MEASURE / OUT OF MEASURE

Call for papers

The notion of measurement plays a central role for the discipline of Drawing: knowing the dimensions of what is to be represented is a necessary condition to scientifically relate it to the phenomenal world, both in the operations of investigation and ruling of what already exists and, in the conception, design and prototyping of new artefacts.
Units of measurement, some of which are still in use today, reflect epistemological and cultural models affected by scientific progress in doing research, as well as by the outcomes of scientific discoveries. Starting from the ancient times, it was more often man and the human body that fulfilled the role of model and module for the proportioning and dimensioning of architecture. The same concept can be extended to the works of famous masters such as Le Corbusier and Terragni, in a sort of yearning for harmony that can be perpetuated over time. However, this is not just the prerogative of architecture, because it also concerns music, mathematics, geometry, and poetry.
Today, representation in design is increasingly linked to generative parameterization algorithms, with applications that allow users to modify numerical values to verify the formal effect produced by new values. At the same time, the obsession with data control, combined with the crisis of anthropocentrism, produces an excess of often ungovernable measurements: an “immeasurable measuring”, a proliferation of numerical data which are aimed at physical dimensions, but which human minds increasingly struggle to understand and rule as a whole.
The design of infrastructures on a planetary scale and the numerous discoveries of collective and non-human intelligence (animal, vegetal and artificial) compels us to deal with an excess of measurements and new challenges to represent and understand what previously appeared as unmeasurable or couldn’t be observed at all. Sensors of all kinds can detect the behavior of flocks of birds, forests, mycelial structures, and autonomous vehicles, returning information that unfolds previously unthinkable worlds and complexities.
In the notes for his American lecture titled Multiplicity, Italo Calvino wrote that “literature remains alive only if we set ourselves immeasurable goals, far beyond all hope of achievement” and invited to “think what it would be like to have a work conceived from outside the self, a work that would let us escape the limited perspective of the individual ego, not only to enter into selves like our own but to give speech to that which has no language, to the bird perching on the edge of the gutter, to the tree in spring and the tree in fall, to cement, to plastic”. Today, Calvino’s thoughts about the literature to come are obviously more and more shared by other disciplinary fields, including that of Drawing.
Whether the act of measuring requires the action of embodied subjectivities or whether it relies on the algorithmic presence of tools with which to interact, the drift of excess can lead to immeasurable results in design practices that range from architecture and engineering to product, communication, and fashion design, up to the freedom of visual and performing arts.
The 45th UID 2024 Conference aims at taking stock of and advancing the current state of Drawing’s relations to measuring, through new methodologies and new tools. Simultaneously, it invites scholars to collect the possible contradictions of these relations by framing questions and challenges to which Drawing itself is called to act with ever more urgency, collaborating with other disciplinary fields and defining goals both rigorously measurable and driftingly immeasurable, but anyway relevant for the survival of many species, including the human.

Focus 1. Devising: prefiguration and configuration
Focus 2. Knowing: observation and deduction
Focus 3. Narrating: description and interpretation

contacts: convegnoUID.padova.venezia@gmail.com