Human Entities 2019: culture in the age of artificial intelligence
Third edition
Thurs 30 Mary 2019, 18.30 – 20.30
All welcome, admission is free but registration is required

The Artificial: Planetary and Programming
Benjamin H. Bratton
University of California, San Diego / Strelka Institute for Media, Architecture and Design, Moscow

This talk will consider how ecological realism (including the specter of collapse) and the scope of planetary-scale computation together alter how we conceive of “the artificial.”

At stake is whether we should embrace “the artificial” as the basis of a more viable technical epistemology, practical materialism and planetary economics, and if so, how so? For this, it is useful to think in terms of totalities not least because they invite the tracing of distributed agency, subjectivity, causality and effect, all at once and beyond any one situated perspective.

Which “artificial?” There is no “nature” of course. The very idea of an absolute outside of culture is discredited but persistent, yet the inverse is even harder to swallow. If there is no nature, there is also no culture. There is chemistry, abstraction and phase change, pattern and then collapse, and other things besides

What “planetarity?” Despite the integrity of our mutual integration, planetarity cannot be imagined in opposition to plurality, especially as the latter term is now over-associated with the local, the vernacular, and with unique experiences of historical pasts.

That is, even as we look back on dissimilar histories that also set our current relations, we will nevertheless inhabit conjoined futures.

That binding includes a “universal” futurity, at least of a kind. It is, however, not one formulated by local idioms nor by a viewpoint collage of reified traditions and perspectives, but rather by the difficult coordination of a common planetary interior.

That is, it is not that planetary-scale computation brought the disappearance of the outside; it helped reveal —again—that there never was an outside to begin with.

Benjamin H. Bratton
University of California, San Diego / Strelka Institute for Media, Architecture and Design, Moscow

Benjamin H. Bratton’s work spans Philosophy, Art, Design and Computer Science. He is Professor of Visual Arts and Director of the Center for Design and Geopolitics at the University of California, San Diego. He is Program Director of The New Normal programme at Strelka Institute of Media, Architecture and Design in Moscow. He is also a Professor of Digital Design at The European Graduate School and Visiting Faculty at SCI_Arc (The Southern California Institute of Architecture).

In The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty (MIT Press, 2016. 503 pages) Bratton outlines a new theory for the age of global computation and algorithmic governance. He proposes that different genres of planetary scale computation – smart grids, cloud platforms, mobile apps, smart cities, the Internet of Things, automation – can be seen not as so many species evolving on their own, but as forming a coherent whole: an accidental megastructure that is both a computational infrastructure and a new governing architecture. The book plots an expansive interdisciplinary design brief for The Stack-to-Come.

Links:
http://bratton.info
http://thestack.org
https://twitter.com/bratton

The talk will be followed by a Q&A session.

Register: https://bit.ly/2V6VYv4

This event is part of
Human Entities 2019: culture in the age of artificial intelligence
3rd edition
Public talks, March – May 2019
Read more about the programme here: https://bit.ly/2SU3NhX

Organised by CADA in partnership with the Lisbon Architecture Triennale