Thresholds + Encounters
MA Research Exhibition
2021
Thresholds + Encounters is the collective exhibition produced by students of the Forensic Architecture and Research Architecture Studios to investigate the multiplicity of approaches existing within the Centre for Research Architecture.
Thresholds — Thresholds are produced by a mesh/web of relations between infrastructures, technologies, historical forces, individual actors, sensors and language. Some thresholds are formed through material pressures – such as the number of carbon parts per million in our atmosphere that are thought to cause a 2° rise in global temperature. Other thresholds are ephemeral and contingent, shifting from terrain to terrain, propagating in various contexts to lead to different outcomes. Within our practice as students of the Forensic Architecture studio, we operationalised the threshold concept, drawing on our research and collective experiences to make visible the limits and delineations that have explicitly and inadvertently structured our investigations.
Encounters — An encounter is not simply a binary relationship between two (or more) actors. Rather, an encounter is a negotiation that is inherently contingent upon the mode, materiality, and form of the engagement. Whilst encounters might occur within the immediacy of the ‘now’, they unfold across multiple temporalities, enclosing both that precedes them and the emergence of possible futures. Encountering might have been anticipated but can never entirely be predicted. Although not all encounters have positive outcomes - some of these compositions might manifest as breathlessness, inaudibility, breakdown, incrementality, deviation, toxicity, incommensurability – we can apprehend something from all of them. Thinking-through and being-with encounters is our collective form of provocation, one that becomes a mandate for situated research as the requirement for informed political response-abilities. To encounter is also to become-with.
Download Thresholds + Encounters catalogue
See 2021 MA research here
Thresholds — Thresholds are produced by a mesh/web of relations between infrastructures, technologies, historical forces, individual actors, sensors and language. Some thresholds are formed through material pressures – such as the number of carbon parts per million in our atmosphere that are thought to cause a 2° rise in global temperature. Other thresholds are ephemeral and contingent, shifting from terrain to terrain, propagating in various contexts to lead to different outcomes. Within our practice as students of the Forensic Architecture studio, we operationalised the threshold concept, drawing on our research and collective experiences to make visible the limits and delineations that have explicitly and inadvertently structured our investigations.
Encounters — An encounter is not simply a binary relationship between two (or more) actors. Rather, an encounter is a negotiation that is inherently contingent upon the mode, materiality, and form of the engagement. Whilst encounters might occur within the immediacy of the ‘now’, they unfold across multiple temporalities, enclosing both that precedes them and the emergence of possible futures. Encountering might have been anticipated but can never entirely be predicted. Although not all encounters have positive outcomes - some of these compositions might manifest as breathlessness, inaudibility, breakdown, incrementality, deviation, toxicity, incommensurability – we can apprehend something from all of them. Thinking-through and being-with encounters is our collective form of provocation, one that becomes a mandate for situated research as the requirement for informed political response-abilities. To encounter is also to become-with.
Download Thresholds + Encounters catalogue
See 2021 MA research here
