Reflexive Architecture:
Seven Continua for post-digital architectures

DESCRIPTION: Reflexive Architecture is a synthesis between the virtual, the actual, the biological, the cyborgs, the augmented, and the mixed in the context of built worlds. Above all, such architectures simplify, amplify, or facilitate and make visible the complex entanglement of what Deleuze & Guattari termed “the chaoids or the daughters of chaos: Philosophy, Science, and Art.” It is this transdisciplinary reflexivity that this Workshop explores. The Workshop is structured at a slow-pace with breaks between Sessions to recognize the time participants need to remobilize concepts for their worldmaking practices.

Participants will be asked to respond to numerous smaller provocations, making works toward a substantial polemical work over the 6-month duration of the Workshop. Philosophical and technical software workshops facilitate the application of media/software concepts in post-digital worldmaking practices. The Workshop is geared towards those interested in establishing a postgraduate studio practice situated between drawing, modeling, prompting, scripting, coding and prototyping - both rapid and diegetic.

This Workshop is split into two strands: One, oriented towards architecture’s visionary mode, is set against the backdrop of cybercultural tendencies in reflexive architecture proposed by Neil Spiller in his 2002 issue of Architecture & Design magazine at the millennial turn including the exegesis of his visionary work Communicating Vessels; another strand detours and swerves through the strata of such worldmaking proposed in Derek Hales’ assimilation of the Deleuzian technical object as objectile, offering a philosophical-technical orientation centered on a guided hands-on encounter with software and hardware. We address the rather vexed question of toolsets and technical rigs practically. While assignments can be completed with mixed-media, simple image-editing tools and a scanner, advanced toolsets and workflows, both closed-and open-source software will be discussed in some considerable detail.

Through our first strand, participants will learn of reflexive architecture as originally pioneered by Spiller in a 7-point manifesto of continua: Space, Technology, Narrative Semiotics and Performance, Cyborgian Geography, Scopic Regimes, Sensitivity, and Time. This visionary orientation features guests with experimental practices relating to the developed themes. The second strand reconstructs this reflexive architectural proposition after web3 with which the reflexive architectural vision might be actualized anew in a visionary mode of worldmaking and practical engagement in making speculative hard/soft/wet-wares for fictive materialities.

The Workshop offers both an engagement in the construction of media systems and a philosophical engagement in the future of drawing and technical objects. The visionary worldmaking mode will be underpinned by the philosophical development of the Deleuzian concept of objectility, relating it to the process-orientation of Whitehead and Simondon. We will do this by reanimating notions of an analog audio visuality from the practice of Simondon’s construction of a television and Kittler’s building of a synthesizer and loose these amidst the assemblage of digital infrastructures of web3, NFT worldbuilding, and emerging metaverses, as we reconfigure instances of the seven continua of a post-digital reflexive architecture.

Session 1
Context: Introducing seven continua for reflexive architecture: Space, Technology, Narrative, Semiotics, and Performance, Cyborgian Geography, Scopic Regimes, Sensitivity, Time.

We will revisit these continua throughout the workshop, conducting philosophical research using mythopoesis (original myth-making through higher imagination) and technogenetics (the intertwined relationship between the origins of humans and technology).

Description: Reflexive Architecture as a technoecological niche

In this Session, we will explore the rapid expansion of the XR metaverse, a digital universe that combines augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), mixed reality (MR), and web3 as a technical assemblage. We will provide a practical introduction to constructing n-dimensional worlds and give an overview of SOTA (state-of-the-art) XR workflows. Participants will begin working with Houdini for 3D object-tool production and integrate this within Unity, understanding Unity's structure and logic for scenographic design in XR events and Houdini's procedural logics.

Pre-requisites:
Install Unity and Houdini.

Tools:
Unity & Houdini

Outcome: Participants will create and import a procedurally generated L-System organic model tool into Unity as a Houdini Engine asset. The object produced will be a procedurally generated flora, such as a botanical vine with fruiting bodies growing on a trellis or similar structure. This object will inspire the visionary landscape for reflexive architectural ideas and be integrated with other tools and systems in future tutorials. Inspiration will come from the visionary landscape in Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, which will be discussed in the next contextual Session.

Session 2
Context: Many areas of architectural experimentation remain underexplored, particularly the surreal processes through which augmented and mixed realities actualize. Spiller’s Communicating Vessels exemplifies the design of relationships across continua. It involves a reflexive relationship with contexts (geographical, psychological, and imagistic), creating worlds that complicate mythopoetic, mythotechnical, and technogenetic narratives. The Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, introduced briefly in the last Session, is discussed further as an inspiration for visionary works, including Spiller’s, as it collapses narrative worlds and cryptographic images.

Description: Perspective, projective geometries, and projection as process

Participants will work with virtual cameras, lights, and materials to understand the problematics of games and virtual film production. We will explore how film and game production converge and how 3D assets are interoperable in reflexive architecture and XR workflows.

Tools: Houdini, Unity

Outcome: Participants will gain an understanding of SOTA XR database logics and how standards converge to structure software and interfaces in post-disciplinary ways. They will work with virtual cameras, lights, and materials in Unity, export assets from Houdini, and deform objects and textures to create decaying fruit images. There will be an option to work with textures in Adobe Substance Designer.

Session 3
Context: This Session presents works exploring reflexive architectural concepts, focusing on the split-site and pataphysical chunking engines. These were deployed in response to perceived problems in architecture and cyberspace around the turn of the millennium. The Session externalizes individual project ideas that Participants can develop further.

Description: Tracing allegorical shadows
Participants will trace found objects using particle systems and generate procedural terrains as allegorical landscapes. They will create scenes within a collective project, map a camera source to an in-world object as a live surface, and explore shadows, optics, movement, and the space between object and surface when split across continua.

Pre-requisites: Install Zig Sim Pro on iOS and ZigSimTools for Unity.

Tools: Houdini, Unity, TouchDesigner, ZigSimPro, ZigSimTools for Unity

Outcome: Participants will trace surfaces of objects using particle tools, map sensor data into the XR environment, project live sensor streams into a virtual environment, and use smartphones as MR-enabled input devices.

Session 4
Context: In much of late 20th- and early 21st-century digital architecture, technical objects as "objectiles" have often preoccupied form and content over reflexive creativity. In this Session, we prepare for a winter break by discussing creative methodologies for confronting XR continua and remobilizing the objectile across split-sites in speculative hardware and pataphysical computing.

Description: Working with volumes and soft bodies
Participants will work with volumetric approaches and procedural techniques in Houdini to generate clouds, fogs, and swarming soft bodies. These assets will be integrated into Unity landscapes.

Tools: Houdini, Unity, GyrOSC

Outcome: Participants will create a mist for Unity landscapes using a voxel system and manipulate ephemeral structures. They will generate positive feedback loops between landform masses across multiple continua using external inputs and prototyped events. Smartphones will be used as environmental sensors triggering virtual environment events in Unity.

Final Four Sessions
Starting in January 2025, the final four Session are project-based, led by Participants' research. Rather than concluding with a summary, we will maintain openness to chaos and worldmaking, revisiting Reflexive Architecture's Seven Continua and the mythopoetic and technogenic processes of worldmaking.

Session 5
Context: This Session centers on encounters with visionary architectural works, constructed in tension with polemical discourse on architectural creativity and imagination. Participants will present their chunking engine prototypes while exploring archives of visionary architecture.

Description: Chunking engines and splatting the split-site

Participants will prepare scanned objects using point-cloud data and manipulate them in Houdini using various XR development strategies.

Pre-requisites:
Access Lidar camera apps on iOS and a 3D object database.

Tools: Photon, Polycam, Houdini, COLMAP

Outcome: Participants will manipulate point-cloud data, understand common problems with Lidar scans, and work with Gaussian splats to extract data from scanned objects.

Session 6
Context: Participants will explore the ambiguous sense of time in their project work and complicate discussions on Reflexive Architecture's Seven Continua.

Description: Reflexive events across split-sites

Participants will compose multiple scenes in Unity, working with in-world scenes, levels, and reflexive events across continua.

Tools: IOS, GyrOSC, MaxMSP, FMOD Studio, Unity

Outcome: Participants will prototype interactions between split-sites across virtual and actual continua.

Session 7

Context: Participants will encounter chaos in this Session, slipping between continua.

Description: Scenes, gates, and mappings across continua

Participants will design complex split-sites in Unity, focusing on object interoperability and real-time generative media systems.

Tools: TouchDesigner, Unity, Madmapper

Outcome: Participants will design complex reflexive virtual-actual split-sites, understanding commercial software and FLOSS tools.

Session 8
The final Session focuses on redesigning reflexive continua, inviting Participants to consider the mythopoetic and technogenic processes in their work. The workshop will explore worldmaking and the individuation of speculative prototype worlds.

IMAGE: Frank Lloyd Wright, Falling water, 1935.

To see The New Centre Refund Policy CLICK HERE.

Building Intellectual Communities Beyond the Academic Bubble

DESCRIPTION: In a world governed by what the Oxford Internet Institute has described as "epistemic bubbles," where the architecture of visibility turns every thought into a commodity and every dissenter into an echo, the scholar is faced with an agonizing paradox. To think rigorously is to risk irrelevance; to think publicly is to flirt with flattening. Beyond the bubble, however, one can operate in a space of tension, taking inspiration not just from contemporary theorists but from the less-tread pathways of intellectual history. This is a Workshop for those who want to think without becoming caricatures, to build without succumbing to collapse, to inhabit the fractures of a decaying landscape as if they were, in fact, an invitation.

Consider the work of early Enlightenment polymath Pierre Bayle, who wrote amidst the aftermath of Cartesian metaphysics; or the spiritualist theories of Hildegard von Bingen, who saw thought as a radiant emanation between body, earth, and divinity; or Gabriel Tarde, whose late-19th-century theories of social imitation prefigured the meme before it had a name; or even the deeply eccentric autodidacts of the Viennese coffeehouse scene. What might their divergent modes of inquiry teach us about scholarship today, caught as it is between disciplinary isolation and the hyper-connected glut of new media? Their idiosyncrasies—so resistant to containment—offer a blueprint for navigating what remains possible when systems of knowledge seem to ossify into self-parody.

What would an intellectual practice look like now, in the age of the TikTok essay and the algorithmic scroll? How do we construct scholarship that holds its form as it leaks into public life? How can we examine intellectual life not as a refuge but as a tactic—a way of dwelling within platforms, institutions, and communities without becoming their object? Drawing on neglected thinkers, participants of this Workshop will learn to see research as not just a body of work but a way of living among others. In this spirit, the Workshop will offer tools for building porous intellectual communities: writing groups that outlast trend cycles, collaborative projects that critique rather than capitulate to institutional norms, and public engagement that resists both insularity and superficiality. This is not a Workshop in personal branding, nor a utopian call to ""save"" intellectual life from its supposed decline. Instead, it is a practice of detour, borrowing from traditions that refuse clean categorization—a provocation into what it means to think today, to build without infrastructures, and to find vitality in the gaps.

Session 0 (Open Session): Contemporary Landscapes and the Contingency of Scholarship: Historical and contemporary roles of public intellectuals, heterodoxy, and disciplines; Understanding the shifting terrains of online culture and intellectual ecosystems; Rethinking the ""core tenets"" of scholarship; How to embrace contingency without sacrificing rigor; Writing routines and strategies for developing your intellectual voice.
Session 1: Intellectual Communities in Practice: Building and sustaining reading and writing groups; Lessons from international reading groups and focus groups; Finding collaborators who challenge your thinking beyond your epistemic bubble.
Session 2: Digital & Cultural Strategies: The limits of academic publishing and the potential of new media; How to position yourself publicly without flattening your work into "content"; Case studies from successful projects that found balance between intellectual depth and public accessibility.
Session 3: Critique and Perspectives: Analysing cultural currents while avoiding myopia and general pessimism; Lessons from the downtown New York cultural scenes through online and in-person ethnographic perspectives; How to resist cooptation by algorithms and superficial trends.
Session 4: Building for the Future: Tools for long-term sustainability in scholarship beyond academia; Final project presentations outlining a new intellectual project that incorporates the strategies discussed.

IMAGE: Vintage Microphones

To see The New Centre Refund Policy CLICK HERE.

Prototyping the Para-Institutional

DESCRIPTION: Over the last decades, alternative art schools have emerged in response to watershed events such as the 2008 financial crisis, Occupy Wall Street, and the Arab Spring, signaling a need for pedagogies that engage with critical social and political junctures. These para-institutional responses were often immediate, fugitive, and fleeting. While structurelessness was a feature, sustaining these efforts over time proved challenging. Many found stability through partnerships with established institutions, private patronage, or public funding, the latter being a hallmark of modernity by decoupling funding sources from their allocation.

Para-institutional models emerged as alternatives to this system. With European cultural funding currently facing deep cuts, the state’s support for culture is faltering and accelerating the demand for practical alternatives. This Workshop is an opportunity to devise what those could be. It will examine why the Postwar liberal order regarded culture as a public good deserving of subsidy, and how the arts codified this status with academic accreditation and professionalization. Through conversations with invited guests behind notable para-institutional models, we will envision approaches that are responsive to contemporary creative production, examining case studies to explore the practical and ideological requirements of institution building. The final goal is that, as the Workshop moves along, participants model their own imaginary institutions, which will be prototypes reflecting the participants' philosophical and political concerns, guided by plans for para-institutional formats, including visual identities, mission statements, funding strategies, and so on.

Session 1: An overview of the Workshop topics, short history of public and private arts funding, university art departments and curricula, independent and critical study programs. The first session will also define expectations for the final project of the Workshop, in terms of the conception of an imaginary para-institution.
Guest: TBA.

Session 2: Discussion of the global art system, markets, and museums, followed by a group organizing session for the initial project drafts (including names, visual identities, and mission statements for the para-institutions).Guests: Jügen Bock, Director, Maumaus Independent Study Programme, Lisbon, Portugal; Renzo Martens and Cercle d'Art des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolaise (CATPC)

Session 3: Discussion on artistic research, philosophy, the humanities, illiberalism, activism, and the internet. Development of the para-institutional project in its internal aspects (funding sources, public relations strategies, flowcharts for structural components).Guest: Mohammad Salemy, Main Organizer, The New Centre for Research & Practice

Session 4: Para-institutional prototype presentations and feedback.

IMAGE: Mike Kelley, Educational Complex (Detail), 1995

To see The New Centre Refund Policy CLICK HERE.

Computer Games & Hellscaping of the Unreal Engine

DESCRIPTION: Gaming is ever more important not only as a cultural form and industry but also in the artworld and contemporary philosophy. This Workshop thematizes the main aspects of this growing medium while avoiding its mere assimilation (into art or discourse) by focusing not on its current forms or narratives but on its very design. The Workshop will introduce Unreal Engine, its basic features and components, in a broader context of media culture and philosophy. We will get from the basics of gaming theory (Galloway) to more political edges of the virtual space to identity-play (Patterson), while featuring guests like Ondřej Trhoň and Alex Quicho.

The Workshop will experiment with what the virtual space of gameplay means for us, moving from the dialectics of hellscape and pastoral garden (Session 1) through dystopian realism of shooter templates (Session 2) and the “final” dialectics of play and identity (Sessions 3 and 4). In the background of this direction is a post-Marxist account of the game as the medium of the empire. Students will work themselves with Unreal Engine to create (1) a working MOD of Lyra Shooter game with base-cap functionality and their own map plus adjustments, (2) a basic walking simulator in a prepared environment with event triggers and subtitled text. The Workshop is designed to get the most from Unreal Engine without any prior experience, focusing on the ability to use its already existing assets.

Session 0 (Open Session): Discussion of gaming experience and participant's interests; Introduction to the course and explanation of approach; Literature review; Poaching with Unreal Engine (free assets, self-reliance, post-production, remixing).
Session 1: Dialectics of Hellscapes and Pastoral Garden in gamespace: Game as art-medium; Orientation in UI, creating a project, FAB and assets, blueprints, and differences between Unreal Engine and Unity; Creating a custom map for Lyra Shooter Game.
Session 2: Discussion on the reading, concepts of acceleration and dystopian realism; Ontology, worldbuiding, and worldending in videogames; Workflow reflection (asset management, materials); Adjusting the player character, map, level design, 3D assets (meshes, materials); Build of the game and multiplayer play.
Session 3: The concept of the avatar; Queer games, gender, and erotics; Discussing erotics; Creating a new project in Unreal Engine, basics of blueprint design, event triggers, basic narrative and setting composition.
Guest: Ondřej Trhoň (No Fun).
Session 4: Online and gamified subjectivities; Identity-as-play and conspiracy theorizing; Walking simulator and trauma-realism; Finishing the prototype of the game, making a build, and testing the gameplay.
Guest: Alex Quicho (Girlstack).

IMAGE: Augusto de Campos and Julio Plaza, From Poemobiles,1974

To see The New Centre Refund Policy CLICK HERE.

Pop & Contemporary Music Criticism Workshop

DESCRIPTION: An apocrypha, misattributed at different times to Miles Davis, Frank Zappa, David Byrne, Laurie Anderson, and others, states that “writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” This maxim is a provocation against music critics, who would try to express musical sentiments in language as if they could casually translate them through their words. Although the quote hides a romantic notion of the ineffability of musical aesthetics, it is fair in its contestation of the current paradigm of music writing, which either implies easy transparency in the conversion of sonic impressions or relies on a cold, technical, supposedly rational interpretation of music by way of notational parameters. It also acknowledges the first lesson of art criticism: that writing is a form of literature, an art form like any other, to which the critic needs to submit different artworks. Thus, music criticism would be, first of all, a literary practice. The main fault of the maxim is not that music is easy to translate but instead that the difficulty in translating itself can be potentially productive.

This Workshop will provide practical training on how to write effectively and synthetically about music. In particular, we will address pop music, which lacks a common imaginative vocabulary of abstractions, and we will use forms of communication that are amicable to current-day social media, which, contrary to traditional publishing, are ever relevant. Exercises will include short reviews, one-liners, criticism of criticism, video commentaries, and a longer essay (from the online pitch to the final editing process). The main takeaway from this Workshop should be a deeper engagement with listening and clarification of one’s taste and its translation into text. Why do you like or dislike a song that has been just released? How do you transmit the images and feelings it evokes in you to a wider audience, without alienating either the musically trained or the total dilettante? Lastly, how can music writing allow us to better understand the openings between art forms, between media, and between people?

Session 0 (Open Session): Introduction to Music Writing – We will introduce the bulk of the seminar and its schedule and assignments, and talk about comparative aesthetics and the phenomenology of the musical work, or how to effectively translate between artforms. We will also discuss your favorite pieces of response to music in all media.
Session 1: One-Liners – We will read and edit the outputs to your first assignment (one-liners) and discuss the conditions of critique and judgment for a piece of music, as well as learn to synthesize complex ideas into punchy, forthright, often humorous or dramatic phrases.
Session 2: Short Review – We will read and edit the outputs to your second assignment (blurb or short review) and compare them with examples of great music writers to understand how music reviews are usually structured and how creative writing techniques can play into it.
Session 3: Long Review – We will discuss the output of your second assignment (conceptualization, pitching, and long-form development) and discuss the modulation of music criticism in terms of size, tone, and style. We will also discuss the main gateways for publication and how to become a music writer in a practical sense, attentive to how freelancing markets work.
Session 4: Video Commentary – We will watch and discuss the outputs to your fourth assignment (video commentary) and discuss the role of music criticism in the current landscape of low-attention-span, influencer-dominated social media, or what a music critic even is in a deeper, long durée perspective."

IMAGE: Mohammad Salemy, Record Store, 2023

To see The New Centre Refund Policy CLICK HERE.