GSD Platform 10: Live Feed

Description

Platform 10: Live Feed confronts a central paradox: the "live feeds" of our lives are exponentially more mediated than the analog forms of documentation they are so quickly replacing and erasing. This fact, in combination with the rapid manipulability endemic to all electronic media, now presents us, its users, with radically new conditions of knowledge and imagination. Under these conditions, real-time platforms for meaningful self-expression and fictionalization are inextricably tied to the novel consequences-political, ethical, epistemological-of a world in which distortion, simulation, and manipulation are often indistinguishable from their opposite. Platform 10: Live Feed is a document of images presented in reverse chronological order from July 2017 to August 2016. Pulled from a crowd-sourced database of 117,518 available files, this "live feed" of the institution samples images from students, faculty, and staff alike, revealing the fluidity between the place, production, and people of the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. With Contributions of Mohsen Mostafavi, Dean and Alexander and Victoria Wiley Professor of Design at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design.

Jon Lott is assistant professor of architecture and codirector of the Master of Architecture program at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. Lott is principal of PARA Project and cofounder of the Collective-LOK. He is recipient of the Emerging Voices award (by the Architectural League of New York), the Design Vanguard award (by Architectural Record), the New Practices New York award (by the American Institute of Architects), the Architectural League Prize (by the Architectural League of New York), a MoMA/PS1 Young Architects finalist, and has taught at Syracuse University, directing the School of Architecture's New York City Program. Lott's recent work includes: the Van Alen Institute in New York City, with Collective-LOK, Syracuse University's School of Education Commons, and Haffenden House, which was a finalist for the Mies Crown Hall Americas Prize. The work has been published in the New York Times, the LA Times, Architectural Record, Metropolis, Domus, the Architect's Newspaper, a+u, Form, Azure, and many others. John May is a design critic in architecture and director of the Master in Design Studies program at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. May is founding partner, with Zeina Koreitem, of MILLI NS, a Los Angeles-based design practice with projects in California, New York, and Beirut. MILLI NS's experimental and speculative work has been included in solo and group exhibitions at Storefront for Art and Architecture, Jai & Jai Gallery in Los Angeles, The Museum of the City of New York, Material ConneXion NYC, the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and the Keller Architecture Gallery at MIT. May is also founding co-director of The Instruments Project--an ongoing exploration of the philosophical, historical, and political dimensions of contemporary design technologies. May is the author of New Massings for New Masses: Collectivity After Orthography (MIT SA+P Press, 2015), and co-editor of the collected volume, The Instruments Project: Architecture and Evidence (Minnesota, forthcoming 2017). His essays and interviews have appeared in Perspecta, Praxis, Thresholds, Project, Quaderns, New Geographies, Verb: Crisis (Actar, 2008), and What is Energy? (Actar, forthcoming 2017).

"Every year I've seen something different (Platform 8 from 2016, with its dictionary-like format, stands out from the others), including the latest - edited by Jon Lott from PARA-Project and John May of MILLI NS, with design by Pentagram - where format is key. Instead of pagination, the book is page after page of numbered photos - from 727 to 001 - followed by chronological captions to each and every photo, but in reverse order of their visual presentation. As the book's subtitle conveys, it's like a digital feed of the school's day-to-day activities jumped to the page. Remarkably, the editors started with exactly 117,518 photos culled from a crowd-sourced database and somehow managed to narrow those down to the final number." --A Daily Dose of Architecture