The seminar is held in-person, but online attendance is possible via: https://aarhusuniversity.zoom.us/j/67482436575

Abstract

In this talk, Keshavan will present the thoughts/notes on themes in and around the idea of space. It will attempt to re-visit well-known aesthetic distinctions between figure and ground through equally well-used styles of typographic-architectural experimentation. Typography, scribbles, text, both screaming and silent, as well as generous blank spaces, are employed as compositional tools. The attempt is like humming an old song, in a bygone singing style, but with new relish, to see where it could lead. These explorations shall be presented in the form of three tiny clusters: 

Small tiny notes are marginal notes about spacebars, blank whites, and backgrounds that precede, intervene, interfere, and live on with, around, and between words; background, but also ground for words to both show-up and hide.

Reading distances riff with the idea of the sense of completion of meaning based on adjusting one’s position concerning words that shout out and the ones that are whispered.

Middle-somewhere is about pop-up places and spaces on the margins along a segment of a national highway cutting through the rock, scrub and pop-up sub-urbanism of Telangana, displaying and playing their marginalities to the rhythm and flow of transport and travel.

The seminar will be accompanied by a small display/demo/exhibit of these ideas on large and small sheets of white paper. 

Short Bio

Neelakantan Keshavan teaches at the Department of Design at the Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad, a design school housed within a technical institute in Hyderabad, India. He is keen on Design as the cultivation, preservation, and proliferation of difference and heterogeneity. His research areas are visual and spatial culture, design as a discourse of visions, and architecture as an active search for being at home.

What is an AIAS Seminar?

The AIAS Seminar is a session of seminars held by the AIAS fellows, AIAS Visiting or Tandem Fellows or by other speakers proposed by the fellows. In each seminar, a fellow will present and discuss her/his current research and work-in-progress for 30 minutes, closing off with 30 minutes for questions, comments and discussion.

All seminars are held in English.