 and I serve as the Dean of the Medical School of the Arts. I promise I will get out of the way quickly after all who wants to hear the Dean talking up here. But I hope you had a great day, a fantastic day yesterday, that our leadership and our wonderful staff team is taking care of your every need. My role is to welcome you to our hometown and to our campus and to our house, whether you come from halfway across the world or from across the street where we're honored by your presence, excited to have you here. I'd also like to give a shout out to all the staff volunteers that have been helping around this. I mean, they're making a run. I mean, let's give it up for them. We've had a hell of a time explaining just what is New City's future lines to our donors and to our colleagues on campus and our community support, even ourselves at times. But you know, last night I saw what it was. I mean, I don't know if you've shared that experience. Walking around in that community of Jubilee Park and really experiencing the installations and having conversations with a few of you folks and people from the neighborhood and with that wonderful police woman who was present at several junctures. And being there to see the senior citizens taking in the evening from their torches and watching those kids play a soccer under that unbelievable moon. I knew that whatever New City's future ruins is, that was it. I mean, it was a very moving experience for me. And I hope you felt some of the same thing. Meadows itself is first and foremost about great people doing great work across 11 arts and communication disciplines. But for that work to have meaning, it has to be relevant to people in a community. And we do believe that artists make a difference in communities every day. And not just on the big stages in the fancy concert halls, but perhaps even more importantly in neighborhoods and schools and in boardrooms and churches and jury waiting rooms. In short, wherever people, wherever human beings live and work and play, artists make life better. But they don't always make life more comfortable. In fact, if artists are doing their job, they often make life more uncomfortable. Because the arts question, the arts challenge, the arts probe, the arts push the status, whoa, they break taboos. In an age that is so dominated by identity politics and consumerism and commodification and appropriation and all this other crap, the arts help us understand what it means to be fully human. And in essence, that's why we chose to award the Meadows Prize to Gavin Krober. And for this wild and crazy project called New Cities Future Roads, because we believe that artists in all creatives should and must have a voice in the civic conversation on the future. They're working collectively with great passion on issues that affect every human being in this particular time and time and place. That artists and creatives should be leading, not following, leading the people, leading the politicians, leading the corporations, leading the bureaucrats towards a society and a culture that is more deeply based in human value, injustice, inequity, enlightenment, and informed by the aesthetic experience of the arts. So we're not expecting very much. But I would like to extend a special thanks before I leave the stage to our anchor partners, those from Arizona State University, Gommage, and those from UT El Paso Rubin Center for the Visual Arts. We're honored by your presence. We're thrilled to have you in our town and on our campus. I look forward to several more years of working collaboratively with you. And I hope to be joining you and your hometowns and on your campuses as this project unfolds. And finally, it's an honor for me to introduce the 2016 Meadows Prize winner, the artistic director and the brains and the creative force behind Duke City's huge ruins, Mr. Gavin Krober. Thank you all for yesterday. I really, it was, I had an amazing time, and I owe it to all of you. So I'm going online here. First off the back, just a little bit of an overview and some housekeeping. I want to say thanks as well to the SNU Meadows School of the Arts, ASU Gammage, the UT El Paso Rubin Center for the Visual Arts. I want to welcome everybody that is watching a stream on HowlRound as well as those listening as we broadcast on radioEE.net. For those of you that weren't in the mix yesterday, I want to briefly survey the initiative itself. Duke City's future ruins is a multi-year curatorial initiative that's inviting artists, designers, and thinkers to reimagine the cities of America's Western Sunbelt. It will unfold between now and 2019 in, of course, its three phases, one which we're in the middle of right now and convening, the next which will spread across 2017 and 2018, a series of residencies and commissions across the region of the Western Sunbelt, hosted by anchor partners. And ultimately in 2019, the initiative will culminate in a touring exhibition and publication. A diverse mix of audiences in the room today because of the nature of the initiative. We have students, we have invited guests, we have anchor partners that have been planning this for a long time. We have people that were here with us yesterday as we were on the bus, as we were touring Jubilee Park and looking at installations there. We have people that are just joining the proceedings for the first time. I think my role here this morning is to try to roll all these different perspectives together and offer a few notes to orient you as we move into day two. If yesterday was about the kind of spatial orientation locating ourselves in Dallas, locating ourselves in the political geography of the Western Sunbelt and relating those things to a wider global context, today we'll be shifting into a different mode, really looking at a set of frameworks, methodologies, approaches that we can bring to bear upon the conditions that define these cities. But before we jump into that, I'd like to speak a little bit to some of those conditions, to the stakes and the urgencies of this geography we're looking at. So obviously, first order of business is to situate ourselves in a very shifted political landscape. Now Donald Trump slept into office Tuesday night, propelled to a great degree by a narrative of decline at home and the rise of powers abroad. This is a vision that a number of people share, and this is a vision that is often communicated in the general press and political discourse and in the art and design worlds through the images of cities. In San Francisco or New York, you see hyper gentrification, the collapse of middle class aspirations in the face of tech buses and oligarch parks. In Detroit, you have the decline of industrial might, these old temples of industry rising above urban prairie. And overseas in places like the Gulf or Shanghai, you have this kind of orientalist sideboard fantasia moving up where there was once no city at all. Now as a whole, these images telegraph a narrative of imperial decline and anxiety, right, of a new world order that's rising up. They gain a lot of potency from a long tradition in Western thought of imaging crisis through cities. There are very important examples of this from Angles' study of Manchester to Ben Amin looking at Paris, the Chicago School of Sociology, or more recently, and apropos of this event, learning from Las Vegas by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown. These sort of urban mosaic that we see today, suddenly it lacks the rigor of these kind of historical examples, but it is ubiquitous and influential in much the same way. It inherits the same impulse, but it of course has many blind spots. One of those blind spots I think is Dallas. I think are the cities of the Western Sun Belt. Now when I say America's Western Sun Belt, I mean stretch, a territory that runs from here in Dallas hovering on its eastern edge all the way to Tijuana, San Diego on the Pacific Coast. This is what we could call the other west, not the picture book southwest, not mesas and plateaus, but the urban negative space that frames that celebrated landscape. These are frontier cities. They hover within the sphere of influence of the Old West myth. They're close to La Frontera in both its current and historical positions. And many have argued that they represent a frontier in another sense, that they show the direction that American urbanism is heading. Demographers like Joel Kotkin point to Boomburg, it's like Arlington, sorry they're Boomburg, this is like Arlington, suburbs that are larger than legacy cities like the one either than St. Louis. They point to these as a kind of counterpoint to Rust Belt decline, the gross and affordable home pricing a magnet for a retrenching middle class. At the same time, demographers are pointing to the coming colorized America and the way you can see demographic change in these cities in advance of the rest of the country. These are the capitalist gap states like Arizona, where the oldest third of the population is 80% Anglo, but the youngest third is 40%. So they embody both the Trump-Coderblock and the Obama coalition in this tension. But to that end, a lot of analyses about the future of these states were pointing to were obviously wrong. Here's a couple of strong examples from the Atlantic, looking at the DNC's shift to actually turn Texas purple, take over Arizona. I think we all know this didn't happen, but if politics have shifted in the Rust Belt and we all sort of are sitting here feeling like, maybe we picked the wrong region, maybe we should get on some buses and get up to Michigan. If you look at this map, this is from the New York Times, it demonstrates the extremity of political shift. Across geography, and you can see this dent, these bright arrows forming almost a pool in the Midwest, but something approaching a kind of stasis in the Sun Belt. So obviously this didn't bring any sort of the predicted triumph to Clinton or the DNC, but it does suggest that in our shift in political territory, the space of opportunity for progressive causes still rests in these places and still rests with the kind of demographic changes that they augur for the time. So you have to understand the Rust Belt and the Sun Belt as conjoined, that you sighed at the same point, like the desperation that we speak about in the Rust Belt is tied to offshoring to China and other overseas sites, but it is also a pattern that was tested and routed through the Sun Belt. Ellie Shermer, who we're lucky to have with us today, historian has talked about how cities like Phoenix transform themselves from these extraction colonies of the East into jewels of the Sun Belt, operating through business elite groups like Barry Goldwater, Phoenix Chamber of Commerce or the Dallas Citizens Council here to develop a sort of cocktail deregulation and federal funding all wrapped up in the sort of language of cowboy independence that ultimately provided a blueprint for say the 70s austerity measures of New York and anticipated the special economic zones that dot the world's day. So this is not to mistakenly try to recenter a political conversation here in the Sun Belt, not to diminish what's happening in the Midwest, but simply to recognize that those who were left behind in the Rust Belt, those who were left behind by globalization, were also left behind by internal power shifts inside of the United States, in which resources, people all migrated to the Sun Belt and this was a kind of staging for globalization and it's this intense. So even these places, even Dallas, even Phoenix, even El Paso must compete with a kind of more robust neoliberalism that has developed since and there's really no better example of this than the ways that like Machila Dora urbanism presses right up against the city like El Paso from Lawrence. So this is all to say that as much as these cities represent a sort of emergent paradigm, there are also emergent crises on the ground. They're not some sort of Shangri-La and if they point a way where the country is going, they're as close to going off a cliff as anywhere else. There are serious questions of social sustainability here. Those demographic shifts create situations of deep political contestation and you can look at the sort of struggles over gerrymandered Texas or purple state campaigns, SB 1070 in Arizona. Sprawl of course is a national norm and the sort of questions of ecological sustainability that come up here. The cost of sprawl, car culture, resource overuse are as applicable here as anywhere else. The housing crash in Las Vegas and Phoenix revealed the precarity of the middle class, the middle class in ostensibly affordable Sun Belt cities and through a national crisis into relief. So, you see here, a North American iteration of the... I appreciate the note. So what you can see in these cities is a sort of North American iteration of planetary crises, right? Cries of sustainability, rapid urbanization and migration. And as Andy Ross pointed out last night, his keynotes in some ways these cities offer a space to think about approaches to these issues globally. So, for me personally, one thing that comes out in these cities is there's a certain sort of legibility. Extreme growth plays off the extreme environment. The lack of a historic core leaves new mid-century and later suburban growth as a sort of central image. The investment of a sense of history out in the western land state beyond city limits can lead these cities feeling a bit like islands of clean contemporary floating on a sea of mutual meant. And so one of the potentialities of these places is their legibility, their sort of representational capacity to help us think about and see these issues. Historically, a number of artists and architects have looked at this from Andrew Shea to Ben Churri and Sal Brown and learned from Las Vegas or Rainer Fathom looking at Los Angeles. These are just a few historical models. There are others, but more on that and on. This morning, what we're here to do is stage a set of less conventional, less established approaches to this geography. A diverse set of hopefully resonant perspectives, some of which come from people working in the region, some who are working on the region, some who are working in parallel urbanisms locally. What we're trying to do is stage a set of methodologies, geographies, issues and tools, all of which we can unpack in the breakout sessions this afternoon and throughout the weekend. There will be a slight departure from the order that you have in your printed programs. I won't be reading bios for any of these presenters. Instead, we refer you to the NCFR website where you can find full bios for each presenter. We're also playing, as you've seen, the likely melodic fascist game with our presenters. You'll receive a little signal from the cello when it's time to wrap up. Unlike me, you'll have to actually obey. There will be no introduction in between. We'll simply be shuttling offstage, following our name cards on the screen to move. With that, I'll clear the stage and thank you all for being here. Ours is a cultural crisis. The crisis of the institutions unable to tackle unprecedented urban asymmetry between in place of mega wealth and sectors of marginalization. Obviously, they have produced unprecedented social and economic inequalities. We must continue to visualize inequality. One of the most compelling studies of American inequality was produced by Emmanuel Sykes and Piketty. They confronted two lines that mirror each other, moving from the Great Depression in 1926 to our own economic downturn in 2006, 2008. At these two peaks, two peaks on each side and a valley in the middle, at these two peaks we find, obviously, the largest income inequality. But what's compelling about their work is that the bottom line at those two moments also measured the lowest taxation on the wealthy. So for us, this gap represents a visualization of the crisis itself because it exposes the hypocrisy of the American dream as promised by trickle-down economics. If we forgive the wealthy their taxes, we will all be better off. But we never talk about the valley between these two peaks. This is where we find, after the decades, when the detail in the middle writes, some of the institutions across sectors to invest in unprecedented ways in public infrastructure, public art, public education, public housing, public health. In fact, the public was not a forbidden word from our political language. So this visualization conveys inequalities with about the polarization of public and private resources but also about the unprecedented privatization of our collective economic, environmental and social assets. So where is our public today? Where is our public imagination? It has been a question essential over the last decades that suddenly has a new urgency for all of us. Witnessing this next wave of assault on public investment and so much else will be excruciating. We have entered a fact-free Orwellian zone in which a climate change denier will run the EPA and tax cuts for the wealthy and the destruction of the social safety net and key public institutions like the Department of Education are the magic tools to bring about prosperity in the middle class. It seems we're not even inhabiting the same universe anymore. As the top-down public is further dismantled, what can we do? How do we orient ourselves beyond drinking heavily? Let's imagine a bottom-up public. A set of informal transgressions that counter the imposition of exclusionary political and economic power from the everyday acts of resistance and adaptation in marginalized communities everywhere to our own artistic and activist practices on the ground. Let's design a more stealthful opposition to the wave of anti-public assaults that are about to descend upon us. What can this bottom-up public look like? Teddy and I would like to offer some insights here drawn from our work on informal urban dynamics, the ethical, political, and spatial building blocks, perhaps, of a new bottom-up public. First of all, enough preaching to the choir. Chances are most of us in this room agree on essential principles of inclusion and social equity. But how do we engage those who don't? We need to infiltrate cultures of opposition, understand their logics of justification, decode this terrifying social and political reality we are in. Events like this one feel great, but we need to get uncomfortable. Enough of consensus. We need to invite conflict. We need to seek out conflict. We cannot underestimate the depth and strength of opposition or be blindsided ever again. We need to retool ourselves now. Let's create new social and behavioral norms of inclusion and social equity from the bottom-up and shame people who violate them. Let's use arts and culture to do it. We need a new citizenship culture that transcends us versus them. Let's untether citizenship in the territorial and identitary obsession with borders and boundaries from ethnicity and race and from wealth and class. We need to be mediators at a time when the extreme left and the extreme right seem to be converging in their mistrust of government. Let's demand accountable public institutions that invest in public goods. The bottom-up is resilient and powerful, we know this, but let's not surrender the top-down public and capitulate to the logics of privatization. Let's not abandon our public rights and our practice we believe that top-down and bottom-up resources and knowledges need to meet and we need agencies capable of mediating their interface. We see our practice operating very much in this vein. We need to construct a new political language organized around urban rights. For example, socializing density. We can no longer measure density as an abstract amount of objects per area, but as an amount of social and economic exchanges per area. The small social and economic contingencies of informal urbanization will transform the largeness and homogeneity of selfish sprawl into more sustainable, plural and complex environments. Zoning has to stop being a punitive tool that prevents socialization. Zoning needs to be a generative tool to reorganize activity and economy at community scales. Temporalizing the space, we need to challenge the autonomy of buildings. Often conceived as self-referential objects that are indifferent to social and economic temporalities embedded in the city. How to engage instead the complex temporalization of space found in formal urbanizations management of time, people, spaces and resources, the informal is just not an image, the informal is a praxis. Rethinking, this clicker is completely hyper. The problem is that the clicker is too... Is this the one you want? Yeah, please. Yes. Rethinking property, we need to rethink existing models of property by redefining affordability through the value of social participation. We need to elevate the role of communities in co-producing housing, enabling a more inclusive idea of ownership while protecting a community's right to social and economic sustainability. Redistributing knowledges, this is a crisis of knowledge transference. Our inability to translate and politically represent bottom-up knowledge to transform top-down policy. Social justice today cannot be only about the redistribution of resources but about the redistribution of knowledges. And finally, democratizing access. The most emblematic image during the civil rights movement is when Rosa Parks sat in the seat where she did not belong. Even though the bus was public, it was inaccessible to many. So today, more than ever, we need to move from the neutrality of our idea of the public to the specificity of rights, the social and economic rights of communities to benefit from the profits of globalization. To conclude, for all of these elements, for us, all of these elements converge in the urgency to transform public space. Let's reject conventional strategies of urban beautification and innovation that turn our public spaces into sites of leisure and consumption. Let's question the agendas of new urbanism and creative class pop-ups. Usually, they only accelerate gentrification, cynically appropriate arts and culture, commodify multiculturalism to enrich private developers and become an apology for the absence of more substantial public investment. No, public space must educate. Public space must be a site of debate and contestation and infused with resources and tools that increase public knowledge and cultivate community capacity for political action. Thank you. Just want to give it up for my student, Nori Siatu, who showed up at 9 a.m. on a Sunday. So he could do a pretty tough job when you see he's itching to play his toe. So, my name is Clyde Valentin, and I'm a diehard next friend. And I'm here for some sympathy because now that the Cubs are one world series and the Cleveland Calvary is a one chip in 2016, I think the Knicks can start getting some sympathy nationally. So what is this diehard Knicks fan, native New Yorker, doing in Dallas, Texas? I had the pleasure of learning about this opportunity for my colleague Will Power. And the very first person that I encountered in this endeavor was my current colleague, Noah Simbliss. And I had asked him if there was a strategic plan. I was like, it seems like you guys are putting together resources, you're talking about building something. He said, no, we don't have a plan. We have a toolkit. That toolkit was developed by Gamro Program. So it's really great to be here at this particular moment because in many ways the work that we're doing, New City's future ruins, I think, echo some of what Dean Holland had talked about earlier in terms of our vision as an institution and a university as we move forward. So last year we launched Ignite Arts Dallas, a Center for People Purpose in place. And the immediate thing I did was began to identify various collaborations, national, regional, local. One of those collaborations was Arts and the Changing America. If you're all not familiar with this initiative out of Power Arts, I'm gonna ask that you become so. And the goal for Arts and the Changing America is to track demographic shifts and cultural practices. Tell you right about the clicker, it is. So this past semester, this is the second of two convenings. The first one we co-hosted here in Dallas was Alternate Roots. Roots is a member organization that supports Southern-based artists and Southern-based arts organizations. And the second is New City's Future Ruins. So through the course of this last four months, we've essentially grounded ourselves in our work around the region. And when I look to my left or right, that's my region, because with smack dab in the middle, that's my particular perspective on our geography. So what does the Future of America look like? This map is a picture, a snapshot, different graphically, of 2013 and where each state is and will be by 2060. So you can see us sitting in the Southwest or across the geography that Gavin pointed out were kind of from the future. So welcome to the future, right? What I find particularly curious is when we talk about that wave or that rusted sub-belt, those states, that quote-unquote turned red in the election, not so much, right? So what does the future look like? I want to zoom in for a moment, and then I want to zoom back out. This is a snapshot of Dallas today, our demographics. We're a pretty diverse city and already a quote-unquote majority minority place. We have a lot of non-animal speakers across the city. Andrew Rocks talked about, you know, the urban core centering around the league and a service class or a permanent underclass. And these are just some snapshots of Dallas economically. So we're about here. We haven't really spent any time in the southern portion of the city. Julie's about here. So you can see where poverty in Dallas is most concentrated. That correlates with assistance. And this is a particular grave issue in that there is very little access to healthy food in Dallas across the southern sector. Fresh food despite a tremendous amount of land. And finally, that leads to some really grave issues. And then the last thing I wanted to share was the concentration of wealth. So we're about here right now in Dallas. This is Highland Park. You can see where the upper strata of the city live in terms of its citizens. And you can see that section. So that's a picture, not the whole truth, but just a picture of part of the truth and the future if we're not careful. But then there's another truth. This is the current election and the wave of people who came in. So despite us losing the federal election, we have more women in the Senate than we've ever had. Camilla Harris, Mazi Rono, Captain Cortez Masto was the first Latina serving in the Senate. Pramila Diapá from Seattle. And Adriano Espalá was the first Dominican American. In Congress. And Pramila's the first Indian American. So we see that there's some changes, but there's also some changes. This young man right here and his business partner, Tanaia Winder, are both young Native American artists. And they've set up a business where they're organizing other artists. And specifically from Native American, for the Native American community, the indigenous community. And they're reclaiming their language, reclaiming their practices, reclaiming their traditions and galvanizing other young people. These are two local organizers from Dallas. Frank Juan was just in town with us three weeks ago at an incredible event. And this is, I think, part of the wave and the shift that we're looking to support not only in Dallas, but across the region. This is a quick cultural quiz. Does anybody know, without saying his name, who this guy is? Just through raising your hand. We got two folks who know who this guy is, right? His name is, what's his name? Romeo Santos, right? Romeo Santos has the unique distinction of being only the second musician to consecutively sell out Yankee Stadium for two nights. Who's the first person? Does anybody know? No. You're wrong. This guy, Paul McCartney, and he's surprised, he's as surprised as you are that Romeo Santos is the second person to have sold out Yankee Stadium for two nights. Romeo has performed with every single popular musician in the country, in the urban space. Trey Usher, Shakira, the list goes on. And yet most of you don't know who he is. This is part of what I believe what our demographic shifts are. And then I just have a question for you guys. I'm posing a question and I'm going to invite you to our panel where my colleagues, Arena de Game, Roberto Padilla, and Daniela Alvarez will be exploring these issues a little bit more, our new America panel. The first minute is, what are we doing to extend our own levels of discomfort as we approach this work as creatives to echo what Fana and Teddy said so well. Thank you. Go ahead, Brenda. I'm just going to say thank you first, Brenda, and then I'll officially start. Anyway, just really, I just want to say thank you to Kevin Noah, to Ron Amber and to Brenda as well for sending an invitation for me to come and speak this morning. I'm very excited about talking about aproputurism, and I really enjoy actually the format and kind of the rapid speed of the presentation and the diversity of the presentation. So again, thank you for the invitation. Okay, Brenda. So as I mentioned, this morning I will be giving a presentation about aproputurism. Through the lens of an exhibition I co-curated called The Shadows to Shape, which opened at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 2013. I worked at the Studio Museum from 2011 to 2016, but I actually moved back to LA a couple months ago where my husband and I welcomed our baby girl. So I am now an LA resident, but I'm talking about a show I did in New York a few years ago. My research for the aproputurism exhibition actually started in 2011. And because I wanted to kind of think about what exhibitions had been done on the topic and really what was the conversation around aproputurism at that time. But before I kind of jumped into the research, I wanted to do a little bit of kind of informal research ahead of time and really kind of understand what people knew or thought about aproputurism. As a closeted science fiction enthusiast, I was curious to hear about people's responses mainly because I knew and raised from I have no idea what aproputurism is to I've read everything Octavia Butler has ever wrote. So a person I actually started my research with was my mom. She's kind of my go-to person. And her response was classic. Me. Mom, what do you think aproputurism is? My mom. Naima? I don't know. She said, I had an apro in college and I think about the future but I really have no idea what the combination means. And I said, she said, seriously, when I think about aproputurism, I think about Aurora. A character in the Star Trek franchise. Michelle Nichols portrayed the character through six-star truck film. Aurora was an important part in the original series, Multicultural Crew, and one of the first characters of African descent to be featured in a non-minial role on an American television series. My response, yeah, she's pretty fly. My mom. I remember reading that she wanted to leave the show after the first year or believe the film series after the first year to return to musical theater. But Martin Luther King, surprisingly, actually convinced her to say, me, really? Like me? Martin Luther King? Wow, that's so random. I said, how did he do that? And she said, I don't know, Naima, Google it. I said, okay, mom. I said, I did, and I learned that Dr. King explained to her that her character signified a future of greater racial harmony and cooperation. King told Nichols, quote, you are our image of where we're going. You're 300 years from now. And that means that that's where we are and it takes place now. Keep doing what you're doing. You are our inspiration. Nichols recounted, Star Trek was one of the only shows that King and his life, Coretta, would allow their children to watch. And I thanked him and I told him I was leaving the show. Then a smile came off of Dr. King's face. King then responded to Nichols, don't you understand? For the first time, we're seen as we should be seen. You don't have a black role. You have an equal role. I thought about the exchange between Nichols and King a lot and I thought it was phenomenal. Not only because it touched on her representation on TV but the significance of seeing people of color in the future. As Sam Delaney noted, science fiction isn't just about the world out there. It's also thinking about how that world might be. And particularly important exercise for those who are oppressed because they're going to change the world we live in. They and all of us have to be able to think about a world that works differently. End quote. In 2012, co-curator Zoe Whitley, who was a curator of the tape, and I began research on what would eventually come the shadows to shape. An interdisciplinary exhibition exploring contemporary art in the lens of aproputurist aesthetics. Coined in 1994 by writer Mark Derry in his essay, Black to the Future. The term aproputurism refers to a literary and cultural aesthetic that combines elements of science fiction, historical fiction, fantasy, aprocentistry, and aprocentisticity, and a magical realism with non-western cosmologies in order to critique not only the present day dilemmas of people of color, but also to revise, interrogate, and re-examine historical events of the past. Aproputurists often cite musician Sun Ra, who often walked around the streets of Chicago with electric spacesuits, as the pioneer of the movement. But more recently, musicians, writers, and artists such as Paola Bell, Betty Davis, Al Cassage, and now Monet to name a few, are attracted to numerous ways aproputurism's themes of imagination, liberation, technology, and mysticism, reflect on the built world and strive to create alternative environments. For the shadows to shape exhibition, we decided to feature 29 artists working in a variety of media, including photography, video, painting, drawing, sculpture, and multimedia installation. And the exhibition opened all 2013 and included 10 new commissions, 6 films, and a robust programming schedule. Our arguing for an expansive definition of aproputurism in a discourse around black cultural production, technology, and speculation of the future, the shadows to shape and recognize that the movement is profoundly connected to geography, location, and time period across spatial and temporal boundaries, and most clearly develops out of historical and social conditions that shape black life in America from the 19th century onward. Since 1974, aproputurism has been stretched, molded, and extended to involve a wide range of disciplines, as evidenced by the multi-artist, many of whom were represented in this exhibition. Many of the U.S.-based artists in the shadow to shape have had the notorious responsibility of wondering. Its idea Hartman has expressed, quote, was it why I sometimes felt as weary of America, as if I too had landed in what was now South Carolina in 1526 or in Jamestown in 1619, was the tongue of all those lost mothers and orphaned children, or was it that each generation built a new, the yoke of a damaged life, the stress of being a native stranger, an eternal alien, end quote. Thus, even as this exhibition argued that aproputurism has the power to reach beyond borders of nationhood, it traces the powerful, discernible, visual characteristics of the movement that connects back to the American experience and conditions of living. A particularly pertinent example, so this is the installation shot of the two installation shots of the exhibition. It was about 5,000 square feet. A particularly pertinent example that I want to talk about this morning is a work by Los Angeles based artist Edgar Arsenault. His work, Slave Ship Song Series, which began in 2013, was a set of new, seismic, large-scale drawings in which he explored the troubled past and dystopian future of Detroit. Incorporating images of oceanic waves set against various elements such as headlines from the Detroit newspapers, the drawings referenced in literal and figurative underground Detroit, from the very ruins of riots to city's alternative music scene. For example, in the techno sounds of Drexia um for for anyway um anyway so in the techno sounds of Drexia, an electronic music duo from Detroit, Arsenault locates ghosts of the city's past. In the 1990s, the musicians created a mythology of underwater civilization descended from slaves to throw up overboard during the middle passage from Africa to the Americans. The title of Arsenault's series, Slave Ship Song, elaborates on Drexia's folklore by directly referencing the massacre of more than 140 enslaved Africans by the crew of the Liverpool Slave Ship Song in the 1781 when the ship ran low on water following navigational mistakes the crew flew through a number of slaves into the sea to drown. Arsenault's drawings occur just supposed disparate people in places that at first seem connected only through circumstantial relationships. However, the sentimental slave ship song is cleared Detroit, once this the world's automatic capital later the site of brutal race rides and social conflicts and more recently, a symbol of economic decline is a place that demonstrates how social and economic forces exert a fundamental influence on the lives of individuals. The installation with its various points of reference do not attempt to explain or resolve Detroit's histories, but rather unsettle them, opening up a shifting space in time in which memory and fantasy coexist. So Brenna's on to hit the button so I'm just going to answer those skip, skip, skip to the end with just a couple of questions. For me Afro-futurism is a pertinent now and particularly this week because I thought about these questions. What is it about our contemporary moment that demands and solicits and activates the fantastic? How do we understand the futurist and speculative as loads of cultural production that trespass borders between high and low art lived and imagined, theoretical and traditional, abstracted by local and transnational? How is making sense the present in an inherently futuristic endeavor? Thank you. I want to thank you this time and this is Grace Morelock and we're from other others in Sydney, Australia and we're here to talk about future ruins in a productive sense. Spoiler! Close your eyes! Do you have a horoscope on that? A whole future! A whole future! So in 1788 when Australia was occupied by the British its first governor immediately envisioned disperse nation when the houses were built for an artful villa a clause will prevent more than one house being built on the allotments which will be 60 feet in front and 150 feet in depth. According to historian Graeme Davis and Australia was founded at the very moment when the model suburb was being born. Conducting a global survey in 1890 American statistician Adna Weber could already identify Australia as the most suburbanised country on earth. Today, Australian cities rank amongst the world's least dense. Fewer than 10% of Australia live within 3 miles of the city centre and fewer than 10% live in rural areas meaning that more than 80% occupy some suburban housing. At the turn of the last century households averaged 5 occupants and lived on small dwellings and expanse in lots. Since the 1980s these averages have completely inverted now half that number of occupants inhabit twice the floors on half the land. And American Islamic mansions have become the norm with new Australian houses the largest in the world. And incredibly these houses sit on half the lots the size of the US average and the highly inflated value of land dictating that property owners build the largest house possible on the smallest plot. So how have architects contributed to this situation? Key players in suburban housing until the 1970s, Australian architects have long abandoned the suburbia. Take for example the words of our best known architect with surprise when it led market. I've never seen anything so depressing as these bloated overly sized, terrible houses built on the tiniest blocks in the traditional subdivision patterns. It's not architecture it's merchandise. So aside from the decreasing influence on our architects there are a number of related factors that contribute to the state of affairs including urban growth boundaries that limit access to land property markets that only recognise free-stand housing develop a driven subdivision without government oversight cheaply available energy and a housing bubble and trouble by recession. We set out to explore this domain deserted by other architects in detail that houses in the city suburb of Kellyville which is notorious as the place where McMansions are marketed and sold. These houses are characterised by cabinet interiors, prominent garages and interchangeable facades. The Oscar House project began with a simple observation that beneath every brick beneath McMansion there is a timber frame waiting to be revealed. Invented and industrialised in 1830 in Chicago lightweight timber frame construction is one of modernity's longest running and most successful projects and remains in worldwide use today. Economical, elegant and easily adaptable the simple timber frame is a lacework diagram of infinite potential. The basic premise of the project is to take a typical suburban plot like the one seen here where large multi-room McMansions build monthly available land and to literally downsize these houses by multiplying and offsetting their external frames. Smaller volumes are inserted within the shell of the original increasing housing density and diversity while preserving open space. So most McMansions have six or seven bedrooms by creating a new interior we can fashion a more efficient plan appropriate to its number of inhabitants. Its smaller volume reduces heating and cooling costs while deeper eaves and larger openings meet more possibility for shading and passive ventilation. The newly created verandas between outer frame and inner walls allow for space for outdoor living suited to our Australian climate and New York Tech's environment. So the basic operation is as follows you take a brick veneer McMansion and this is a real 1990s era Kellyville House Horses and Horses retaining the slab and roof you remove the brick veneer to excise into the frame and then next you build new lightweight walls inset from the frame in this example you can see two new side by side dwellings have been added and then lastly you can cloud and infill the outer frame as necessary. We investigated a range of alternatives for reducing the size of these houses or subdividing them into townhouses duplexes or even micro apartment blocks offering many different options for downsizing and subdividing existing suburban dwellings without displacing their occupants. We exhibited this proposal last year at the Chicago architecture biennial in the form of models which we made ourselves. Divided into two harms these models depict the before and after states of transformation some model describes this transformation at the scale of the suburban subdivision and the other at the scale of the architectural object then it's in backyards as seen here pre-transformation and then at the suburban scale we imagined the exodus frame acting as a line of primacy and enclosure around the house removing the need for six-foot tall property fences and allowing communal space to be recovered and socializing play gardening and recreation and then in an architectural sale the models attempt to demonstrate the underlying beauty of the frame and reclaim this type of housing for architecture and they also show the potential of the frame to generate moments of light and shade inside and out utility and the light The project tapped into collective nostalgia for communal suburban life and just as it is not necessarily a new vision it is not a proposal for new housing but a strategy for adapting housing adapting existing dwellings The occupants of such houses are predominantly aged 50 and older and likely to remain in place beyond the age of 75 These empty nesters are unwilling to downsize to extensive inner city apartments while the young family simply cannot find housing So with enough incentive they might be encouraged to explore a mutually beneficial solution The offset house has recently reinstalled an exhibition we designed and created called Occupy and the exhibition aggregated a number of projects that dealt with incremental strategies for addressing population growth contested cities and housing inequalities and has now the focus If cities aren't able to accommodate their ever occurring populations then our suburbs must adapt, evolve and densify Architects cannot continue to exclude themselves from the social, cultural and political domain of suburbia I said at the beginning that I mentioned learning from Las Vegas the Bannums for Ecology book about Los Angeles the sort of landscapes that we're looking at have a certain set of historical approaches and established narratives that condition the way that we see and think about them and we felt we would be remiss if we didn't take a moment to at least review some of the sort of core precedents in terms of this For some in the room this is probably a relapse of a familiar architectural or cultural history for some it may be new So that is to say this might also be a good bathroom opportunity for you Which is where which is where if you go down this hall and then you reach your head and do a little drop to the right come to the window just to add some second there are others around but that's the easiest Is it doable? Great So I mentioned on the bus tour yesterday that Dallas itself is defined by this sort of trifecta images of the public imaginary beginning with the Kennedy assassination moving to the TV show and of course the football team I also mentioned that locally where these three images don't necessarily dominate in the same way there is a vision of the city divided between north and south white and black which while reflective of important conditions here is also reductive and that a lot of our efforts yesterday were to sort of push past these determining narratives and complicate our vision of space a few other things that press in on these cities from Dallas to Phoenix to El Paso Juarez and the way that we think about cities more generally I mentioned at the outset of my introduction that there's a kind of urban canon a contemporary urban canon through which we visualize the end of the Americanized world as we know it between the decline of Detroit and the rise of these eastern cities so these are these are black spaces these are Asian spaces these are the quintessential others of romanticism and in many ways the way these cities get represented are recapitulations of some of romanticism's caricature trope you have Ozymandias rising up above the Detroit Urban Prairie you have Blake's Denizens of London assembling iPads Shenzhen you have a sort of new form of Orientalism rising up in the form of glass towers rather than representational portraiture a glossy lure for the West I think it's really important that we question the power of these images in wider discourse especially given these correspondences I think it's very real of course the attention that Detroit or Dubai or Beijing received does relate to the very real urgency of conditions on the ground but we have to ask also about how much it corresponds to the potency of those crises rendered in a romantic language in some ways that we might do just as well to look not at places that conform to our image of the end of the world but places where it seems the world persists against all odds the suburb would be a good example of this and many of the cities that we're dealing with are cities that don't look like cities conventionally there's a suburban caricature consolidated in the 1960s that has stuck and is commonly understood as the antithesis of art not the place for art of course also not the place for art the antithesis of the romantic city is the suburb or of course nature many of these cities in the public imagination exist almost as like a vestibule of drosscape to be navigated through on your way to the romantic southwest to get out to the land art the reservations and the plateaus now there are a couple of key terms that have happened and these are really just footnotes that people could follow up of course in the design world there has been a decisive turn towards suburbia a long abandon to the developers by architects and in words such as Ellen Denham Jones retrofitting suburbia there's been a desire to engage the suburbs precisely at the point where they no longer resemble suburbia we have to remember that the the mosques of Dearborn are in a suburb that the Chinatown in Richardson, Texas is a suburb these are complicated places that over time have departed from the caricature to reveal more diverse populations occupying and misusing buildings in new ways creating churches in box stores and also revealing the early wear and tear of cheap architecture there hasn't really been a parallel turn in the art world but there are a handful of key art historical examples that dominate the imagination chief among them perhaps Robert Smith's engagement with SA at New Jersey this is photos from a famous SA of his where he takes a walk along the river looking at the sort of infrastructural edge of the suburbs and contemplates their relationship to his kind of deep geological time there's also a tradition of aerial photography certainly Michael Light's photo in our Visionary Sprawl exhibition is a good example I think in all these cases we find a situation where art begins in the suburbs but departs from it by either contemplating a temporal or spatial distance it moves from the suburbs towards the sublime and even these sort of classic words like vatoms or ruchets that try to stare very non-judgmentally have found themselves swept up in a sort of romantic apocalyptic imaginary since their publication an imaginary that's arisen in Hollywood around the destruction of the city or embodied in Las Vegas in a strip that's no longer simply suburban kitsch but like a performative architecture of a kind of Gomorrah right before the fall these same kinds of apocalypticism do exist in the western Sun Belt in the last couple of years like in the wake of the housing crisis you've seen an amplification of this last year Paula Pacheca-Lupi published The Waterknife, a Kly-Fi novel that details a near future water world along the Colorado River between the city-states of Phoenix and Las Vegas but historically of course there has been a tendency to look at these places and ponder the possible dusty and it's possible dusty fate for them mostly premised on the possibility of water shortage and this certainly came up in Cadillac Desert and as you approach the border there is a long tradition of a kind of borderline cartographic romanticism relating to poverty and crime pouring across from war as a Tijuana at the same time there's also local techno utopianism a kind of sensibility that through innovation we will be able to completely renovate these cities make them into something completely new I said yesterday when asked about the title of the initiative, what its intention was and I think really at heart these are cities that point towards both a false vision of new cities completely pure, sparkling and sustainable and also towards future ruins, visions of complete collapse and our intention really is to navigate between these two potential futurism is to find visions of a future that are a patchwork of resiliency and collapse and with that I'm going to take things back Uber to our presenters to carry this forward with a handful of other examples and frameworks that might help us push past some of this material the Gulf Futurism is a misnomer and it is in many ways I think of it as a bit of juvenilia for me because looking at the larger systemic problems of the globe it was very much my worms I knew I still have a worms I knew I'm not trained as a climate scientist or as a sociologist or anything other than a highly sensitive person and so that is why I make art about these things and do not claim to be an expert in any way on the future of the planet around 10 years ago I was trying to find a way to articulate the changes that I had seen in my lifetime in the Gulf for me Gulf Futurism was an explanation of the time travel that had happened in the region which is essentially a leap from pre-agrarian lifestyles into the hyper-consumerism and hyper-capitalism which occurred in less than a generation certainly my grandmother lived in a manner of until middle age which was essentially unbroken since before Sumeria I found the shock the whiplash that happened around that to be interesting and in that way Gulf Futurism was an exploration of essentially what was happening around me and what was happening to me the Gulf has a strange set of conditions which I think are perhaps unique this real living memory of a deep historical way of life mixed with a super rapid development that has taken centuries for many other places suddenly dive bombing the region I had to find a way to talk around that it's traumatic culturally it's traumatic and certainly it's traumatic environmentally through that I began to think about these conditions and I never came to any conclusions other than the very obvious ones that were all fucked which is just true there are places all over the world that experience extremely rapid development especially places which have had this sort of resource curse of finding petroleum or fossil fuels we will be forever haunted by our reliance on fossil fuels and because in the Middle East was this sort of trigger for this age of fossil fuel consumption the discovery of oil places like Azerbaijan Saudi Arabia it's a highly potent and symbolic place and that's why I find it an interesting place to think about aside from the fact that I'm from since I first started thinking about Gulf Futurism everything has changed in the Gulf everything has also changed everywhere I said before we're all fucked and I still I think that that's particularly pertinent in the Gulf because by 2050 it will essentially you know the place where I grew up the place where my family still lives will according to scientists the uninhabitable due to climate change and in this way I do feel that the Gulf is a a global preview of what's going to happen in the rest of the world as our environment becomes less and less hospitable I know that this sounds very dystopic but I try not to think of it that way in the black and white terms of dystopia and utopia because that which is coming I think is exists without without morality there's no way there's no way to find it anymore I say that with a smile I know that we share certain things with Texas I've always thought that there is an affinity between the two and no small part due to the fact that people like Wallace Stegner went to Saudi Arabia and wrote sprawling books about the discovery of oil and there is this big man mythology that was transplanted from America into the Gulf right down to the fact that my father and uncle's love for Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard so there is a strange sort of link between the places one of the things that bothers me about the term futurism or the word futurism is the way in which it is so often read as sympathy and aesthetic I'm suspicious I suppose of the way in which projections of the future encourage encourage a sort of blind quite violent shredding into this sort of fantasy of the future it doesn't encourage patients or or any kind of I guess it doesn't doesn't foster the things which I think are in some way virtues worth keeping in our development I have one thing to say for anyone attempting to project a future onto a place and that is that I think the only way forward is to think about collectivity and community that is the great downfall of a lot of the sort of dreams of Gulf countries we have tremendous financial backing behind these massive sort of master plans for development figuring out how to remain relevant in a global economy etc etc etc jargon jargon jargon and the thing which is missing and the reason that a lot of these projects fail is because there isn't a focus on building any kind of education or sustainable and community communities that sort of will grow with the country team developing that the our curator put into place here so I just at the heart of the environmental crisis lies the issue we moderns are creatures of energy we come to depend on and desire an ever increasing amount of energy to allow us to do all the things we associate with life in the 21st century access to energy has allowed us to do remarkable things such as building and inhabiting the new cities that we're discussing this weekend but the energy we have shaped our lives around our habits capacities, expectations and beliefs that energy is dirty energy to be modern is to live a contradiction energy use expands possibilities those same possibilities are threatened by the environmental and social implications of the expanding use of energy the stories we tell ourselves determine what we do and what we don't do what we imagine is possible and what we have figured is impossible so too I think with how we understand our relationship to energy today and in the future yet to come I want to suggest to you today that there are three competing narratives about our dominant form of energy today which are fossil fuels that are shaped how we respond or don't respond to global warming and these are strategic realism technical utopianism and eco-apocalypse and how talk about each return and suggest our assignments so strategic realism strategic realism use contemporary geopolitical maneuvering as the inevitable outcome of competition for access to goods and resources chief amongst these being access to fossil fuels it's a discourse employed widely by the government and the media alike those who subscribe to it suspend or minimize concerns about the cumulative environmental disaster of oil and focus instead on the international tensions that will never really arise as countries pursue their individual energy security in an era of scarcity what is a prime concern in strategic realist thought is to keep economies floating in oil at its heart is the blunt expectation that nations will protect themselves from energy disruption by any means necessary strategic realism is a discourse that makes nation states the central actors in the drama of the looming disaster of oil actors who can and do engage in brutal geopolitical calculations in order to secure their economics ability this kind of strategic calculation conforms neatly with right wing discourses that adopt a right approach to defense of homeland as for the larger consequences of oil usage for the environment or for humanity as a whole strategic realism recognizes only that oil is essential to capital and capital is essential for the status quo to continue the potential disaster of oil in this discourse is figured as the possibility that through mismanagement or misrecognition of geopolitical strategy a commodity essential to state power might no longer be available in the abundance necessary for continued utopianism what I call technical utopianism confronts the looming end of oil by calling on science and technology to develop energy alternatives that will enable us to pass through this crisis unscathed government officials environmentalists and scientists from across the political spectrum have espoused this approach which proposes two solutions to the end of fossil fuels either scientific advances will perfect techniques for limiting carbon emissions in the form of exhaust scrubbers, carbon sequestering and so on while simultaneously enabling access to oil resources either too expensive to develop or science will create entirely new forms of energy such as hydrogen fuel cells for space station automobiles technical utopianism technical utopianism has become like strategic realism a ubiquitous and familiar discourse readers of wired advanced electric cars are technical utopians as are most politicals who want to push difficult decisions on into the future all of us seem to believe that the natural historical flow of scientific discovery will resolve the energy and environmental problems we have produced for ourselves faith in such technological evolution lies at the heart of not only technical utopianism technical utopian solutions to the disaster of oil but of modern imagines of science more generally technology is figured it's just around the corner always on the verge of arriving innovation can be hurried along but only slightly just in time technological solutions arrive when needed and not before but they never fail to emerge at the core of this notion of the notion that technological solutions will appear as and when they are needed lies another fantasy that technological developments manage social problems and that they have in the past always appeared in the nick of time to help push modernity along but in reality history offers no examples no such examples at all technical utopians want electricity to solve our social problem of energy use for instance so that we can continue to live exactly how we are just happily fueled in a different way third narrative apocalyptic environmentalism if strategic realism is a narrative of the right largely it's complement on the left unfortunately is equal populace theories of equal populace face the disaster of well capitalism head on the dire consequences of an action in regards to oil are laid out and because it then becomes obvious that avoiding this outcome would require changing everything apocalyptic narratives and statistics are trotted out the first two narratives remain committed to capitalism and treat the future as one in which change will occur because it has to occur equal populace in the future more grimly they understand that fundamental social and political change is essential to address the end of oil however since such change is not on the horizon or difficult to imagine equal apocalypse sees the future as Bosch like a hell on earth full of the tortured survivors of the present who drag themselves through a denuded landscape obscured by choking carbon dioxide smile the statistics and warnings of equal apocalypse discourse are intended to make us realize that without a complete change in social life we have no chance whatever whatsoever of avoiding future disaster how we are to do this is left open although sometimes new social systems are aligned in utopian fashion at the heart of equal apocalyptic discourses are an acceptance that a major transformation is not likely to happen even if the coming disaster can be predicted and described in detail nothing can be done to stop it indeed there is a sense in which disaster is almost welcome the end of oil will mean that capitalism has dug its own grave since without oil current configurations of capitalism are impossible a fourth narrative that I am going to suggest here today so national futures technological futures and apocalyptic ones if these are the dominant discourses with respect to our own futures there is a desperate demand for new visions that will introduce hope and politics in the social life this is the most important task of the century a task for everyone such as those people assembled here artists, writers, scholars and everyone else we can avoid future ruins and create new cities by taking up the challenge of reimagining what energy means for social life specifically I think and newly reimagining too how access to energy might be one of the most important aspects of environmental and social justice the narratives of the energy futures I am imagining will not fall prey to the easily easy criticality of apocalyptic narratives giving up because we have come so far down a road toward ruin rather than longing for a pristine nature that never existed they will accept global warming as the landscape we occupy this century and articulate the hopeful world we should shape in relation to it our energy futures should not await the aha moment of science and technology to save us from ourselves we use the best of science to help us in creating the world we want finally and perhaps above all else and echoing a lot of what I've heard this morning we need to open up we need to reimagine how we should live together and why we separate ourselves from one another even though it is completely imaginary after all the nation has still proven to be a remarkably powerful invention that's proven to be a hard to think past or beyond it's an invention that gets in the way of a problem that envelops the planet as a whole there's other ways to be together let's figure out what they are the ruin is a product of the horrors of war an image of death, destruction or displacement but also an image of romance tied very much to romanticism in the 19th century something that evokes nostalgia for heroic past the ruin can also be about authenticity tied to a kind of oratic origin this is Gaza and Palestine after the 2014 war but it could equally be Aleppo more presently or Hiroshima or Dresden in the past more locally I think of the ruin in relationship to Detroit or even New Orleans was Katrina these were in products of war but social collapse resulted in disasters but could this also be an image of Dallas, Phoenix or San Diego in some future this election has reminded us that we live in a fragile social fabric that could tear at any moment how can the ruin also be connected to other themes that we're talking about immigration, borders refugees and violence against indigenous communities today we build both present and future ruins and we have a new project from Decolonizing Architecture Decolonizing Architecture was started in 2008 by Sandy Bilal it's an architecture studio and residency program based in Beza who are just outside of Bethlehem they're engaged in speculations on the rebuilding after the end of occupation after the 2006 withdrawal from Gaza became the real question how would Palestinians repurpose settlement architecture after Israel has left the question of reuse through a subversion of structures of domination such as evacuated military bases so this is a hilltop which means crow's nest in Arabic in the West Bank it's a site where 500 million birds migrate through between Northern Europe and East Africa when they fly to the Jordan Valley one of the interventions that they proposed was an intervention in the binary of revolving drawer occupation in which Israeli settlers and Palestinian activists would constantly reoccupy the space to repurpose it towards a landing space for bird migration it's temporary but also a symbolic migration of refugees and also evokes the nightmare of the Enlightenment that the formlessness of nature overtakes the order of the city and may I say that this project is the legacy of 1948 when the origins of the Gaza and the West Bank began the refugee camp pictured here which was post-1948 in many ways is a symbol of the Nathbury catastrophe as Palestinians refer to the war of 1948 it's a time of ruin of a people and a ruin of a nation what Benedict Anderson called an imagined community that's bound together by the mourning of a lost moment of destruction the camp symbolizes the catastrophe and here's also a city a city that's extraterritorial under no national sovereignty so campus and camps a project begun by San Diego and Alessandro Pitt that in many ways grew out of colonizing architecture which is also based in bits of gorgeous upset of Bethlehem invited Brave New Alps to think through this question of the camp as a city so this is an image that combines the notion of the camp based space of refugees into the camp as actually a city a city that's intentionally kept in a state of ruins intentionally buying in the industry that relies on it being perpetually a place of victimization perpetually kept in a state of ruin by an Israeli occupation and also perpetually kept in a state of ruin because of a Palestinian resistance to normalization and the need for a hope for return a city that grows organically one of the projects for campus and camps was to think about a space called the alphanique center which was built on the end of the mountain just outside of Deisha, not far from Bethlehem it's about layers of destruction and competing powers Cosine is a space that has encountered many different occupations from the Ottomans to the British from 1948 to 1967 Jordan used this that mountain as a military base after the 1967 war when Israel occupied the West Bank and became an Israeli military base in 1994 following the Oslo the Palestinian Authority took it over and used it as a police station in 1997 the Deisha Public Committee petitioned the Palestinian Authority to use this land to construct housing in a hopeful center in 2002, after during the Second Intifada they destroyed the center and once again established it as a military base in 2005 Israeli withdrew from it and it was rebuilt once again as a cultural center campus and camps was established in 2012 and brings together young people from five camps in the West Bank to to discuss and produce new forms of visual and cultural representations of refugee camps this is a diagram of the newly built cultural center as a space for thinking through for refugees from these refugee camps within the West Bank to think through how the organic city of the refugee camp can be repurposed and how the image of the ruin as the refugee camp as a ruin can be repurposed towards something that can be also a way to rethink Palestinian nationalism in relationship to the refugee camp one of their projects is the concrete tent it was actually set up in the garden of Alphanique center Alphanique means the Phoenix in many ways what they're trying to do is to produce an image of the refugee in the camp that's positive that's about planning, that's about moving beyond the image of the refugee in the camp that's associated with poverty, marginalization and victimization so just a shift for a second to an overlapping politics from Palestine to Beirut I'm thinking of this region a region that's very interconnected in terms of its political history as how one deals with the ruin how one deals with rebuilding the ruin in many ways decolonizing architecture in campus in Kansas thinking about Palestine in particular and how to rebuild after the occupation after a projection of the possible return but also in Beirut which a city that was ravaged by civil war from 1975 to 1990 because of the protection of fighting within Lebanon but also because it was a space of war between Israel and various factions within Lebanon Israel between the PLO that was based in Beirut Israel and the Syrian army that used Lebanon as a space for international war Beirut has become a space after 1990 for an amazing group of artists and designers who really are thinking about how do we negotiate a space of trauma how do we negotiate memory how do we hold on to it in some ways in a national context that has done everything to erase it so in many ways this image this kind of pale future of this building called the Egg speaks to that ruin but Beirut is also a space of a rebuilt future it's an image of the future one of the organizations that was about rebuilding Soledare and to erase the past to build that future something I think echoes a lot of feelings here in Dallas Jalal Tifik who is an artist, writer, part-palestinian who was based for many years in Beirut said I along with my two siblings and my mother deserted the apartment during the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon Did this make the apartment a ruin? Yes and not because it was really damaged and burned during those last years of the offensive even after it was restored it remained a ruin the renovated apartment is a copy of what it was before it was deserted and destroyed but that copy can never be the original and as a result always points to its destruction in this sense the true ruin is the new building to illustrate this idea Tifik tells a story about a vampire in post-war Beirut who is looking for the perfect ruin and with the help of a realtor goes from one destroyed building but can't find the perfect ruin he's constantly dissatisfied until he finds a brand new building and buys it the realtor was confused but at that moment saw the seemingly young vampire as old and the seemingly new building as a ruin in this sense the newly constructed building is haunted by the destruction of the Bedouin's construction it's becoming so how does this connect to the region we're thinking about we tell ourselves that Gaza, Beirut Aleppo are far away but are occupations in civil wars that far off both in the past and in the future this country is built on genocide of indigenous populations and the ravages of capitalism there's resonance from the notion of occupation and land grabs of this service of ideology and like for Tifik's vampire this isn't represented with a smoking shell of a burnt out building it's signified by the gleaming towers of explosive development on the ruins of displaced people I'm going to leave please be my guest it's a subject that's been raised on numerous occasions by the Syrian playwright Muhammad Al-Atar who includes the description of his family's home in suburban Damascus and the influence of the late Egyptian filmmaker Muhammad Hassan Khan in our ongoing interviews he discusses how the middle class was the stabilizing factor in both politics and the economy and a check and balance on the ruling elite the obliteration of this class has accelerated the destruction of basic resources and infrastructure for everyone in the country Al-Atar interviewed Chomsky in 2013 and asked if he now had advice for Syria he said that well I have no advice except to say you have to face the actual facts and not stay in the world of your own imagining saying I want this or I don't want that so what is the reality that we're all actually facing everyone knew there was no evidence whatsoever how does a drag queen who knows nothing about any CIA justice have no access to you it was not connected whatsoever now we're faced with her as Obama's heir presumptuant and she's going to pitch herself as a hog actually so will she wash you what policy is going to sit excerpt is from 2015 and it's the waning of justice by the artist Charles Atlas when asked about the political nature of this title he said well the world's going to end and then there should be a disco song he also said that I am not political I don't make political pieces it's a mood lady bunny or drag becomes the interlocutor for Charles Atlas and made the political audible which actually is now audible now in 1999 while being stuck in traffic as one does on the 405 heading back from LA after teaching some really mediocre students at the University of California at Irvine I hope nobody was in my class I read the following about making a work that would utilize policy to actually make architecture perform prototype 180 began in earnest in 1991 before the start of the Persian Gulf War when I read that architecture is inherently a political act we are living in a political epoch and policy needs to be considered as a material Houston selected itself because of this policy condition as the site because it's the only municipality in the United States of its size without a formal land use policy otherwise mountain is having a zoning we started the map the city in 2001 with my architecture and policy students and focus on sharpstown ultimately section one with the GIS system at Rice University this was pretty early on organizing with the residents who canvas and ultimately created their own lenses from which to map the results as our neighbors stated this is not how they see us but how we actually want and we'll see ourselves the condition for the site prototype 180 was for two parallel sides to be public land sharp view drive met this condition with the city street on the north side and Bayland County Park at the south the developer of sharpstown Frank Sharp who was a crook effectively did background deals and donated the land for highway 59 to cut through his development to guarantee an off-ramp that would empty and shoot people into the parking lot of his sharpstown mall by post another naming opportunity as we saw on the outside attended the opening driving along the perimeter of the park in 2001 65-13 sharp view fulfilled the public private requirement and was an uninhabited home for over 13 years but there was one small issue it was not for sale located in a policy blind spot or what Muhammad al-Ataar actually also referred to in the review was a post-war development of single family homes as we saw from our tour in the bus that people actually pay attention to the two lines of the continuum but when you start to move in there's less visibility programming also included engaging the political process by conducting a mayoral form for in 2009 excuse me policy with the mayoral candidates in Houston the first question that I asked was a yes or no question nearly impossible for politicians to do with a support zoning every candidate said no the 180 degree revolution took place six years ago on November 11th in 2010 the structure was severed from its municipal connection something that's actually illegal to do in Houston and was removed from its plinth the empty lot visually and physically connected to the public to public space the process was live streamed throughout the world on an open source wireless system that I envisioned in 2001 the structure is the protagonist hence we see everything from its perspective and this eventually evolved into the work public utility 2.0 in manner in which prototype 180 was financed became a part of the work everybody loves to talk about money how you get things done once the revolution occurred it went from being a private home to being a public work that makes architecture perform the dissemination is always a consideration it was intentional and necessary that the exhibition first took place within an architectural context in order to actually occupy the political this is a little name drawing by the Holland Cotter from the New York Times wrote like many performances prototype 180 is critically exaggerated and transforming vision of life it demonstrates among other things that urban space is never a passive environment but rootedness and belonging are or can be resilient realities that architecture can be socially proactive public utility 2.0 could be categorized as a 21st century work of land art albeit it's the public space of the airwaves it architects a spectrum known as super wifi broadband open source wireless networks retrofits the old unused television channels access could be as simple as it was to plug in a TV and get reception this spectrum is a public resource just as our national park system we began in an underserved area of northeast Houston that was redlined by service providers and then we piloted the program as a part of prospect 3 New Orleans at the AIA store front and the use of that statue for raviders was actually shot down by the city and the statue has since been removed so policy programming and technology are the play here and part of what we realize early on is that the story of narrative needed to first be told locally nationally and then in the world research prototypes were developed to utilize this unused frequency and the first experimental license in the world was something we received in 2008 from the FCC that's going to change significantly Twitter which is better in some hands than in others as we know is an amplification app which we use to detail the history of infrastructure and the systemic discrimination within its development we began with the start of interstate 10 and the space program and extended through to the wireless present so I want to just continue briefly with policy or the real estate discussion here and if one app for the one bell one road trade route in northwest China the Mopayin Chuan appears in a satellite image this is not the similar to Houston in 1950 policy was expanded through television in JFK's visit to Berlin in 1963 it was not only to look over the wall but it was to see and be seen following that European tour he was also invited to China for a state visit being in Dallas of course we all know why that did not occur so the biennial which was taking place in Yinchuan on my behalf attempted to borrow or effectively repatriate a 13th century woven silk fabric from Yinchuan titled Ropade with Hairs in the collection of the Cleveland Art Museum that fragment actually evidences the trade that took place between the region and the west in this case actually being eastern Iran but they declined to consider a loan to a new and relatively unknown institution in northwest China with the fear that it would not be returned leaving in looms as we are all aware of the conceptual precursor to the development of computer programming the image of the hair is actually made up of glyphs encrypted raw data that when translated reads G-N-O-V-O-R the red banners on the exterior of the museum represent the artifacts of attempted policy and mutually agreed diplomatic discourse that ultimately filled those voids of the Brandenburg Gate in 1963 repurpose blocked the view from the west of the east making it impossible to look far away the central image of the East German flag was replaced with the encrypted hair from Yinchuan where it was originally manufactured the municipal slogan for Yinchuan is look far away the city of Dallas paid five million dollars in 2012 for their new logo and motto big things happen here it used to be live large think big why the thinking was removed somebody might be able to answer that in the audience the idea with Jackie is the adjacent work and the last mile in the network of culture as trade within the city when we organize drivers who self-selected to participate and circulate Chen, the owner of the three wheeler convexed his usual business but also stops in front of a prescribed index around schools, police building markets, Muslim orphanage halal, food shoots thank you if the world does end and we will hear that disco song there will also be nothing but we will know that the trademark exists for nothing and this is the potential for the work of art to begin again when nothing will be concealed when we get that I'm ending with what my friend Kenyan author Yvonne Ebyan a war talks about and refers to as the need to use the ethical imagination thank you thank Gavin and Noah and Ron Ember and Brenda for all of your work so I'm here to talk about a project that I worked on at the magazine I'm an editor there and this project stems from 2013 we organized as part of the summer exhibition X for one New York we organized a project called speculations the future is blank so just to give a little bit of background we at triple canopy have organized a kind of cynicism even an apocalypsism had permeated our contemporary moment as supported by the new cycle and as manifested in literature and film critical and political theory and the visual arts alike and we call this mood and its spirit of resignation are apathy no futurism we in our progressives we were also good at advancing dire and withering analyses of the present but in terms of imagined alternatives we offered nothing the dream of utopia of the social world where personal gratification and the collective good are aligned where scarcity is eradicated and wealth redistributed belonged to the 20th century it seemed as did its object failure utopias were dangerous we had learned to deliver totalizing systems and prescriptions for the many on behalf of the few meanwhile on the west coast a tiny enclave spewed forth boundless optimism for the future for all the ways new technologies could improve our lives and transform our world in silicon valley future thinking and utopian spirit were alive and well and they were being acted on designed, fabricated, produced within triple canopy we thought about what it meant to have a future outsourced to such a small subset of the population who appeared to equate so-called progress with the provision of new lifestyle amenities to the middle and upper classes and we also began to consider the connection between imagination and action whether the former was necessary for the latter whether constructing the images of alternative worlds might symbolize or even determine the agency of the constructors so we channeled these questions into a series of discussions and lectures that lasted 50 days over two and a half months we asked artists, poets novelist, coders, economists, social scientists to imagine a future they would want to see and we asked that would the future be optimistic even if that optimism were to be dark I think around 80 people passed through our project all in all so one year later we began organizing the materials into a book we observed that many of our narratives about the future seem to be inhabited by a set of characteristic oppositions oppositions that not surprisingly in our era revolve on the axis of technology and I just wanted to break down perhaps some of these oppositions in case they proved useful for going forward with this project so the first is asceticism versus indulgence or to make this a little bit more concrete a stationary state versus the growth-based economy so some participants have had a future to wear in order to combat issues of scarcity and resource depletion Ashwin Congresswara for instance, a former banker and a writer argued that many of our social illness could be addressed via the support of more independent entrepreneurs to innovate better products he envisioned an economic system that would allow for small businesses to take risks and thus to fail while providing a social safety net for individuals bail out individuals not forums he said others felt strongly that scarcity was a healing back production and curbing growth writer Benjamin Kunkel for instance described a society organized around what he calls communism where we would deliberately maintain a stationary state economy and populations under communism we would be necessarily less material of wealthy but we still have everything we need another set of contradictory narratives for transhumanism and helium nostalgia so some participants have been speculated on ambitious Promethean projects that might make possible new configurations of our mind and our bodies through innovations in nanotech, biotech, infotech and neuroscience philosopher Ray Brassier for example argued that these experiments with human enhancement are exploring and that insofar as experiments are happening progressives must engage with their development simply to denounce and pathologize them as to disempower ourselves and leave their development to neoliberal elites the writer James Stanley Robinson on the other hand proposed that we must revert to simpler times that life's most important activities those very certain to make us happy are things as simple as cooking having sex and dancing for Robinson our sweet spot for contentment means being in the natural world and acting like paleolithic creatures another set of contradictions was the end of work versus full employment or more and better of work so some participants saw our emancipation in the end of work and to this future they argued is automation which can potentially liberate us from work strategies women's studies professor Kathy Weeks envisioned a future defined by less work and by lesser work and her vision work would be optional and entirely divorced from income instead the state would provide a basic income to all of its citizens others envisioned a world with more and better work and incidentally full employment as a means to solve intractable social problems like climate change for instance so political scientist Alex Gravich suggested that work entails an immense number of activities that are creative and serve the development of the individual it emerges our lives and should not be discarded meanwhile those machines and algorithms that were meant to free us merely end up controlling us and the last set of contradictions touched on today are statism versus anti-statism reform versus revolution fighting versus swinging so some participants made cases for ameliorating the state and all together or establishing entities beyond its purview Asa Taylor for instance called for a future where education for the sake of education as opposed to job preparedness is available to everyone she argued that the state is essential to such a project that the state should directly fund education rather than profit from the debt students as it is now by contrast someone like Sylvia Federici envisioned a society of the commons with community run centers outside the state's purview that would include cafeterias, child care centers, computer work spaces libraries, medical clinics and legal clinics so as we try to reflect on these contradictory narratives we turn to Frederick Jameson for help and in a 2004 essay Jameson wrote what utopian oppositions allow us to do is by a way of negation to grasp the moment of truth of each term put the other way around the value of each term is differential it lies not in its own standard content but as an ideological critique of its opposite number Jameson insists that the terms must not cancel each other out their disappearance would return us to the status quo that realm of the present that the fantasy was to have negated in the first place so we a triple canopy decided thus to let the contradictions stand and this is sort of the organizing principle of the book and so just as a final thought I'll share with you that about the only thing our project has confirmed is that imagining the future is a formidable task but happily we also confirm that the cultivation of utopian aspirations and of a common language with which to articulate them can provide a better fight if not an exit from resignation we need this now more than ever as journalist Masha Gessen wrote this week in a widely circulated essay the failure to imagine a different and better future may have lost the democrats' crucial election end quote so the democrats offered no vision to counterbalance Trump's white populist vision of an imaginary past but nothing lasts forever and so we should remember the future I heard that you've done a great job I have my own time so I think you need a break I'm sorry seriously my name is Brent Brown I'm an architect here in Dallas welcome to those to our town our city who are from far before I start I just want to say I'm really glad many of you got to visit East Alice and an area that's here to be we're able to typically go to Congress it's a place that has taught me a lot and it's been very influential as I began to work there about 10 years ago so it's a with that I'm not going to talk about that portion of the city but I think in many ways it reflects the opportunities working between that is you're saying between bottom up and top down and bringing about creative transformation and it's important to acknowledge power to mention many times but where it's so here's where we are and I'm going to try to tell a story quickly now so Dallas, Texas at the time that Chicago was kind of burning and rebuilding a guy who was living in a cabin on a river and Dallas came out of that in many ways the new city it's the frontier city it's things that Gavin's mentioning this idea of the future of America the frontier of America in so many ways I think tries to aspire to be America but without a lot of confidence needing to say you know we think or we're big or big things happen here and all this kind of stuff right we like to say that we even put up letters and let you be the I in big which is fascinating and ironic so by the river Dallas begins to be made and as it happens there's a relationship with this river not like other cities and the necessity of water the necessity or hope or transportation and commerce right that goes along with that but simultaneously the fear and the awe and the power of a river and of nature and so in 1908 a flood happens some happened before that but it was felt that this one was the big one and we needed to do something about it and so what happens what happens is you hire a really smart person to come to town from somewhere else right not from where you are and they come to town because they're smarter you know what there's this western border to your town not to mention that there's other people living beyond but this is the western edge of Dallas and then here's the punchline right and you're going to be a big city and if it's going to be more than 100,000 people you got to do something about it so what are you going to do about it we moved the river we just moved it there it was we've seen the marks it's almost like this sort of ruin and sort of ribbon in a way and it's getting built and we moved it and nevertheless there are communities on the other side and language I'll use today language that I believe has been a part of the psyche of the place it's not necessarily something that I endorse but at the same time that I think I were going to try to overcome so here's Dallas on the right and here's the center as a place of gathering convenient ways of middle ground no longer the western border but what I would tell you is what happens is thousands of acres are made available for flood control and protection for both sides but this orange area which is thousands of acres becomes the economic engine of distribution and warehousing for the city of Dallas in the mid-century this is where Trammell Crow built his first building now we know what happens after that so there's a new border it's not a center now you can see this in language today the other side of the river was prevalent and through decades leading up to now it's been a way to do things on the other side of the river but what do you do you put a lead filter plant you put thousands of units of affordable housing it's where people can live that you don't want in the city it becomes a mechanism of shaping and economically it becomes the division if I could take this line and put that line in the slides that were shown by Klein you would see health you would see wealth and poverty you would see burden by transportation and not burden by transportation and etc and it's the division but this edge is just a mound of dirt and its whole purpose is to protect from flooding now it does protect both sides of the river because the river is sort of in the middle of the river in a neutral area in an area that when you're on the other side seems like this massive zone of like how do I even get to the city where is the city what is this space and this guy is just going for a walk it almost implies a demilitarized zone in other places in modern time but it's a beautiful place and there's the river and the opportunity for we do it again not quite a hundred years goes from 1910 to 2003 we get another smart guy they come to town great work, great convening more democratic in the convening of a public conversation I would say versus when Mr. Kessler came when it was pretty much 10 white guys that hired him in a good way did a lot of good things for the city look at this language I'm an architect but I do a lot of planning but this language the language of opportunity the language of city building this aspiration sees the opportunity real urban enrichment from simple growth growth for whom what does that mean how do you do it the political acts necessary the financial investments necessary and etc so what about the space in the middle what about the space so we build bridges we've marked for the first time this new channel which is completely man-made and artificial with these glorious bridges of symbolism and to be frank they're kind of in the middle they're not on one side or the other but they have massive impacts when the one to the north was built the title and the headlines and the periodicals were the bridge to nowhere this is within the last 15 years the bridge to nowhere now for people in those communities it's everywhere it's home it's like Congo street maybe small so how can we and shouldn't we aspire for this promise of really over 100 years of moving the border or removing the border creating a middle ground a place of convening and gathering well there it is managed by the best bush hogs in America big tractors keeping it clean for the water and the water will come the fear is still present today as it was in 1908 the power of nature and the water bodies in this case more influenced not just by the rainfalls but by the upland meeting the headwaters of the trinity to the north and the urban sprawl to the north so this is the consequence of the northern sort of migration of the city and the proposition the proposition of a gathering place or a park in the middle and this is somewhat kind of hung over in a way because of the conversations of over 100 years and 100 ideas but in this case my question is can it be something that really brings us to the middle and how it's made, how it's organized how it's paid for, how it's managed how it's designed can either begin to break down the sexual segregation separation in our city I believe and possibly put forward a new order something that reaches from the middle to the city and that is navigating and negotiating and representing the cultural distinctions and the area identities that it's along and just as a beginning places to look into places to be in what it is will we be able to move past our psyche of two sides will we be able to identify as I said earlier where power resides will we be willing to hand over authority and power in all kinds of ways to really make a middle ground where people can come together and whether it's a new city like Dallas its future I think requires us to use spaces such as this to reorganize our thinking and with that I hope it happens thank you great, thank you Brent I want to thank all the presenters this morning and as a point of review I think among our technical hiccups the book end slides that would put everyone's name before each presentation have not been showing so to clarify again in order Teddy, Cruz and Fana Forman Clyde Valentine Naima J. Keith other others myself Sophia Omaria by a video postcard Imra Zeman Noah Simbliss Brent Brown, thank you all very much and thanks too for bearing with us through some of the technical hiccups I want to thank also Yolanda Alameda and Brenda Randall stage managers for this event and others during the weekend Dave Herman our visuals manager and Jackson Budd our technical director thank you all I think if you guys are at all like me you're probably one hungry and two hungry to move from this conversation into round tables they get a certain traction on some of these issues so both of those are coming next I'll hand things over to Ron Amber to speak about logistics but I'll add also there are two exhibitions in the building that are open and on view new cartographies in the Bob Hope Lobby and Illusionations of the Global Future in the Dueling Gallery I believe these are both indicated on the breakout map programs there's also the Radio EE exhibition in the Pollock Gallery which is in a separate building across campus and where Erin Landsman's performative post gentrification panel will be located in the afternoon so if you want to squeeze some of that in over lunch please do please enjoy and with that Ron Amber Deloni good afternoon so lunch is downstairs it's always set up and if you don't want to partake in what's downstairs there's a one sheet in your folders with a list of restaurants on the Hillcrest side of the building so you're welcome to walk and find something to eat and Hillcrest is when you come down the stairs if you make a right and you go through the hallway directly to your right you'll come out on the Hillcrest side at four o'clock we will reconvene downstairs the buses the buses will depart around four thirty from SMU going back to the crown and then they will depart from the crown at six fifteen you head into the Mac so if you'd like to catch the shuttle to the Mac you should get on the