Submission of Abstractsby 28 July 2013

We invite unpublished research from scholars working in the fields of history of art/architecture and science studies as well as from practitioners. We are particularily interested in work that strives to relate a theoretical approach to a case study in terms of specific strategies developed, techniques employed or problems encountered by researchers, artists or architects. Problems addressed may correspond but are not limited to the following:

How have differences between the universal and the specific been theorized, today and historically? - To what extent and for which purpose may generalizing explanations and predictions serve as a sufficient basis for planning and behavioural decisions? - What strategies have been developed by scientists, artists and architects to deal with the seemingly infinite number of global and local factors that might be involved (or interfere) with the realization of a project? - By which means are researchers, artists and architects attempting to control diverse cultural or individual particularities of their human subjects /audiences /users and how are they dealing with the limits of such control? - Which theories have they been relating to or which modelling techniques have they been using? Which theoretical concepts have proven useful in broaching the human factor in past and planned projects? - Can the critical impetus of post-colonial approaches, which challenge Western-centric claims of universality as well as certain aspects of cultural particularism by explicitly focusing on past and current interdependences be translated into a set of directives? - Are new technologies offering solutions? - In view of the global art and architecture market: how may we best continue to address problems of cross-cultural transfer or relations between “globalized“ forms and the particular cultural contexts in which these are realized and experienced? What are the limits of such binary thinking? - Which approaches offer an alternative to the universal-specific dichotomy? - Are there instances in which “complexity“ functions as a rhetoric mist, veiling decisions which are in fact based on simple, straightforward interests and calculations?

A publication of suitable contributions is planned.