ADS12: Melee
About
This year in “Melee”, ADS12 explored what it means when we can encounter everything at once. As the volume and immediacy of opinions grows, so too does evidence that they can directly shape a world-scale public forum. Language acts indeed have material effects.
“Melee” is a studio told through individual relationships to inordinate amounts of information. Not just one's ability to perceive and react to epistemological change, or the revisions of shared traditions that are already upon us, but also a sense of bewilderment and estrangement towards such magnitudes. The role of the architectural project then is to address the growing gap between information and (over-)looking; complexity and (mis-)understanding; contribution and (non-)participation.
The swirling melee of beliefs are also explored through shifting relationships to visual and architectural language with the belief that, like language itself, it can do great damage—as seen played out as radical regression of mainstream political speech—but also that there is hope for great renovation. The projects have been developed as "plenitudes": consisting of a minimum of 2000 "acts" (eg. species, subjects, objects, processes etc.) to explore strategies that an architect can deploy when the magnitudes of content they’re responding to, challenges their own perceptive shortcomings.
Tutors: Valle Medina, Benjamin Reynolds
https://www.instagram.com/rca.ads12/
Thanks:
Kyla Arsadjaja
Lorents-Kristian Blomseth
Matthew Cowan
Amelia Groom
Emanuele Lugli
Laura Spina
Nicholas Weltyk
Zairong Xiang
Vivian Yuan Xuan