Freefall is a series organised by AA 4th year Moad Musbahi & AA graduate Konstantina Koulouri. The series looks at the multiplication of ‘lines’ that govern daily life, from the tangible frame around an image or the building of a wall; to the more intangible construction of juridical and disciplinary borders. Freefall in this operates as a way to construct trajectories, in the form of conversations, questioning the ground upon which disciplinary divisions acquire their intelligibility.
By questioning how disciplinary definitions and exclusions are made, the series hopes that architecture can be re-evaluated in a more relevant fashion to today’s rapidly changing technological and cultural environments.
Iain Boal is a social historian of science, technics, medicine and the commons. Since moving to the US in 1982 he has taught the earth sciences and community studies at Harvard, Stanford, the University of California, and the San Francisco Art Institute. He is associated with Retort, a group of antinomian writers, teachers, artists and artisans based in the Bay Area. With James Brook he co-edited Resisting the Virtual Life: The Culture and Politics of Information (City Lights), and with T.J. Clark, Joseph Matthews and Michael Watts, he co-authored Retort's Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War (Verso). He is affiliated with the Geography department at UC Berkeley, the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in science and technology, and a founder of MayDay Rooms, the social space and safe haven for archives of dissent located at 88 Fleet Street. He co-edited West of Eden: Communes and Utopia in Northern California (PM Press), and is the author of The Green Machine (forthcoming), a heterodox history of the bicycle in planetary perspective. He is director of the Stokesby Institute of Geohistory and the Material Arts.
Ruth Beale is an artist whose work considers the evocative relationships between culture, governance, social discourse and representation. Her practice includes performance, installations, film and socially-engaged processes. She is co-founder of Performance as Publishing, an active research project into text and writing for performance, and The Alternative School of Economics, which uses the practice of self education to reclaim and explore economics as a social subject. She has performed and exhibited at Whitechapel Gallery, London, ICA, London, Turner Contemporary, Basel Kunsthalle, MoMA Ps1, South London Gallery and Modern Art Oxford. She gained a MFA in Fine Art Practice from Goldsmiths in 2010.
Tim Ivison is an interdisciplinary scholar and artist working on the political ecology of modern cities and urban planning. He teaches in both Liberal Arts and History + Theory at SCI-Arc and in Critical Studies at CalArts. He is a contributor to Real Review (London) and currently the editor of Offramp (SCI-Arc). Recent curatorial projects include T.E.O.T.W.A.W.K.I. and Operations Theater at Before Present, LA. Ivison holds a B.A. in Visual and Critical Studies and a B.F.A. in Studio Practice from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In 2016 he completed a PhD in Humanities and Cultural Studies at the London Consortium, with a thesis on biopolitics and environmental discourse in modern British town planning. From 2014-2016 Ivison was an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Researcher at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montréal.