Media Agency – a conversation with Christophe Barlieb

7. Juni 2017, 18.00 Uhr Hörsaal A, Hauptplatz 5-6, Kunstuniversität Linz

bei Schönwetter im Hof

Sustainable Architecture + Spatial Tactics lädt zum Vortrag und Gespräch mit Christophe Barlieb.
Eine Veranstaltung vom Institut Raum und Design

As a child, I enjoyed drawing technical illustrations, Star Wars and had a passion for building detailed models. My parents were avid history buffs, we spent our holidays traveling the USA and Europe, like treasure hunters following maps outlining the life journeys of great minds, heroes, etc. visiting castles, cathedrals and galleries encapsulating their deeds.

In the early eighties, my father brought home an Oric Atmos 64KB / 16KB DOS RAM computer. In those days, you needed a television monitor, a cassette recorder and programming knowledge of BASIC to make something happen, it was very abstract and frustrating; few people knew what a computer was.

In ‘89 at the age of sixteen a fellow classmate gave me a bootleg of AutoCAD on a 5-1/4-inch floppy disk. His father worked for NASA and claimed this was the software needed to design space ships! In fact, one of the demo files on the disk was of space shuttle plans. By that time, we had a rather expensive Toshiba plasma screen portable computer (AT based processor) capable of running DOS and AutoCAD.

Combined these events most likely led to my growing passion for architecture and media geekiness.

Since then, I continue being a sixteen-year-old playing with media, seeking ways to describe flashes in my head. Most of the architecture I’ve made has never been built, nor may it ever be. My architecture stems from personal interests, deviations, that gestate by crafting the tools to shape them. In a sense, it removes authorship, yet, each work is authored. I coin this: media agency.

I wish to share a brief history of architecture through a media perspective. Greg Lynn’s Archaeology of the Digital is a lovely place to begin exploring the early days of “high digital” culture in architecture, the beginnings. I will feature ideas from his research along with other references and personal experiences. I’ll demonstrate how media agency shapes architecture, and specifically my architectural project and how it continues mutating as new media emerge.