Priests and Programmers
Description
Cities are machines for the distribution of resources, and amongst all of those resources, water is the most indispensable. This film, Priests and Programmers, deals with a special case of water distribution: the island of Bali. In a crisis brought about by overdevelopment in the early 1980s, it was discovered that the island's irrigation networks were not merely sharing the water, they were functioning as a distributed hydraulic computer, half a millennium old. This is a story about traditions, landscape, activism, and intelligence taking unfamiliar form.
Biography
Adam Jasper is an Assistant Professor at the School of Architecture at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK). His broad research interests in the history, theory, and criticism of architecture range from the design of Hong Kong’s hospitals to irrigation infrastructure in Eastern Indonesia. He studied philosophy and art history in Sydney, Melbourne, and Freiburg (Breisgau). In 2010, he received his doctorate on marginal aesthetic categories. From 2010 to 2014, he was a lecturer in the Faculty of Design, Architecture, and Construction at the University of Technology Sydney. During that time, he was editor of the Architectural Theory Review (Taylor and Francis), and a contributing editor for Cabinet Magazine, as well as a regular contributor to Artforum. From 2018–2024, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture (GTA), where he served as the editor of GTA Papers magazine. In 2018, he edited "House Tour: Views of the Unfurnished Interior" (Park Books), the catalog for the Swiss pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale (winner of the Golden Lion 2018). He has curated several exhibitions and research installations, including Priests and Programmers, part of the inaugural Sharjah Architectural Triennial, Rights of Future Generations.
Materials
Digital Film
Organisation
School of Architecture, The Chinese University of Hong Kong
