I have been invited by Nous Gallery (Melissa Woolford) to participate in Beyond Media 2009, the 9^th Edition of the International Festival for Architecture and Media, that takes place in Florence, Italy during 9-17 July 2009.

I will be presenting a 3-minute video showcasing my work on www.elif-erdine.com, as part of the Nous Gallery installation at the Stazione Leopolda.

Here is some information on Beyond Media 2009:

“BEYOND MEDIA is one of the main events worldwide dedicated to the most current visions on contemporary architecture and on the outcomes of the intense relations which exist between architecture and the media.”

“Within a world that is rapidly accelerating, architecture itself is attempting to renew its identity, to redefine its function and tools, and to reconfigure the borders of its areas of intervention. And it is in this progression that communications and media increasingly become part of the means with which project designers operate and develop their relations and tools that, as a result, inevitably influence a consistent part of architectural production and its widespread presence.

With BEYOND MEDIA we have chosen to insist upon the investigation of this scenario in order to effectively convey and report the architecture of our times, through a manifestation that gains strength from both widespread sentiment and independent observation.

It seems that, in the last few years, contemporary architects have lost their ability to pursue grand visions and to construct a broad outlook that engages complex transformations of the built environment. They are unable to construct thoughts and a conscience beyond that which is usual, empirical, and visible. It is also true that the massive production and consumption of architectural images has resulted in a greater proximity to design issues by the general public. In the era of global communications, the representation of projects expresses an increasing tendency to develop new capacities to elaborate its very realm of action and to determine new systems of relations, while heading towards something that can be interpreted as a renewal of those persuasive intents that were part of humanistic representationalism. However, at the same time, those images, which are often so autonomous as to seem disassociated from representation, have altered the way people conceive of architecture; hence they seem to have affected the ability and the opportunity to generate visions, and hence theories, that are deeply rooted in our time and, at the same time, receptive to new, possible scenarios.
With VISIONS, this festival proposes a new reflection on the themes of project figuration and representation, and on the limits of our ability to observe and report that which is not in front of our eyes, in order to move towards a research of more effective visions that are extended in space and time. Visions that allow us to think about and better define the context and framework for the future.”