viz.

Image Credit: Experiments in Architecture and Research

A few days ago, New York City’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) unveiled its newest exhibition, Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream. A collection of five architectural plans that reimagine how five different suburbs in America could have benefitted significantly from Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) funds, Foreclosed is an amazing exhibition that melds art and architecture, politics and place. Today, I’m going to discuss the impetus of this exhibition—The Buell Hypothesis. The Hypothesis is an amazing hybrid publication created by Columbia University’s Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture. According to the publication’s graphic designers, The Buell Hypothesis is “part socratic dialogue, part contemporary screenplay, part media scape and part power point slide presentation.” This hybrid production, with its emphasis on collaboration and reinterpretation, is an appropriate point of genesis for Foreclosed. 

The documentation, representation and analysis of academic networks has a long tradition with, for instance, citation networks having been well-examined.  Even here at Stanford, the focus on studying academic collaboration, interdisciplinarity, citation and "the dynamics of knowledge creation" by projects like the Knowledge Creation Lab have led to research and interactive software like the Dissertation Browser, which allows for an exploration of the topic networks formed out of the texts of various dissertations.  In my own experience, however, describing the Wild West of Digital Humanities projects, groups, institutes, centers, collaboraties and informal teams is not so easy as downloading and reconciling authors and citations from a friendly and metadata rich on-line journal or aggregator, nor is it deeply embedded enough in network theory to easily sidestep the practical concerns that it evokes.  Describing the projects and participants in the Digital Humanities at Stanford using semantic links has produced enormously interesting, as well as enormously problematic, results.

Julian Voss-Andreae earned a Masters in quantum physics at the University of Vienna, participating in a seminal experiment demonstrating quantum behavior for buckminsterfullerenes.  He then left academia to become a full-time sculptor in order to express his powerful artistic response to the scientific phenomena he'd been immersed in.