International Lecture Series with Francois Roche: Strategies of digital disobedience

This open lecture at KADK is taught by Francois Roche, architect and co-founder at the architecture studio, New Territories. Experimental architecture has shifted toward a new corpus of instrumentations, made out of tools, computation, mechanization, but also and simultaneously of fictions and lines of subjectivity, synchronous with our symptoms; of fears and great escapes in the “here and now”.

The purpose of this 1993-2050 flashback is to explore attitudes that show a correlation, a co- dependency with the forms they underpin, through their conflicts and reciprocities.  It is to discover a post-digital, post-human, post-activist,  post-democratic,  post-feminist  world, …  a queer, androgynous, carnal, disturbing, disenchanted, pornographic, transient, transactional  world, … where scenarios, mechanisms, misunderstandings, and psychological and physiological fragments are what make up walls and ceilings, cellars and attics, … schizoid and paranoid, between the lines of operative and critical fictions…

S/He and Her/Him      

S/He consider architectural identity as emanating from uncertainty principles defined through provisional processes and forms in which animism, vitalism and mechanism become vectors of dynamic mutations.

S/He critically engage contemporary technology in experiments alchemically mixing Eros and Thanatos to develop deliberately ambiguous scenarios that fuse realities that would seem immiscible. 

Her/Him synthetic devices works out possibles somewhere between attractions and aversions, simultaneously mixes of obstacles and possibilities, waste material and efflorescence, threats and protections, mechanical powers and natural forces.

Here everything is intertwined and knotted, in the process of becoming, in a movement in becoming.

About New-Territories

New-Territories is a polymorphous architecture organization. Founded in 1993, it has embraced different labels, names, strategies and purposes. New-Territories is fronted by the androgynous avatar, trans-gender avatar, _S/he_, who authorized François Roche to write, talk and teach on his/her behalf, as a PS / personal secretary, an Ariadne’s wire of this ectoplasmic system and paranoiac mind. ‘New-Territories’ emerged through the multitude of meeting points, friendship and dispute, in the hollow of sympathy, empathy, antipathy ...

 New-Territories seek to articulate the real and/or fictional, geographic situations and narrative structures that can transform them, with technology, robotic and human natures, physiological and psychological.