only in the case of a guided tour along a predetermined path. Moreover, cinema in the computer age is not what is was when the comparison was first made. What might it mean today to represent architecture in terms of cinema when the terms of cinema have been changed by the same computer technologies that have transformed architecture?
About Victor Burgin
Victor Burgin is an artist and writer. He is Professor Emeritus of History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz; and Emeritus Professor of Visual Arts at Goldsmiths College, University of London. Burgin’s academic books include Parallel Texts: interviews and interventions about art (2011), Situational Aesthetics (2009), The Remembered Film (2004), In/Different Spaces: place and memory in visual culture (1996), The End of Art Theory: criticism and postmodernity (1986), and Thinking Photography (1982). The most recent books devoted to his visual work are Components of a Practice (2008), published by Skira, and Victor Burgin: Objets Temporels (2007), published by the Presses Universitaires de Rennes. He is currently working on The Prosthetic Unconscious: Psychoanalysis and Virtual Worlds, for Polity books.
Burgin’s still and moving image work is represented public collections that include: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Corcoran Gallery, Washington DC; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; The Tate Gallery, London; The Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Museum Ludwig, Cologne, and the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. His recent commissions include audiovisual and photographic works for the permanent collection of the Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal; the MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Los Angeles; and the Musée de Picardie, Amiens. His most recent commissioned work was installed in the Istanbul Archeological Museum last year in the context of Istanbul 2010 - Cultural Capital of Europe.