Addressing the intricate socio-techno-environmental dimension of noesis within the current climate of social and urban challenges necessitates a transdisciplinary approach. In pursuit of this objective, NWM incorporates contributions that delve into sense-making processes involved in the individuation of humans, technologies, and their affective environments. These contributions offer diverse perspectives that critically examine the production of sense and its heterogeneous potentials for transindividuation. Key questions include: What transductive relations emerge in the entanglements between technology, affects, and the production of our (offloaded) memories and desires? How do these relations shape the sensible apprehension of our lives and the lives of our milieus? In what ways can they be expressed beyond the conventional, Western, ocularcentric, and annotational fixations of generic sciences? What new senses are required to navigate the complexity of the present? And, collectively and technologically, how do we sense the effects of our actions? Drawing inspiration from Gregory Bateson, how can we cultivate a different sensory perspective to foster a transformative mode of thinking?

NWM provides a platform for thinkers who boldly traverse disciplinary boundaries, encompassing a diverse range of fields. These include, but are not limited to, affect and affordance theories, architecture, art and cultural studies, philosophy and philosophy of technology, (digital) media studies, feminist theories, film theory, social sciences, and literature.@en

Various forms of violence and conflict continue to shape our habitats. What historically has been straightforward and even obvious two-way dependency, in recent years took more subtle and covert form due to sophisticated technological advancements in the fields of media, surveillance and armament. Recognising the detrimental effects of these new developments on the way we experience, conceptualise and build our environments, Footprint #27 proposes artistic reflections, cross-media inquiry and counter-tactics as new powerful tools to rethink the complex relationship between conflict, space and mediation. On one hand, the aim of this issue is to deepen and expand theoretical considerations that substantiate investigations of spatial conflicts by making them truly interdisciplinary. On the other, it seeks to empower architects and artists in their pursuit of exposing, critiquing and fighting spatial violence by reclaiming/unlocking the enormous potential of media tools.@en

Conflict, when dislodged from its conventional understanding as a process and system of war and destruction exclusively, may be apprehended as an experimental method for analysis and synthesis, as a potent resource for pedagogy, for disruptive design and for the production of theory. In this sense, conflict produces more than the eradication of (the possibility of) life and its supporting structures: conflict produces transitional spaces at different scales, of differentiated material ecologies and site-specific meanings in relation to their global position. Conflicts are both locations and explanations of often ‘seductive’ images of destruction offered by popular (and other) media: ruined architectures, dead (or barely alive) bodies, forced migratory movements, impermanent infrastructures and settlements, as well as the tracing and construction of borders, real-estate driven post-war reconstruction processes, etc.

The emphasis on the mediatic aspect in the concept of conflict, may be seen as a way of triggering trans- and interdisciplinary discussions, conversations and encounters that serve as a negotiation between conditions of violence and new — or alternative — possibilities for everyday life. Artistic mediations could be as effective as violence in resolving conflicts, but operate through other means and through other channels, thus truly producing new power relations and alternative ways of political struggle. This exposing of conflict and violence through the artistic work is an activist act, but more importantly an artistic and technological mediation. The agency of the artistic work in terms of conflict, then, is situated in the capacity of visualising the conflict, creating awareness of its consequences, its side-effects, its collateral damage. And the creating of awareness and the becoming of fertile ground for protest and the creation of alternative realities.

At a three-day conference held at the TU Delft on November 6-8, 2019 researchers, scholars, activists, practitioners and artists presented individual papers that addressed the relationships between spatiality, mediation and conflict from a variety of perspectives. In addition to academic paper contributions, the conference welcomed other proposals in different formats and media: audio-visual material (film, video, photography), digital or physical archives, experimental design proposals, installations, performances, etc.

The thematic core of the conference explored new — or innovative — theoretical and methodological approaches and insights on: (1) Spaces of conflict as transitional spaces of material interactions between violence and everyday life; and (2) Spaces of memory as transformative space of violence).@en