Nader Vossoughian

Can public space be downloaded?

Biography
Nader Vossoughian (nvossoug@gmail.com) is a curator, critic and theorist whose research interests center on the relationship between politics, knowledge and the city. He studied philosophy, cultural studies and German literature at Berkeley, Swarthmore, and the Humboldt University (Berlin) before receiving his M.Phil. and Ph.D. in the History and Theory of Architecture from Columbia University. His articles have appeared in Bidoun, Metropolis, Design Issues, Volume, the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, and Transnational Associations. He has recently contributed essays to Boyd Rayward (ed.) European Modernism and the Information Society, Elisabeth Nemeth, et. al. (eds.) Otto Neurath's Economic Writings, and Iris Meder (ed.) Josef Frank 1885-1967 – Eine Moderne der Unordnung. His curatorial credits include "Urban Disobedience: The Work of Santiago Cirugeda," and "After Neurath: The Global Polis," the latter of which took place at Stroom den Haag earlier this year. His first book, Otto Neurath: The Languge of the Global Polis, was recently released by NAi Publishers (Rotterdam). Currently, he is a lecturer at the Museum of Modern Art and an assistant professor of architecture at the New York Institute of Technology.

 
Abstract

For much of the period between the two World Wars, avant-garde artists, planners, and designers were convinced of the emancipatory potential of mass production and the mass media. Laszlo Moholy-Nagy "dictated" painterly compositions over the telephone in an effort to democratize the arts. El Lissitzky hoped to revolutionize capitalist society through the use of photography, photo-collage, and cinema. Otto Neurath hoped to promote civic participation by mass-producing museums and exhibits. He wanted to communicate in ways that virtually anyone could understand; he wanted to develop techniques for describing the world that anyone could learn. He wanted to create the very inverse of a cabinet of curiosity – a system of display, namely, that could be accessible to anyone virtually anywhere.
This talk will highlight some of the installation and communication strategies that Neurath developed; it will also consider the deeper questions that his endeavors as a museum director raised. Can technology foster more inclusive forms of public assembly? Can public space be "downloaded"? Neurath, I hope to show, was not a child of the internet age, but he did espouse a political and social philosophy that strongly prefigures "open source" design and other experiments in interactive and participatory planning. Moreover, his example can serve as a  useful reference point for us as we begin to contemplate technology and its role in public life today.