AMT Visiting Artist Lecture Series: Vito Acconci

Wednesday 10 October, 2012
7pm, $0

New School, Johnson Design Center
66 Fifth Avenue, Kellen Auditorium


Vito Acconci’s design and architecture comes from backgrounds of writing and art. His poems in the late 60’s treated language as matter and the page as a field to travel over; his performances in the early 70’s helped shift art from object to interaction; in the early 80’s, his architectural-units were meant to be transformed by users. By the late 80’s his work crossed over and he formed Acconci Studio, a design firm that mixes poetry & geometry, computer-scripting & sentence-structure, narrative & biology, chemistry & social-science.

The Studio uses computers to give form to thinking; they use forms to find ideas. They make not nodes so much as circulation-routes, designing time as much as space. Built in the last decade are:

In Graz, a person-made island where the theater, a bowl, twists to become a playground on its way to becoming a dome. In Coney Island an elevated subway-station façade that waves & bulges to make views & seats. Being built now, in Indianapolis, is an interactive tunnel through a building where pedestrians & cyclists activate sensors that set off lights that swarm around them like fireflies.
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