Atmosphere Symposium 2016

Feb 25 Feb 26 Feb 27

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The intention of this symposium is to posit emerging relationships between human and natural systems with specific reference to water as an activating agent. This symposium addresses the idea of working with water instead of against it – by design. Our goal is to advance our understanding of water and spatial occupation through the intersecting themes of:

 

 

design          community          ecology          economy

 

 

These themes are inter-dependent and contingent. We seek to understand water and our determined place on the planet while recognizing that access to water is a basic human right, water is a common and shared resource, and water has rights of its own.

 

As designers we are interested in the facets and measures of spatial occupation – how water informs and impacts all scales of inhabitation including policies, territories, landscapes, settlements, infrastructure, buildings and objects. Water ‘operates’ with dynamic geometries and organizations, it privileges fractal rather than Euclidian orders, it is adaptable and elastic, and it is multivalent.

 

Poetically speaking, we want to create myths of desirability - of unique and compelling places to engage water and life, based on the fusion of various novel and unforeseen programs, relations, and contextual options. Purposefully speaking, we want to posit resilient solutions that respond positively to working with water at a range of scales, settings and conditions.

 

We invite academics, artists, designers, engineers, environmental scientists, economists, geographers, planners, poets, social scientists, and other allied disciplines to address water and spatial occupation: through texts, treatise, and words; through a range of scales, quantities and limits; and through cartography, geometry and proportion.

 

We look forward to the unforeseen possibilities of disciplinary and inter-disciplinary engagement and exchange – to propose new forms for living, working and playing, predicated on a deeper understanding of the forces causally linked with nature and those linked with past and future notions of settlement – of living with water.

 

We have developed a matrix to privilege specific issues to address WATER+. These have been grouped under the 4 thematic headings. A list of sub-themes are also provided – terms that offer a sense of agency relating to each of these themes. Symposium participants are asked to privilege one theme and then aggregate additional themes and sub-themes to serve as topic keywords. We are particularly interested in the aggregate association of these themes and the narrative potential to advance disciplinary and inter-disciplinary issues.

Water’s global disposition, physical properties and phenomenal characteristics determine or figure in all forms of spatial occupation of all living systems. Water occupies: our atmosphere; our earth’s surface in oceans, lakes and river systems and its core in aquifers and springs; and our bodies. However pervasive, water is finite. We understand water to be the harbinger of life while also recognizing its destructive potential. Water in its solid, liquid, and gaseous forms, occupies our sense of being and place in both real and imagined ways – it is vital and transformative. Water is also contested and is subject to depletion, access, and control. Water has its own way, evidenced in global flooding, droughts, and atmospheric disturbances.