Christian Kōun Alborz Oldham speaks about Ikebana, a floral art form codified in Japan, often eschews being turned into an easy commodity, as part of the New Public Forum, a student-led series of lectures and demonstrations aimed at instituting public dialogue between various fields as they evolve and adapt to a changing world. The economic model of ikebana practitioners is based on teaching and the exchange of knowledge, emphasizing in-person presence such as lectures and demonstrations. General knowledge alone on the form is scant, and its different ideologies, likely numbering in the thousands, do not have a centralized channel for a unified understanding of the many directions the practice moves through. Meanwhile, a nearly pre-internet 1990s England sees a rapid development of dance music taking place in clubs with dizzying amounts of musical adaptations, sampling, and demographic shifts. Its distribution too is scattered across regional pirate radio stations, dancehalls, and bootleg recordings. Often, its relatable lyrical content runs counter to its aspirational dress codes of designer labels and champagne. Oldham's lecture explores the parallels of scattered continuity between educational lineages of ikebana and the more informal dissemination of musical forms focusing on the heyday of the 1990s dance-music genre UK Garage.

Christian Kōun Alborz Oldham is an artist, writer, researcher, and ikebana practitioner concerned with what surrounds production and the lives of things. Oldham continues Flower Planet, a studio founded by their teacher Kosen Ohtsubo, a pivotal figure in the avant-garde ikebana movement since the 1970s. The studio holds lectures and workshops and produces writings and exhibitions on various elements of ikebana from antiquity to the present. It was through Ohtsubo’s tutelage that Oldham became a certified freestyle sensei at the Ryusei Ikebana School, headquartered in Shinjuku, Tokyo.

Learn more about the New Public Forum, which is supported by The Cooper Union Grant Program and The Cooper Union School of Art, here. Lectures will be broadcast by the Cooper Radio Collective.