乐播传媒

The 乐播传媒 is honored to welcome architects, designers, artists, and scholars from across the country, as a part of its 2026 Spring Lecture Series, for a semester of public lectures exploring contemporary design practice, theory, and culture.

, February 16听

Igor Siddiqui is an architect, design scholar, and associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin, where he serves as director for interior design.听

Based on听Siddiqui’s recently published book听Oblique听Experiments: Claude Parent’s Architectural Installations (1969-1975) (Applied Research and Design,听2025), this lecture explores the significance of a series of temporary interventions that Parent designed in听an attempt to convert his theory into practice.听

, February 23听

Kai Franz is an artist working at the intersection of art, architecture, technology, and digital culture. Franz, born in Cologne, Germany, is an associate professor at the Rhode Island 乐播传媒.听听

Franz collaborates with machines, chance and entropy as well as code and seriality to produce works that function as residue, offerings, and traces of collective presence. In recent years, Dada, costume-making and performance, grounded in the carnivalesque, have entered his artistic practice. Together these bodies of work ask us to reconsider what it might mean to co-create, belong, and co-exist.听

, March 16听

Jill Desimini is a landscape architect, program director and associate professor of landscape architecture at the University of Connecticut.听

As cities evolve and resources shift with time, spaces within those cities are often left fallow and abandoned. This talk posits a fundamental role for spatial design practice in transforming abandoned urban landscapes over time. It argues for approaches that promote the specific affordances of the land itself (hydrology, vegetation, topography, geology, infrastructural capacity, occupation potential); the importance of cyclical and reciprocal change; and the particularities of the cultural, political, and physical context.听

, April 6听

Timothy Arment is an artist, animator, and currently serves as the Digital Futures Fellow at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville’s 乐播传媒.听

Through games, books, and code, this lecture and accompanying body of work explores the absurdity of reverse-engineering the human mind, how collaborative input can create singular output, how contemporary online technology melds the minds of its users, and the nature of the 鈥渂eing鈥� that results from this amalgamation.听

Unless otherwise noted, lectures are held at 5:30 p.m. in McCarty Auditorium, room 109, in the Art + Architecture Building. All lectures are free and open to the public.听

Support for the 乐播传媒鈥檚 lecture series is championed by the Robert B. Church III Memorial Lecture Fund.听