Making the World Discrete. Workshop on Methods

With the rise of liberal societies, new regimes of calculation emerged to tame the growing social and economic uncertainties that followed the toppling of older political and productive orders. While histories of probability, statistics, and accounting have long accounted for the ways uncertainty began to be managed via quantification, the material and spatial dimensions of this process have received comparatively less attention. 
As we learn from mid-twentieth-century anthropologists, counting is always rooted in material practices, from body techniques such as finger counting to the objectification of numbering with devices such as khipu, abacuses, or ledgers. Joining a host of new art and architectural histories concerned with these developments, we aim to pull together scholarship that brings numbers closer to the ground anchoring these histories to the built environment. Our guests will present their ongoing research on histories of measurement, environmental accounting of resources, and post-war internationalism. Special attention will be paid to the objects structuring these regimes of calculation, ranging from paper data sets to buildings and infrastructures designed to house and quantify people and materials.

This workshop welcomes doctoral students in the history of architecture with an interest in the period ranging from 1500 to 1950, with any geographic focus, whether at the center or periphery of the commercial and administrative empires that emerged in this historical arc. The discussions will also aim at identifying the hierarchies and resistances embedded in the history of these technologies of counting.

Students are expected to complete the reading assignments in advance and attend the guest lectures. They will also be expected to participate actively in the reading discussions.

This workshop is offered by the SNSF-funded project "Data Centers: An Environmental History of Information" led by Alfredo Thiermann, Xavier Nueno, and Pedro Correa.

Invited lecturers: Prof. Aleksandr Bierig, Prof. Lucia Allais, and Prof. Emanuele Lugli

Participants who fulfill the requirements of this workshop will be granted 2 ECTS.