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JOHN BINGHAM-HALL
About our guest:
Dr. John Bingham-Hall is Director of Theatrum Mundi and an independent researcher interested in performances, infrastructures, and technologies of shared life in the city. With a background in music (Goldsmiths) and architectural theory (UCL Bartlett), he works across artistic, spatial and critical humanities to question and participate in the making of the urban public sphere. Since 2015, he has initiated projects with Theatrum Mundi on cultural infrastructure, urban commons, political voice, and sonic urbanism. Alongside this he has collaborated on research projects at LSE and Oxford; taught at CSM and UCL; published writing across scholarly and arts platforms; and organised queer cultural events (serving drinks whenever needed).
Image credit: © Richard Dougherty
About the topic:
At the intersection of urbanism and experimental music, Scoring the City takes inspiration from graphic scores in music as dynamic forms that could offer new ways of notating the relationship between design ideas, built form, and social life: in other words, between scoring and performing urban space. The workshops invited architects and composers to explore a site, share their observations, and create scores that challenge the static nature of the architectural blueprint.
In this session, John discussed ideas of scores as open forms, linking to architectural design but also the notion of cultural infrastructure as a set of enabling conditions for the performance of public life, opening up a conversation about the relationship between the 'stage' and the 'backstage' as a metaphor for symbolic and productive form in cities. You can read about scores as infrastructures here.
Image credit: ©
Aura Satz
Image credit: ©
Sharon Phelan
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