Fugitive Geographies: A Yale School of Architecture Graduate Student Symposium

From the unique perspective of the criminal fugitive, the built environment is both accomplice and obstacle - a mercurial landscape that offers concealment one moment and prevents escape the next. To be fugitive is to exist in a continuous present, where successful evasion depends on the ability to re-read and react to a shifting context. Fugitive Geographies brings together students from philosophy, history, art, geography, media theory, and architecture to discuss this elusive and transitory condition where both subject and context exist in a precariously unstable state, where boundaries and borders are unclear, and where the criminal takes new agency over the environment. Fugitive Geographies will open on March 24th with the David W. Roth and Robert H. Symonds Memorial Lecture, "Topographies of Elusion," a keynote address by Thomas Y. Levin, Associate Professor of German at Princeton University. Levin teaches media and cultural theory and serves on the executive committee of Princeton's Program in Media and Modernity. Levin's areas of enquiry includes the philosophy, aesthetic theory, technology, and the politics of surveillance. His book CTRL [space]: Rhetorics of Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother (MIT Press, 2002) is the catalogue of a major exhibition which he curated at the ZKM in Karlsruhe, Germany. The symposium is organized by the Yale School of Architecture Master of Environmental Design class of 2011 and complements the M.E.D. research colloquium Space, Crime, & Architecture, in which students explore how the criminal act degrades conventional readings of designed environments to expose the sinister latencies of architecture. More information can be found online at http://fugitivegeographies.com