Joel McKim
I am Senior Lecturer in Digital Media and Culture at Birkbeck, University of London and the director of the Vasari Research Centre for Art and Technology. My areas of research and teaching interest include contemporary digital image design, the intersection of media and architecture, and political, aesthetic and media theory.
Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Pittsburgh, Department of the History of Art & Architecture (2011-12)
Postdoctoral Fellow, McGill University, Department of Art History & Communication Studies (2010)
PhD Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths College, University of London
MA Media Studies, Concordia University
BA English, McGill University
E-mail: j.mckim(at)bbk.ac.uk
Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Pittsburgh, Department of the History of Art & Architecture (2011-12)
Postdoctoral Fellow, McGill University, Department of Art History & Communication Studies (2010)
PhD Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths College, University of London
MA Media Studies, Concordia University
BA English, McGill University
E-mail: j.mckim(at)bbk.ac.uk
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Yet this is not simply a book about post-9/11 architecture. It instead presents 9/11 as a multifaceted case study to explore a discourse on memory and its representation in the built environment. It argues that the reconstruction of New York must be considered in relation to larger issues of urban development, ongoing global conflicts, the rise of digital media, and the culture, philosophy and aesthetics of memory. It shows how understanding architecture in New York post-9/11 requires bringing memory into contact with a complex array of political, economic and social forces.
Demonstrating an ability to explain complex philosophical ideas in language that will be accessible to students and researchers alike in architecture, urban studies, cultural studies and memory studies, this book serves as a thought-provoking account of the intertwining of contemporary architecture, media and memory.
Papers
http://computationalculture.net/envisioning-a-technological-humanism-a-review-of-yuk-huis-on-the-existence-of-digital-objects/
This essay explores the growing presence of digital animation within the work of contemporary visual artists, architects and designers concerned with urban geography. While contemporary theorists such as Bernard Stiegler and Mark Hansen have emphasize the ways in which digital media technologies have colonized cultural memory and foreclosed access to a collectively envisioned future, socially engaged architects and artists have turned to animation as a medium that retains an important aesthetic potential. Digital animation has thus become a primary method for both envisioning alternative urban futures and reconstructing the traumatic past within politically engaged work. The paper focuses on four examples, two past and two future-oriented. The conceptual artist Stan Douglas has recently, and uncharacteristically, adopted digital animation and gaming technologies in his Circa 1948 collaboration with the NFB. The interactive app allows Douglas to reactivate a repressed period of Vancouver's past, thereby questioning the narratives of progress and property speculation that dominate the contemporary city. The work of Eyal Weizman and the Forensic Architecture project has increasingly involved the use of digital animation techniques to both reconstruct and visualize key dates or events within moments of humanitarian crisis. In the Rafah: Black Friday case study, for example, digital animation and 3D modelling are used to reconstruct a particularly intense four days of bombing during the 2014 Israeli military offensive in Gaza. The artist Larissa Sansour merges live action and digital animation to visually depict bleak and disturbingly convincing Palestinian futures and the " speculative architect " Liam Young has been employing animation techniques to present urban scenarios that teeter between the technologically utopian and dystopian.
The interview appears in Spanish in the collection, Disturbios Culturales: Conversaciones acerca de Cultural y Movilizacion, ed. Lucia Vodanovic and Jose Ossandon (Santiago : Ediciones Diego Portales).
The burgeoning digital visualization industry has, in recent years, become an integral component of urban property development in major city centers. The marketing of highly lucrative and capital intensive urban real estate hinges on the provision of photo-realistic representations of as-yet unrealized architectural structures. The visualization industry is often disparaged within the design community for its overtly commercial application, its largely undifferentiated aesthetic, and its employment of media workers outside of the architectural profession (epitomized by the out-sourcing of work to large-scale “render farms” located around the globe). Yet the generally low professional and cultural status of the practice of 3D rendering should not distract us from its undeniably growing importance within contemporary urban development. For instance, the visualization industry offers a quintessential example of how digital convergence is disrupting and re-organizing traditional media and design industries.
Examining the output of Factory Fifteen as a case study helps shed light on the ways in which urban planning, design aesthetics, film knowledge and digital media technologies are becoming increasingly intertwined. While the possibilities produced by these new disciplinary convergences are often seized upon by commercial interests, there are also new creative, and even critical, openings emerging. The overtly socio-political content of Factory Fifteen’s urban animations is testament to the existence of this critical potential. The speculative register of the design studio’s films diverges, therefore, from the opportunism of economic property speculation, embracing instead the cautionary speculative traditions of the science fiction genre. This paper will begin by outlining the recent critical debates surrounding the emergence of digital architectural visualizations, highlighting the complex networks and convergence of practices involved in their creation. It will then turn to an examination of Factory Fifteen’s distinct position within this growing industry, considering the studio’s unusual intermixing of politically challenging and commercial rendering work.
"Rather than serving as references to the figure or event of the history they depict, public monuments communicate far more about the collective sentiments of our current period and the period in which they were erected. They express, in other words, rather than simply educate. The majority of confederate monuments, as New Orleans mayor Mitch Landrieu reminds us , were constructed not at the time of the civil war, but long afterwards during moments of resurgence in pro-confederate sentiment and white backlash against black civil rights, such as the Southern Redemption period. They were much less a marker of a tragic, but completed chapter in the nation’s history, than an expression of a renewed commitment to the cultural values of the losing side. Nicholas Mirzoeff points out that the monument to Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville was completed in 1924 and reflects a period of intense KKK organizing in the area. That these monuments can still function today as rallying points for ethnic nationalists and white supremacists, rather than as neutral transmitters of a distant history, should be self-evident after this week’s events. Could whatever nominal educational value these monuments possess, ever justify the continued emboldening role they play for these groups, or the genuine pain and distress they cause to so many who are forced to encounter them in public space? Ask a member of the black community if they are in need of a statue of Robert E. Lee to teach them about the history and continued impact of slavery and discrimination in America."
http://blogs.bbk.ac.uk/bbkcomments/2017/08/17/yes-the-monuments-should-fall/
Infrastructure-oriented architecture takes shape in realized projects such as the Lifescape landscape urbanism plan that is currently transforming Staten Island’s Fresh Kills landfill, once the largest garbage dump in the world, into a public park and wetlands conservation area. It also manifests itself in speculative proposals and competitions, including the ecological visions of the Toronto based firm Lateral Office and the WPA 2.0 design initiative organized by UCLA’s cityLAB – a contemporary reimagining of the Works Projects Administration, the depression-era American public infrastructure investment program.
While Keller Easterling argues that the current architectural focus on infrastructure is inspired by “radical changes to the globalized world,” the movement has, somewhat surprisingly, demonstrated a marked aversion toward an engagement with critical theory and radical philosophy. Responding to an oversaturation of deconstructive and Deleuzean discourse within the field, the proponents of infrastructural architecture call for a form of design pragmatism that reprioritizes the concrete or physical practices of the discipline, eschewing abstract theorization. Yet this missed encounter between philosophy and architecture is an especially curious one given the recent proliferation of philosophical writing that seeks to address quite specifically questions of realism, materiality and natural forces that would seemingly pertain directly to issues of infrastructure. Whether grouped under the heading “speculative realism” or “new materialism,” these varied currents of thought are linked by a shared interest in moving away from textual or cultural analysis in order to conceptualize the realm of non-human objects and systems. This essay will attempt to outline a selection of these recent discussions, focusing primarily on the object-oriented philosophy of Graham Harman and Timothy Morton and the process-oriented thought of Jane Bennett. Its objective is to ask a number of related questions: firstly, what does it mean to speak of such a thing as a philosophy of infrastructure? What insights might these recent philosophical forays into questions of realism and materialism offer architects attempting to design tangible interactions between human and non-human systems? And finally, would this philosophy of infrastructure possess a radical or critical politics to match its radically non-anthropocentric ontology?
Conferences (Organized)
Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities (June 5-6 2015)
The aesthetics of animation has come to occupy a significantly expanded social and political role, moving well beyond the sphere of either children’s entertainment or avant-garde filmmaking. We now encounter digital animations, 3D simulations and computational models in contexts ranging from ecological activism, to human rights law, to military training regimes. As rhetorical tool, affective trigger and imaginative technique, the strategic use of the animated image has become a powerful means to both “re-animate” the past and speculatively predict or envision the future. Digital and analogue animations intervene in life processes at both the intimate level of the body and the expansive scale of urban design and planetary phenomena. In relation to living systems, animation may constitute an effort to capture or simulate that which already exists, or an attempt to bring into being that which could not exist otherwise. Given this apparent contemporary proliferation of animated life, this symposium will re-consider the place of animation and simulation within visual, material and political culture.
Confirmed Speakers:
Thomas Elsaesser
Eyal Weizman
Susan Schuppli
Toshiya Ueno
Pasi Väliaho
Liam Young
Sean Cubitt
Suzanne Buchan
Keisuke Kitano
Erika Balsom
Gillian Rose
Anselm Franke
Richard Squires
Screenings of Work by: Harun Farocki and Hito Steyerl
Organized by: Professor Esther Leslie and Dr. Joel McKim (Birkbeck)
Yet this is not simply a book about post-9/11 architecture. It instead presents 9/11 as a multifaceted case study to explore a discourse on memory and its representation in the built environment. It argues that the reconstruction of New York must be considered in relation to larger issues of urban development, ongoing global conflicts, the rise of digital media, and the culture, philosophy and aesthetics of memory. It shows how understanding architecture in New York post-9/11 requires bringing memory into contact with a complex array of political, economic and social forces.
Demonstrating an ability to explain complex philosophical ideas in language that will be accessible to students and researchers alike in architecture, urban studies, cultural studies and memory studies, this book serves as a thought-provoking account of the intertwining of contemporary architecture, media and memory.
http://computationalculture.net/envisioning-a-technological-humanism-a-review-of-yuk-huis-on-the-existence-of-digital-objects/
This essay explores the growing presence of digital animation within the work of contemporary visual artists, architects and designers concerned with urban geography. While contemporary theorists such as Bernard Stiegler and Mark Hansen have emphasize the ways in which digital media technologies have colonized cultural memory and foreclosed access to a collectively envisioned future, socially engaged architects and artists have turned to animation as a medium that retains an important aesthetic potential. Digital animation has thus become a primary method for both envisioning alternative urban futures and reconstructing the traumatic past within politically engaged work. The paper focuses on four examples, two past and two future-oriented. The conceptual artist Stan Douglas has recently, and uncharacteristically, adopted digital animation and gaming technologies in his Circa 1948 collaboration with the NFB. The interactive app allows Douglas to reactivate a repressed period of Vancouver's past, thereby questioning the narratives of progress and property speculation that dominate the contemporary city. The work of Eyal Weizman and the Forensic Architecture project has increasingly involved the use of digital animation techniques to both reconstruct and visualize key dates or events within moments of humanitarian crisis. In the Rafah: Black Friday case study, for example, digital animation and 3D modelling are used to reconstruct a particularly intense four days of bombing during the 2014 Israeli military offensive in Gaza. The artist Larissa Sansour merges live action and digital animation to visually depict bleak and disturbingly convincing Palestinian futures and the " speculative architect " Liam Young has been employing animation techniques to present urban scenarios that teeter between the technologically utopian and dystopian.
The interview appears in Spanish in the collection, Disturbios Culturales: Conversaciones acerca de Cultural y Movilizacion, ed. Lucia Vodanovic and Jose Ossandon (Santiago : Ediciones Diego Portales).
The burgeoning digital visualization industry has, in recent years, become an integral component of urban property development in major city centers. The marketing of highly lucrative and capital intensive urban real estate hinges on the provision of photo-realistic representations of as-yet unrealized architectural structures. The visualization industry is often disparaged within the design community for its overtly commercial application, its largely undifferentiated aesthetic, and its employment of media workers outside of the architectural profession (epitomized by the out-sourcing of work to large-scale “render farms” located around the globe). Yet the generally low professional and cultural status of the practice of 3D rendering should not distract us from its undeniably growing importance within contemporary urban development. For instance, the visualization industry offers a quintessential example of how digital convergence is disrupting and re-organizing traditional media and design industries.
Examining the output of Factory Fifteen as a case study helps shed light on the ways in which urban planning, design aesthetics, film knowledge and digital media technologies are becoming increasingly intertwined. While the possibilities produced by these new disciplinary convergences are often seized upon by commercial interests, there are also new creative, and even critical, openings emerging. The overtly socio-political content of Factory Fifteen’s urban animations is testament to the existence of this critical potential. The speculative register of the design studio’s films diverges, therefore, from the opportunism of economic property speculation, embracing instead the cautionary speculative traditions of the science fiction genre. This paper will begin by outlining the recent critical debates surrounding the emergence of digital architectural visualizations, highlighting the complex networks and convergence of practices involved in their creation. It will then turn to an examination of Factory Fifteen’s distinct position within this growing industry, considering the studio’s unusual intermixing of politically challenging and commercial rendering work.
"Rather than serving as references to the figure or event of the history they depict, public monuments communicate far more about the collective sentiments of our current period and the period in which they were erected. They express, in other words, rather than simply educate. The majority of confederate monuments, as New Orleans mayor Mitch Landrieu reminds us , were constructed not at the time of the civil war, but long afterwards during moments of resurgence in pro-confederate sentiment and white backlash against black civil rights, such as the Southern Redemption period. They were much less a marker of a tragic, but completed chapter in the nation’s history, than an expression of a renewed commitment to the cultural values of the losing side. Nicholas Mirzoeff points out that the monument to Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville was completed in 1924 and reflects a period of intense KKK organizing in the area. That these monuments can still function today as rallying points for ethnic nationalists and white supremacists, rather than as neutral transmitters of a distant history, should be self-evident after this week’s events. Could whatever nominal educational value these monuments possess, ever justify the continued emboldening role they play for these groups, or the genuine pain and distress they cause to so many who are forced to encounter them in public space? Ask a member of the black community if they are in need of a statue of Robert E. Lee to teach them about the history and continued impact of slavery and discrimination in America."
http://blogs.bbk.ac.uk/bbkcomments/2017/08/17/yes-the-monuments-should-fall/
Infrastructure-oriented architecture takes shape in realized projects such as the Lifescape landscape urbanism plan that is currently transforming Staten Island’s Fresh Kills landfill, once the largest garbage dump in the world, into a public park and wetlands conservation area. It also manifests itself in speculative proposals and competitions, including the ecological visions of the Toronto based firm Lateral Office and the WPA 2.0 design initiative organized by UCLA’s cityLAB – a contemporary reimagining of the Works Projects Administration, the depression-era American public infrastructure investment program.
While Keller Easterling argues that the current architectural focus on infrastructure is inspired by “radical changes to the globalized world,” the movement has, somewhat surprisingly, demonstrated a marked aversion toward an engagement with critical theory and radical philosophy. Responding to an oversaturation of deconstructive and Deleuzean discourse within the field, the proponents of infrastructural architecture call for a form of design pragmatism that reprioritizes the concrete or physical practices of the discipline, eschewing abstract theorization. Yet this missed encounter between philosophy and architecture is an especially curious one given the recent proliferation of philosophical writing that seeks to address quite specifically questions of realism, materiality and natural forces that would seemingly pertain directly to issues of infrastructure. Whether grouped under the heading “speculative realism” or “new materialism,” these varied currents of thought are linked by a shared interest in moving away from textual or cultural analysis in order to conceptualize the realm of non-human objects and systems. This essay will attempt to outline a selection of these recent discussions, focusing primarily on the object-oriented philosophy of Graham Harman and Timothy Morton and the process-oriented thought of Jane Bennett. Its objective is to ask a number of related questions: firstly, what does it mean to speak of such a thing as a philosophy of infrastructure? What insights might these recent philosophical forays into questions of realism and materialism offer architects attempting to design tangible interactions between human and non-human systems? And finally, would this philosophy of infrastructure possess a radical or critical politics to match its radically non-anthropocentric ontology?
Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities (June 5-6 2015)
The aesthetics of animation has come to occupy a significantly expanded social and political role, moving well beyond the sphere of either children’s entertainment or avant-garde filmmaking. We now encounter digital animations, 3D simulations and computational models in contexts ranging from ecological activism, to human rights law, to military training regimes. As rhetorical tool, affective trigger and imaginative technique, the strategic use of the animated image has become a powerful means to both “re-animate” the past and speculatively predict or envision the future. Digital and analogue animations intervene in life processes at both the intimate level of the body and the expansive scale of urban design and planetary phenomena. In relation to living systems, animation may constitute an effort to capture or simulate that which already exists, or an attempt to bring into being that which could not exist otherwise. Given this apparent contemporary proliferation of animated life, this symposium will re-consider the place of animation and simulation within visual, material and political culture.
Confirmed Speakers:
Thomas Elsaesser
Eyal Weizman
Susan Schuppli
Toshiya Ueno
Pasi Väliaho
Liam Young
Sean Cubitt
Suzanne Buchan
Keisuke Kitano
Erika Balsom
Gillian Rose
Anselm Franke
Richard Squires
Screenings of Work by: Harun Farocki and Hito Steyerl
Organized by: Professor Esther Leslie and Dr. Joel McKim (Birkbeck)