Two International Conferences

Lodz. This Conference will be held at the the Strzemiński Academy of Art at 121 Wojska Polskiego Street in Lodz, on 22^nd – 24^th September 2016.
The aim of the conference is to critically explore the role of urban art and the ways it can shape the public sphere. Lodz has specific historical, multicultural and economic characteristics and it is still being modernized and redesigned. These processes are the driving forces for creating art from the bottom up. One relevant example of the interaction of the city and its inhabitants is an outdoor gallery of murals created by Urban Forms Foundation. We would like to highlight the interconnection between the main factors creating  the culture of the city, therefore we chose ‘aesthetics’, ‘energy’ and ‘city’ to be the key words of our conference.
The second edition of the conference is focused on the role of urban crators, both artists and citizens as those who give ideas, create forms and places.

Topics:

 Ideas

• Great and small ideas.
• Realized and unrealized ideas.
• Universal and local ideas.
• Ideas as patterns.
• Misplaced ideas.
• Ideas based on bottom-up and top-down activities.

Forms

• An interdisciplinary analysis of various forms of urban art.
• The structure of urban art piece (the role of form and content, the proportion of these components in urban reality).
• Functionality and nonfunctionality of urban art pieces.
• Permanent and ephemeral nature of urban art.

Places

• Places for people. Who is the creator of the city, who is the user and who is the intruder?
• Socially successful and unsuccessful places.
• Place-based identity.
• Physical places as art inspirations.
• Redefinitions of the place (non-places, heterotopic or atopic experience of  the place etc.)

 

BEIRUT, 9-11 Nov. 2016

 

CONFERENCE THEME

Streets connect but also disrupt. Streets are traces of cities’ evolution and of civilizations. In the 21^st century, with unprecedented urbanization and the need for planning resilient cities, the impact on streets is tremendous in relation to transport, communication, identities, safety, functions and socio-cultural roles. Queries arise, on whether anticipating or influencing change in the roles and characters of streets should be addressed within pre-determined conventional, professional, and institutional settings or within a broader framework.
Defining the need for reforming streets that disrupt to those that connect, this conference asks: to what extent should disciplines be engaged with street progress in terms of theory, practice and education in an era with new social networks, new political springs, new diseases, and new forms of art and culture? To what extent are streets urban arteries seeking to facilitate communication or is there a new complexity of streets, uncertainties, and questions to be addressed?

As various actors find ways to express what is going on in streets in terms of their design, use and role in cities, the discussion on streets goes beyond the domain of design and planning. Various aspects of deliberate manifestations of social needs and concerns are addressed within the broader scope of everyday life, politics, economy, technology, communication, to name few. With their ambitions and interests, these actors attempt to reform streets in a versatile global framework, using a wide range of tools based on their backgrounds (internet, writing, painting, filming, installing and so on).

Through an international and interdisciplinary exchange of scholarship, the conference provides a platform for the exchange of thoughts on adaptive approaches towards transformed city streets.