In March, Associate Professor Brian Boigon lectured at the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) as part of the exhibition The Other Architect. The exhibition explored architecture in terms of different collaborative strategies, strange concepts, and new kinds of tools.

From the CCA:

“Brian Boigon ran Culture Lab at the back of a rock club in Toronto from 1991 to 1994. The object of Culture Lab was to intellectually entangle and compress the distance between theory and product—and to ultimately create a new space of interoperability whereby speakers, hosted on stage by Boigon, would be thrown into an unknown social architecture, yielding new speculations about what constitutes cultural production in the transitional years between the analogue and the digital. Boigon’s talk addresses the temporal and social ramifications that led up and into the Culture Lab project and beyond.”

After the talk, Boigon was joined by Joan Ockman and Phyllis Lambert to discuss the internet and social media in today’s context.

“We are barely able to function in the digital and yet there’s a new layer, this social media layer,” said Boigon. “I think this social media layer, despite the tropes of it being superficial and…curiously problematic, there’s something in their networks and meshes that are producing a new kind of social space and temporality and we have to pay attention to this as architects.”

The transcription of the discussion was included in the online CCA publication What the future looked like. To view the publication, visit: cca.qc.ca/what-the-future-looked-like