“The role of technological imagination in planetary crises is taken up further by Simon Weir as he explores the notion of tragedy, both as an artistic and philosophical category, and as a description of our civilisational pre-dicament. Drawing on the traditions of surrealism and object-oriented ontology, the essay prompts a new consideration of the epistemological value of the non-rational. Striking AI-generated visuals draw on Magritte’s ‘tragic pairs’, using the text prompts ‘shipwreck’ and ‘theatre’ to produce a creative scrambling of relations and non-relations, posing questions about the ontological stability of architecture. These scenes project into an alien future in which the aims of today’s technology are ancient history, lying in preserved ruins. As the essay tours these other-worldly landscapes of ‘cosmotechnical tragedy’, readers are prompted to irrational interpretation, and to speculate upon radically redrawn architecture-ecology relationships.”
Dulmini Perera and Samuel Koh, ‘Cosmotechnical Difference in Architecture and Urbanism’,
Footprint Delft Architecture Theory Journal, vol. 18, no. 2 (2024): 8. [link]
Shipwreck Theatre
Contemporary culture’s credible catastrophism collides critically with our seemingly endless desire for the theatricalisation of everyday life, and its suffusion with masochistic morality. The Shipwreck Theatre celebrates this complex enigma, with all of its contradictory cravings, and anxious ambivalence.
The project was made in the manner of a René Magritte “problem painting” wherein a first object appears as a subject of sustained interest and it inspires a long pursuit for a second object that was its matching pair. After a year and a half contemplation, I found the word within myself, shipwreck. This word produced the most varied and wild results because each term is cinematically vivid, and their juxtaposition is unprecedented.
Digital Images, 2022.
Weir, S., Rich, S. (2024) “Shipwreck Architecture”
Footprint - Delft Architecture Theory Journal, 31, 51-65. [link]