As architecture slips (wittingly or unwittingly) into the embrace of AI, this seminar posits that well before the "arrival" of the modern computer, the ideations of architecture and computation were already long-entangled, if not co-constitutive. By way of a set of recursive histoires longues durées, the sessions consider the constituent duties, devices and desires computation shares with architecture in the mutual meta-project of correction, including: memory storage and retrieval systems; deletion and forgetting; the window, the gun, the pen, the nozzle; Universal Languages and the calculation of truth; the algorithm, chance and prediction.

Architecture has always been deeply collaborative, like moviemaking or opera where the credits are long and layered. But in architecture there is a huge effort to credit a single figure. Why this pathological need to keep collaboration secret? What is so threatening about the collaborators? What are we afraid of? What is at stake? This seminar explores questions of authorship, the signature, copyright, the anonymous, networks, labor, etc. It also thinks through the ideological implications of this narrative and the implications of its undoing. What would a post-author discourse look like?

What is 'banality', and why have so many artists, authors, architects, and others been drawn to it? How can we distinguish the banal from the commonplace, the everyday, the trivial, the vulgar, the vernacular, and related terms - and why do so? What aesthetics can be discovered in the banal? What politics?

This course covers the three major historical moments of documentary work from its emergence in the interwar avant-gardes to its rediscovery in the 1960s and the contemporary documentary turn. With an eye toward the specific political conditions, technologies, and formal conventions that established the boundary between reality and representation at each of these three moments, this seminar considers: deskilling and the industrialization of writing; the contest between literature and technical media; the emergent properties of mass culture; changing conditions of authorship; documentation, the archive and forensic investigation.

Rhythm is often taken for granted as an aesthetic form or natural phenomenon--from the form of a poem to the pulse of a beating heart. Yet not only does the concept of rhythm have a history, but a 'rhythmic episteme' (Janina Wellmann) has historically shaped many discourses, some of them politically problematic, particularly where the concept of life is at stake. This seminar examines rhythm in aesthetic, scientific, and philosophical discourses with a focus on the periods around 1800 and 1900 and the role of rhythm in later theoretical projects from poststructuralism to new materialism.

The seminar introduces graduate students to central problems, themes, concepts and methodologies in the history of science and neighboring fields. We explore past and recent developments including the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge, Actor-Network Theory, the study of practice and experimentation, the role of quantification, the concept of paradigms, gender, sexuality and the body, environmental history of science, the global history of science, and the role of labor and industry, amongst others.

In this course, we investigate questions of material persistence and plasticity through artifacts, embodied practices, and textually embedded ideas of matter and body that emerged in the ancient Mediterranean and carry on today. Moving along three conceptual axes (body, cosmology, change) and working with three primary materials (plaster, rubber, wax), we experiment with practices of close reading; speculative, material-based art-making; different genres of writing; historical analysis; and other strategies of engaging premodern techniques of making alongside ancient philosophies of matter within contemporary materialist projects.