Mimi Zeiger

Critic, editor, curator and instigator.

Apple may have acquired Beats Music and Beats Electronics in May, but the new Beats by Dre headquarters in Culver City couldn’t be farther from the all-white aesthetic favored by Jonathan Ive and Steve Jobs or Norman Foster’s spaceship-in-the-garden landing soon in Cupertino. “We come from hip-hop, hardcore punk, and indie rock. Hype Williams to Paul Williams, Robert Mapplethorpe to Robert Kelly. How do you design for that without being cliché?” asks Luke Wood, cofounder of the company with Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine. Read More …

Join us at USC School of Architecture for a lecture by Mimi Zeiger.

Trained as an architect, critic Mimi Zeiger tracts the rise of publishing as practice through her own work. Memos from the Front Line rejects the binary of the print and digital divide and suggests that the commingling of the analog and algorithmic creates rich territory for cultural production, criticism, and architectural experimentation.

Wednesday, April 16, 2014 | 2pm
Gin Wong Conference Center
Harris Hall 101

History was written on a sunny Sunday afternoon. Or at least a little piece of it, as a group of volunteer Wikipedia editors gathered in MOCA’s outdoor plaza for Unforgetting L.A., an edit-a-thon sponsored by online art magazine East of Borneo. The third in a series, the event’s goal was to build Wikipedia articles for artists, curators, and galleries of the past 30 years — the three art-rich decades since MOCA’s inception. Read More …

When did the war between technology and urbanism now battling on the streets of San Francisco begin? On December 10, protesters blocked a private bus from commuting from the city’s Mission District to Google headquarters in Mountain View, 34 miles away. Over the summer, emotions ran high when tech entrepreneur Peter Shih posted his screed 10 Things I Hate About You: San Francisco Edition. Read More …

When talking about workplace design, the buzzword “collaboration” flies around the tech world faster than a speeding foosball. From startups working out of garages to sprawling corporate campuses, everyone is looking to harness the creative energy of people working together. Pinterest is no exception. The design-driven company is using its new 45,000-square-foot headquarters in San Francisco’s SoMA neighborhood as a test site for collaboration. Read More …

Today the feedback, spin, and other acts of interpretation that were once the preserve of historians and other experts are often virtual, instantaneous, and open to input from a broad audience. What does this mean? Mimi Zeiger, critic and journalist based in Los Angeles, will consider expanded models of architectural criticism and discursive platforms. Alexandra Lange, New York-based critic and 2014 Loeb Fellow, will explain why architects should use Twitter and Instagram to show their influences—what they read, the design pilgrimages they make, the colleagues they admire—not just to promote themselves. Florencia Rodriguez, editor of Plot (Buenos Aires) and 2014 Loeb Fellow, will explore the question of criticism’s social or disciplinary responsibility; should it be “useful”? A discussion will follow, with GSD student writers and bloggers.

Moderated by Shantel Blakely of Harvard GSD Public Programs.

Reread Remix is a cross-platform criticism workshop that explores the act of critical writing as it translates from the page to the screen to performance. The workshop questions the role of the critic in a digital age, cautiously embraces the potential of the social web, and posits a collective criticism as a productive mode for expanding discourse.

Prior to the workshop, participants were asked to read and respond in a public manner to the following texts:

Ada Louise Huxtable, Plastic Flowers are Almost All Right (1971)
Reyner Banham, Bricologues a Lanterne (1976); see also: Charles Jencks and Nathan Silver, Adhocism (1972; 2013)

Working in groups, students made critical commentary, using the 140 character limit of Twitter, on the texts or on the discussion going on in the workshop. All tweets were tagged ‪#‎rereading‬. Students then chose 3-5 of their tweets to perform in rapid succession. The goal of the reading was to continue the translation between platforms and to apply the immediacy of performance to critical practice.

The internet gets blamed for a lot of things, our current crisis of criticism being just one of its victims. The explosion of free content, the rise of unpaid bloggers, a diffuse democracy of likes and retweets, has surely weakened the authority of traditional critics. But in this new landscape Mimi Zeiger sees a host of new possibilities for architectural debate. Explaining her notion of ‘collective criticism’, she shows how platforms like Twitter can help build momentum on critical issues that often fall through the cracks of the pressroom floor.

Download PDF.

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#platform = collaboratively produced publication by SVA summer design writing intensive participants, with Mimi Zeiger & Neil Donnelly.

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Freedom of expression within tight constraints: An anthology of thoughts and observations give voice to the collective experience.

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Moving from digital to analog, it presents conversational, observational, narrative, and critical tweets produced during the Intensive.

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Time is of the essence. Dérive tweets get tagged and bagged. Narratives are shared. Meaning created with collective intelligence.

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We distilled two weeks of collective experiences, conversations, and relationships (more than 1,000 tweets), curating 68 for this volume.

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Interdisciplinary curation means staying true to a collaborative direction, allowing for a spontaneous selection of educated critiques.

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Potential sound of a tweet: quality of tone, incisive critical pitch, the volume that can be generated with 140 characters.

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Herein lies the mystical divining rod of the Intensive. A retroactive guidebook to city-slicking, quotable-quotes, and D-Criticism.

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#platform’s physical documents navigate back into the city, lingering as messages.

The School of Visual Arts Design Writing and Research Intensive offers students and working professionals a unique opportunity to study closely with a faculty composed of leading writers, editors, researchers, curators and bloggers. Participants spend two weeks in the SVA MFA Design Criticism studio learning how to write compellingly about images, objects and spaces and are introduced to a range of writing genres and a spectrum of methods and formats.

Faculty and lecturers include: Steven Heller, Alice Twemlow, Adam Harrison Levy, Karrie Jacobs, Paul Lukas, Justin Davidson, Mimi Zeiger, and Jennifer Kabat.

Click to download a copy.