Cambridge Talks is an annual symposium organized by the PhD Program in Architecture, Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning at Harvard University that brings together junior and senior scholars to engage in an interdisciplinary exchange on critical themes in architectural discourse and urban studies.

This year, the topic for Cambridge Talks III will be “Mediated Space.” With media technologies embedded ever-deeper into architecture, the city and everyday life, a rigorous historiography of media’s relationship to space has become a burning issue. Under the radar of the dominant discourses on media that are fueled by technological fetishism and determinism, an innovative and rapidly evolving body of scholarship has evolved. The work of these scholars has crossed disciplinary boundaries to situate architecture and urbanism within new histories of spatial perception and kineaesthetics, the contingencies of the human sensorium, 19th-century optical devices and early cinema, sound technologies, and an expanded conception of cartography. Cambridge Talks III aims to channel this interdisciplinary momentum by providing a forum for the presentation and debate of vital new work.

Since the early 1960s and Marshall McLuhan’s definition of media as extensions of man, “media” has proven to be a concept with enormous obscuring capacities. Meaning all and nothing, the term per se might refer to devices regulating and/or transmitting information, their infrastructure, the science and discourse informing their production, the workings of advertisement, propaganda, and other communication channels, or generally speaking, the politics of representation at large. Within the framework of architectural discourse and urban studies, the concept of “media” has been implicated in discussing architecture and the city as a sort of medium conveying meaning, in exploring articulations of spatial representation in media, and last but not least, in employing media themselves in the production of ambiences and space. At the heart of these investigations lie fundamental yet unanswered questions: What does qualify as a “medium”? How is a medium conditioned and how does it simultaneously condition conceptions of space? Are there boundaries between architecture as an autonomous medium and its representation in media? How do media technologies, ranging from pre-cinematic devices to GPS-enabled mobile phones, transform the conception of the human subject and the lived experience of space?

In order to provide the appropriate forum for such a necessarily interdisciplinary discussion, Cambridge Talks III employs a tripartite structure. Mediated Space is the core of the event, where senior scholars from the fields of History of Architecture, Urban Studies, History of Science, Comparative Literature, and Visual Studies come together in two debate-format panels. A Media Archaeology of Boston addresses the symposium’s theme in practice via an experimental one-night sound, film and video exhibition that uses the Boston metropolitan region as a laboratory for exploring different modes of urban representation across history and various media. The city has a rich legacy and vibrant scene today of media artists engaging architecture and the city, from actuality films of early cinema to the work of György Kepes and Kevin Lynch at MIT following WWII to experimental documentaries on urban renewal to contemporary works in new media. A Media Archaeology of Boston presents an initial excavation of this city’s spaces through a montage of short films, photographs, postcards and experimental soundscapes recorded on-location in the larger metropolitan area. This program will be presented at the Carpenter Center for Visual Arts, and will be curated in collaboration with the  Film Study Center at Harvard University. The last element will be the publication Mediated Space, to be released following the conference combining participants’ papers, discussion and a critical commentary on A Media Archaeology of  Boston.