architecture | TEDxCalArts

Brian Massumi is a Canadian social theorist. Massumi’s research spans the fields of art, architecture, political theory, cultural studies and philosophy. He received his Ph.D in French Literature from Yale University in 1987. His publications include Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation and Semblance and Event: Activist Philosophy and the Occurrent Arts. He is also known for English-language translations of recent French philosophy, including Jean-François Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition (with Geoffrey Bennington), Jacques Attali’s Noise and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus.

Massumi collaborates with Erin Manning, director of the Sense Lab, a research-creation laboratory affiliated with Hexagram: Institute for Research/Creation in Media Arts and Technology in Montreal. They co-edit a book series at MIT Press entitled Technologies of Lived Abstraction and are founding members of the editorial collective of the Sense Lab journal Inflexions: A Journal for Research-Creation.

Massumi is currently teaching at Université de Montréal, in the Communication Sciences Department.

Erin Manning holds a University Research Chair in Relational Art and Philosophy in the Faculty of Fine Arts at Concordia University (Montreal, Canada). She is also the director of the Sense Lab (www.senselab.ca), a laboratory that explores the intersections between art practice and philosophy through the matrix of the sensing body in movement. Her current art practice is centred on large-scale textile installations that facilitate emergent collectivities. She presented Stitching Time at the 18th Biennale of Sydney in 2012, will present Stitching Time – Traces at the 5th Moscow Biennale in 2013 and is preparing a work entitled The Knots of Time for the opening of the new Flax Museum in Kortrijk, Belgium. Publications include Always More Than One: Individuation’s Dance (Duke UP, 2013), Relationscapes: Movement, Art, Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2009), Politics of Touch: Sense, Movement, Sovereignty (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2007) and Ephemeral Territories: Representing Nation, Home and Identity in Canada (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2003). Her forthcoming co-written manuscript (with Brian Massumi) is entitled Thought in the Act: Passages in the Ecology of Experience (Minnesota UP).

Ms. Deamer is principal of the firm, Peggy Deamer. Prior to this, from 1986 to 2002, she was a partner in the architectural firm of Deamer + Phillips. She is the Assistant Dean at Yale University’s School of Architecture where she teaches design and history/theory. She has also taught at the Cooper Union, University of Kentucky, Barnard College, Columbia University and Princeton University, among other institutions. She received her BA from Oberlin College, her BArch from the Cooper Union, and her Ph.D. from Princeton University. Her design work has been published in Progressive Architecture, House and Garden, The New York Times Magazine, among other journals and newspapers.

Her Ph.D. was on the English 20th century art and architecture critic Adrian Stokes, who was analyzed by Melanie Klein and saw his aesthetic work as an extension of her psychoanalytic theories. Deamer’s current work concentrates on how theories of form and architectural production – especially prefabrication and mass-customization – influence contemporary culture. Articles written by her have been published in Assemblage, Perspecta, Architecture and the Everyday and Drawing Building Text, among other publications. She is the editor of The Millenium House, based on a studio she taught at Yale. She has served on the board of the New York Foundation for the Arts, Journal of Architecture Education (where she was Design Editor) and currently serves on the board of Storefront for Art and Architecture and Yale’s student journal, Perspecta.