International Visitors Programme
"States have citizens, markets have consumers and next to that we now have platforms that are new technical and institutional realities. Platforms have users, user can be humans, but also non-humans, machines or even organisms. We now have to come to terms with how states, markets and platforms as organisational entities overlap, and how they clash and what kind of frictions they produce."
NAME
Benjamin H. Bratton
FROM
USA
DATES OF VISIT
27 February - 3 March 2015
PURPOSE OF VISIT
"I'll be one of the keynote speakers at Sonic Acts, a festival in Amsterdam that serves as a platform for research, development and production taking place at the intersection of art, science and theory. The title of my talk will be 'Geobiopolitics and Planetary-Scale Computation: Sensors, Abstractors, Governors'. At Sonic Acts I look forward to catching up with the latest happenings in e-culture in the Netherlands and expanding my contacts in the field. The final stop on the schedule will be Het Nieuwe Instituut, where I'll provide input for the website dossier that will accompany the exhibition The Machine Garden, which opens in late April." The Machine Garden presents a world where machines cannot only be taught to live with humans, but also with plants and animals. Machines are increasingly able to listen, communicate and function more independently, making it high time to consider them as living beings in order to tell a new story about the future of technology.
BIO
Benjamin H. Bratton is a theorist whose work spans philosophy, art and design. He is an associate professor of visual arts, the director of the Center for Design and Geopolitics, and the faculty coordinator of the MFA programme at the University of California, San Diego. Since 2014, he has also worked at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland. His current research topics include the political geography of cloud computing and alternate models of ecological governance.
Read more about Benjamin Bratton here.