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Jiajia Zhang: Window (Script), Kunstmuseum St. Gallen 2023, Photo: Sebastian Stadler
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(Too Much) Information Workbr
– roundtable at Kunsthalle Zurich

Roundtable-Discussion with Peggy Deamer, Charlotte Malterre-Barthes, Jiajia Zhang, Klaus Platzgummer and Lennart Wolff
Wednesday, August 21, 7 pm
Kunsthalle Zürich, Limmatstrasse 270, 8005 Zurich

Servers, data centers, algorithms, and protocols work around the clock without exhaustion. Today, architects' work is virtually unthinkable without these digital information environments, which propel outsourcing, automation, and atomization. Isn't it time to abandon the outdated self-image of architects as master builders and authors of buildings and instead recognize them as information workers, to paraphrase Peggy Deamer?

“(Too Much) Information Work” is a roundtable event within the “Building Information” program series. It fills a discursive gap on labor practices and struggles in digital work environments by bringing together perspectives from architecture, art, and curating. This roundtable at Kunsthalle Zurich features architects and educators Peggy Deamer and Charlotte Malterre-Barthes, artist Jiajia Zhang, architecture theorist Klaus Platzgummer, and curator and architect Lennart Wolff. Drawing on the Visiting School’s theme, “Exhibiting Architecture,” the roundtable discusses exhibiting as a particular form of “information work.” Exhibition practices collide media forms, carve out discursive arenas, transcend disciplinary boundaries, and have become integral to contemporary architectural discourse. Can the understanding of exhibitions as a form of “information work,” with its ambiguous division between immaterial and material labor, between the merely categorical separation of life and its institutional production mechanisms, enable alternative practices and agencies? Within today’s information environments, can exhibitions become forums where these labor practices are not only represented but tested? Amidst omnipresent data exhaustion, can this particular form of “information work” act as discursive and spatial interventions into the ever-accelerating processes of resource, labor, and data extraction?

Building Information is an exhibition event and workshop series that started in 2022 with an exhibition curated by Kadambari Baxi, Elisa R. Linn, Klaus Platzgummer, and Lennart Wolff at the Architekturmusum of the TU Berlin, which brought together contributions by Harun Farocki, Sidsel Meineche Hansen, Alan Ruiz and Ibye Camp, among others. This event was followed by a synonymous ARCH+ features Workshop and Discussions event and a workshop and screening at the Estonian Art Academy in 2023. 

Further information can be found here.