Virtuality And-the-affect-of-environments

A Visual Vocabulary of Memory and Emotive Prediction

Matthew Ledwidge

Ledwidge’s Visual Vocabulary uses interactive web design to query the use of predictive and emotive technologies in architecture and urbanism. Adopting a poetic, call-and-response format, Ledwidge attunes us to affective experiences of the built environment, asking: What emotional states are anticipated or imagined at the time of design? How do these anticipations converge or diverge from everyday aesthetic and affective experiences?

Excessive Heat

Jordan Loeppky-Kolesnik

Amid an unprecedented season of wildfires across the west coast of North America, Loeppky-Kolesnik’s video Excessive Heat considers real and imagined Californian landscapes—from found footage drawn from last year’s fires, to the idyll of Los Angeles seen in Grand Theft Auto. Reflecting on this recent work, Loeppky-Kolesnik will discuss how their practice draws together environmental destruction, queer embodiment, architecture, and social dynamics.

Presenter Biographies

Matthew Jacob Ledwidge (Toronto, 1994) is an artist based in Cambridge, MA, working in an interdisciplinary mode between forms of academic research, artistic inquiry, and media production. He holds a BFA from Cooper Union, New York City, and a Master of Science in Art, Culture, and Technology from MIT. He was recently an MIT Transmedia Storytelling Initiative fellow, and artist-in-residence at SOMA in Mexico City. His work is built around particular geographic and historical sites and uses structural intervention, installation, image, and sound to engage with the conditions of knowledge and attention in the built environment. Past projects have focused on the transmission of historical information at the site of a particular work, investigating conditions of obfuscation, conventions of representation, and the psychosomatic implications of particular disclosures. Recent exhibitions and collaborative projects have been presented at the Ecole Polytechnique, Paris; Sakiya, Ramallah; Gallery Elektrozavod, Moscow; The Shed, New York; GGG Foundation, Basel; Festung Hohensalzburg, Salzburg. He has also been involved in curatorial and educational projects at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies Archive at MIT, The Herb Lubalin Study Center, and the Center for Urban Pedagogy.

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Jordan Loeppky-Kolesnik is an artist from Montréal living in Los Angeles. They work in video, sculpture, and installation, creating experiences that tell stories about ecological survival, the queer body, personal relationships, and sense of place. Explorations of non-binary gender and the body arise with questions around architecture, social dynamics, nature, and place. If you were to file their work in a library search engine, effective keywords would include: speculative fiction, the occult, ecology, learning through experience, sexuality, personal relationships, new forms of society, chaos, desire, mental health, public health, spiritual architecture, land art, climate change, folk & craft traditions, paganism, architecture, ghosts, out-of-body-experience, feelings, post-humanism, anti-capitalism, trans-humanism, cross-species embodiment, fantasy.

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A Visual Vocabulary of Memory and Emotive Prediction

Excessive Heat

Presenter Biographies

Public Presentations by Research Fellows: Virtuality and the Affect of Environments