Opening Lines
Gendai Workstation, 1265 Bloor St. West
Friday, November 11th, 2011
Door opens at 8:30pm
Free Admission

Opening Lines is a one night event staged to reduce its own narrative to the simplest yet fullest form – lines.

09:00pm – Raumlichtkunst: lightplay.lineplay
Visual-music projections programmed by Aliza Ma

10:30pm – Intermission

11:11pm – 11.11/11.11.11 Drawing-Architecture: On the Line as Lived Abstraction Lecture/Architectural tour by Etienne Turpin

Raumlichtkunst: lightplay.lineplay

Walter Ruttman
Lichtspiel Opus 1 (1921)
Opus 2 (1922)
Opus 3 (1924)
Opus 4 (1925)

Len Lye
Free Radicals (1958)
Colour Box (1935)

Malcom McLaren
Begone Dull Care (1949)

Aliza Ma is a fervent cinephile living in Toronto. She has worked on programming for the American Film Institute and Sundance Film Festival, and is now a year-round employee of TIFF Cinematheque, in the film programmes department. She has mediated and translated for Chinese filmmakers, Jia Zhangke and Emily Tang. Independently, she contributes to various film-related publications and works as a programmer for the Gendai Gallery, exploring facets of micro-cinema programming, focusing on the avant-garde and contemporary Asian cinema. Her last programme, was on Ernie Gehr, in collaboration with architecture journal, Scapegoat: Architecture/Landscape/Political Economy.

11.11/11.11.11 Drawing-Architecture: On the Line as Lived Abstraction

To draw is to produce conceptual reflection and experiential sensation with, or perhaps more precisely, on the line. To borrow a neologism from the philosopher Brian Massumi, the practice of drawing-architecture might be considered as a peculiar mode of ‘lived abstraction.’ To develop these concepts, the lecture will first consider the question of measurement, and its persistent premise of calculative value, in relation to the practice of drawing-architecture. Then, through an engagement with architectural historians Hubert Damisch and Claudia Brodsky, the lecture will sketch, in broad strokes, the legacy of the line within the hegemonic context of perspectival representation. Our attempt will then be to map the problem of correlationism (in the conceptual sense given by Quentin Meillassoux) that arises through the lived abstractions of drawing-architecture.

Etienne Turpin completed his PhD at the University of Toronto where his doctoral dissertation considered the problems of restricting and regulating moral and aesthetic economies in Kant, Georges Bataille, and Robert Smithson. He is a founding editor of the architecture, landscape, and political economy journal Scapegoat (www.scapegoatjournal.org). For the 2011-2012 academic year, he is the Walter B. Sanders Research Fellow at the A. Alfred Taubman College of Architecture + Urban Planning, University of Michigan.

Opening Lines brings about Stage 3: Architectural Construction of Gendai’s 2011 Fall project Feasibility Study, an alternative renovation strategy where the process is slowed down, broken into three stages, and made transparent to the public.

Feasibility Study
A Renovation in Three Stages
9 September – 12 December 2011
Regular hours: Tuesday – Saturday 11am-6pm

Project Initiated by: Yan Wu
Performer-Builders: Mitchell Akiyama, Stephen Fisher, Marcin Kedzior, Chris Lee, Evan Saskin, Mercer Union, Haley Uyeda, Jonathan Wong, Oaken Work

For more information, call 416.534.1693 or visit www.gendaigallery.org