Prefix Institute of Contemporary Art presents the eighth season of the Urban Field Speakers Series, and scholar Edward Dimendberg will take the floor along with Will Straw on Thursday, March 28, 2013 at 7:30pm at the Prefix Institute of Contemporary Art in Toronto.
Dimendberg will speak about Mies van der Rohe and the moving image, addressing the architect’s relation to cinema and analyzing the continued attraction of his work to film and video makers, including David Cronenberg. His lecture will be followed by a book signing for Diller, Scofidio and Renfro: Architecture After Images, newly released from the University of Chicago Press. The lecture is moderated by Will Straw, Director of the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada.
Edward Dimendberg is Professor of Film and Media Studies, Visual Studies, and European Languages and Studies, at the University of California, Irvine. He received his BA from Brown University (Providence, RI), his MA from New York University and his PhD in the History of Consciousness from the University of California, Santa Cruz. He has received fellowships from the German Fulbright Commission, the J. Paul Getty Trust, the Graham Foundation, the Canadian Centre for Architecture, and the International Research Center for Cultural Studies in Vienna. In 2009, he was a University of California President’s Fellow in the Humanities and the Daimler Fellow in residence at the American Academy in Berlin.
Dimendberg publishes on the relation of the mass media to the built environment in numerous journals and exhibition catalogues, and has lectured widely on publishing, film and design at conferences, museums and architecture schools in Europe and North America. His book Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity was published in 2004 by Harvard University Press. In 2013, the University of Chicago Press published his book Diller, Scofidio and Renfro: Architecture After Images, a historical monograph on an architecture studio widely admired for its buildings and multimedia projects.
Currently, Dimenberg serves on the advisory board of the Society of Architectural Historians Architectural Online Resources Archive (SAHARA), funded by the Mellon Foundation. He is a member of the editorial board of the journals October and Modernism and Modernity and editor at large at the University of Minnesota Press. He is also a co-editor of the Weimar and Now: German Cultural Criticism book series and coordinator of the FlashPoints electronic book series, published by Northwestern University Press.
Will Straw is Professor in the Department of Art History and Communications Studies at McGill University (Montreal), where he also currently serves as the director of the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada. He is the author of Cyanide and Sin: Visualizing Crime in 1950s America and the co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to Rock and Pop (2001), Circulation and the City: Essays on Urban Culture (2010) and several other books. He is the author of more than 100 articles on cinema, urban culture, popular music and the popular press.
Programmed by Janine Marchessault and Scott McLeod and presented by the Prefix Institute of Contemporary Art in association with the Visible City Project and Archive of York University, the Urban Field Speakers Series centres on the role of art in transforming the experience of the city. Through lectures, audio-visual presentations and discussions, it explores how creative practices can help improve the quality of urban life and planning in Toronto and around the world. This series of monthly events brings together an array of international and local participants, including artists, architects, curators, designers and scholars, who are working at the intersections of technology, communications and aesthetics. Reflecting a broad range of perspectives and practices, the events build upon each other to inspire dialogue on the role of the city in art, and art in the city.
The Prefix Institute of Contemporary Art is located at 401 Richmond Street West, Suite 124, Toronto, Ontario. For more information, please visit www.prefix.ca.