Reassembled mirrors

Updates to this blog have been entirely absent though I am now beginning to craft different narratives together here in Berlin. Currently I am developing a deeper historical analysis of the city center of Berlin to complement the observations I have been conducting at the Marx Engels Forum. Market halls, slaughterhouses, bürgerin, neoliberalism, and protest are topics of inquiry.

For my criticism seminar I am researching the Max Planck Institute für Bildungsforschung here in Berlin, designed by the architects Hermann Fehling and Daniel Gogel. It will be a relatively short term paper but should introduce relevant commentary on the strands of organic modernism within German design.

When I began this blog my initial inclination was to include a greater commentary on art. This is manifesting itself in the contemporary analysis of the Marx Engels Forum as the temporary art museum next to the footprint of the Palace of the Republic cannot be ignored in assessing the current context.

I will be returning to Austin at the end of December and will only have sketches of my thesis before then. Until at least February this blog will be content updates and archive imagery in anticipation of writing in the Spring.

welcome

“Technology is not neutral. We’re inside of what we make, and it’s inside of us. We’re living in a world of connections — and it matters which ones get made and unmade.”
Donna Haraway

In starting this blog my hope is to create a resource for others who are interested in exploring the relationships between constructions (read loosely) and their impact. Whether these projects be physically realized, theoretical concerns or fleeting art practices is not so much the matter as is the reception of such ideas and projects.

My academic background has been a steady mixture of studio art, critical theory, design and urban studies. material_semiotic lacks any strict discipline in the sense of only concerning architecture, art practices, infrastructure, etc. Rather it is an attempt to approach these related practices as both an outsider and practitioner- the products of such an attempt retaining the formal goal with varying content.