Core Studio - formAxioms

“It begins with a tickle and ends in a blaze of petrol. That’s always what jouissance is.”

Jacques Lacan, Seminar XVII: "The Other Side of Psychoanalysis", p. 72.

“All sorts of things in this world behave like mirrors.”

Jacques Lacan "The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book II: The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954-1955"

“The Digital Archive”
[“Memory in the Digital”]

Federico Ruberto’s essay “Models and Fictions: the Archi-tectonic of Virtual Reality” (laying down the theoretical core of Core Studio II) is published HERE.

Within Core Studio 2 first and second iteration, Federico Ruberto was responsible for the lecture series “Models, Interfaces and the Aesthetics of the New Virtual”. A three parts lecture:

—“Ontology and Design: Models towards Virtual | Reality”;
—“Conceptual Models of Space | Time”;
—“Fiction-Narration-Space: the Ethics and Aesthetics of Virtual | Reality”.

The lectures offer, by way of media theory and digital humanities, and introduction to designers to how architecture is sublimating into new forms, requiring alternative aesthetics and processes of narration. The lectures are designed with a hardwired philosophical core which exposes “the virtual and the real” as a relation that requires critical “fictioning” / “modelling”. The series was meant as introduction for blending analog and digital domains, for creating speculative narratives bearing “queer” aesthetics and alternative ethics, and so forming pathways towards alternative modes of design and creative narration. The lecture became the material for the paper “Models and Fictions: the Archi-tectonic of Virtual Reality”(soon available online) that has been selected for publication and oral presentation (14-11-2019) by the 2019 Lisbon Architecture Triennale, section “Artificial Realities: Virtual as an Aesthetic Medium for Architectural Ideation".

more about the lecture series HERE.

The studio explores the thresholds between the real and the virtual through the development of critical-speculative narratives (theory-fiction and science fiction). It asks the students to design a spatial (virtual/physical, or both…) archive required to be set in “generic” albeit self-consistent world. Within this context the relationship between what we call ‘material’ and ‘digital’ is the main driving core of the projects. Each student designs an environment that is both physical and digital. Architecture is then described in a twofold manner for its physical characteristics and for the potential happening that can be lived in it through augment-reality devices. For these reasons the students are asked to diagram both the physical and the digital, finally simulating through virtual reality (Unreal Engine) how the intersection of the two realms can be played out in a consistent narrative and ultimately in a hybrid, physically augmented reality.

Each year the students are directed by the general brief (see below, co-written by Eva Castro and Federico Ruberto) and by the sub-briefs produced by the studio tutors.

The studio concentrates in development of four re-invented typologies within the praxis of archiving, 4 different sections:
__the Estranged Theater. Archive for participatory practices. The space of such archive was the stage of a theatre in which actions and performances are recorded, reiterated whilst re-performed in time in order to create new forms of community.
__the Museum for Humanity’s Memory: imagining collective practices of book keeping and spaces fro collective orientation.
__the Proto-Cemetary. “Archive of memory”; what does it mean to create a digital altar for oneself or for a community? What does it mean to create a space inhabited by a voice? What is to design the space of smell?
__the Deep Library. “Archive of knowledge”; constructing a digital library spatialized by a particular structure of knowledge.

[SEE PROJECTS HERE].

CREDITS
Core Studio II, “The “Digital Archive”. Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD_ASD).
VR Projects of 2019 Core Studio II were exhibited at the 2019 Lisbon Architecture Triennale, section "Artificial Realities: Virtual as an Aesthetic Medium for Architectural Ideation” (http://istar.iscte-iul.pt/artificialrealities/).

Course lead: Eva Castro
Digital Humanities backend: Federico Ruberto
TA: Daryl Ho
VR/AR workshops: (IRL) Jacob Chen.Song, Young Bin, Yi Jun Ng

Design Tutors
2019 instructors: Christine Yogiaman, Jason Lim, Jane Chua, Deniz Manisali
2020 instructors: Calvin Chua, Jason Lim, Federico Ruberto, Deniz Manisali
2021 instructors: Deniz Manisali, Jason Lim, Calvin Chua, Eva Castro
2022 instructors: Jason Lim, Eva Castro, Dicle Uzunyayla

Students: too many to be mentioned here. See more info at SUTD