Attention — Audio Journal for Architecture

In this episode we trace the genealogies of this generation through academic lineages, their movements through the geography of American Academia, and the post-critical or projective discourses which defined much of their time as students.

In this introduction we hear from Joseph Bedford addressing what this issue is about, who he interviewed, what their work is about, what questions he asked everyone, why he undertook the project, and how his interests in this generation intersect with his larger interest in the fate and future of theory, and the understanding of architecture as a discipline.

In this episode we hear from the group of American academic architects that has been brought together by this issue of attention. The group pushes back against their characterization as a generation, though there are throughlines in the group— namely their responses to the digital project, the crash of 2008, and their individual, pluralized approaches to architecture.

In this episode, Megan Eardley interviews the artist, puzzle-maker, and escape room designer Laura E. Hall about the design of escape rooms for the public, building community, and the politics of play. Together, they reflect on the popular appeal of detective work in an era of corporate dragnet surveillance.

In this episode, Megan Eardley interviews the investigative journalist and veteran beat reporter Caryn Dolley about the use of biometric and building surveillance devices in organized crime networks. With reference to her journalism and research for her book “The Enforcers” (2019), Dolley describes the movement of illicit and counterfeit goods through night clubs and the duplication of the state security apparatus in post-Apartheid South Africa.

In this episode, Megan Eardley introduces Issue 7 by relating contemporary spatial practices to the literary detective story and present day political realities of surveillance, state violence, and justice work.

Like proof, evidence typically refers to things, traces, marks, or signs, that can be studied to establish relevant facts and evaluate competing theories. But while proof has been associated with tests and verification procedures since the thirteenth century, evidence (or the Latin evidentia) refers to something that is “manifest to the senses” and “obvious”– there in a way that is not subject to dispute. To examine evidence is thus to contend with the politics of presence, practices of display, and conditions of access. In this episode, Megan Eardley discusses these concerns with Eyal Weizman, who is a critical proponent for forensic research in architecture today.

In this episode, Megan Eardley invites listeners to reflect on the way that detective work operates between form and event. She interviews the artist Janice Kerbel about the use of detective work in pieces such as “Bank Job” (1999), “Doug” (2014), and “Sink” (2018). They discuss how detection can be built into form, Kerbel’s experiments using plans to foreclose events, her relationship to language and writing, and how she seeks to reclaim small spaces within which we can act freely.

In this episode, Megan Eardley interviews the writer and artist Bryan Finoki. He describes how he came to study the security industry and reflects on his process of harvesting his own field recordings, synthesized sounds, and files scraped off the web, to make Dark Freqs, an original sound composition produced for Attention and this issue on Detective Work.

This episode presents Dark Freqs, an original sound piece by Bryan Finoki. Please note that the piece incorporates recordings of police brutality.