the new normal · 2020. 11. 17. · keller easterling yuk hui lydia kallipoliti geo! manaugh lev...

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From 2017–2019, The New Normal think-tank at Strelka Institute for Media, Architecture and Design in Moscow investigated the impact of planetary-scale computation on the future of cities in Russia and globally. This book is a comprehensive record of the questions posed and the designs created in response to what the New Normal is, and what it should be. Published by Strelka Press and Park Books, October 2020 THE NEW NORMAL Benjamin H. Bratton, Nicolay Boyadjiev, Nick Axel, Editors

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Page 1: THE NEW NORMAL · 2020. 11. 17. · Keller Easterling Yuk Hui Lydia Kallipoliti Geo! Manaugh Lev Manovich Metahaven Trevor Paglen Robert G. Pietrusko Patricia Reed Rival Strategy

From 2017–2019, The New Normal think-tank at Strelka Institute for Media, Architecture and Design in Moscow investigated the impact of planetary-scale computation on the future of cities in Russia and globally. This book is a comprehensive record of the questions posed and the designs created in response to what the New Normal is, and what it should be.

Published by Strelka Press and Park Books, October 2020

THE NEW NORMAL

Benjamin H. Bratton,Nicolay Boyadjiev,Nick Axel,Editors

Page 2: THE NEW NORMAL · 2020. 11. 17. · Keller Easterling Yuk Hui Lydia Kallipoliti Geo! Manaugh Lev Manovich Metahaven Trevor Paglen Robert G. Pietrusko Patricia Reed Rival Strategy

From 2017–2019, The New Normal think-tank at Strelka Institute for Media, Architecture and Design in Moscow investigated the impact of planetary-scale computation on the future of cities in Russia, and globally.

The work was conducted by ninety interdisciplinary researchers from thirty different countries and over forty faculty members, drawn not only from the field of architecture but also from the areas of computer science, philosophy, art, cinema, economics, and more. Projects ranged from short-form cinema and software design to proposals for new political systems and economic models. At stake for the work is not only what the urban future looks like, but also how it works; how it circulates ideas, value, and power. The twenty-two interlinked projects which were developed show how speculative urban design can move upstream in the decision-making processes.

This book includes all final research projects from the The New Normal program, a series of newly written essays by program director Benjamin H. Bratton which reflects on the questions posed and designs created by the think-tank, and a series of newly commissioned essays by faculty members.

2Strelka The New Normal

ESSAYS Julieta ArandaBenjamin H. BrattonBen CervenyKeller Easterling Yuk HuiLydia KallipolitiGeoff ManaughLev ManovichMetahavenTrevor PaglenRobert G. PietruskoPatricia ReedRival StrategyStephanie ShermanAnastassia SmirnovaMolly Wright SteensonLiam Young

PROJECTSAir KissAlt’aiAtollCommon TaskCurrentDomaGeocinemaMeraOf Earth and SkyPatternistPhiPodkopPresenceSeicheSeverShiftSimptom Sir-AhaStandard DeviationSybl Tuda SyudaVault

Page 3: THE NEW NORMAL · 2020. 11. 17. · Keller Easterling Yuk Hui Lydia Kallipoliti Geo! Manaugh Lev Manovich Metahaven Trevor Paglen Robert G. Pietrusko Patricia Reed Rival Strategy

3Strelka The New Normal

Cover of THE NEW NORMAL

Page 4: THE NEW NORMAL · 2020. 11. 17. · Keller Easterling Yuk Hui Lydia Kallipoliti Geo! Manaugh Lev Manovich Metahaven Trevor Paglen Robert G. Pietrusko Patricia Reed Rival Strategy

The “New Normal” we explored was in response to dramatic shifts in geopolitics, finance, media, and the parameters of truth. The moment we started was marked by societies breaking apart and exiting one another on a cultural level, while simultaneously further integrating on technical and ecological levels. The weird emerging patterns of this contradiction were our site conditions. From there we made sense of what the New Normal is, and what it should be.

We began by looking at the territory itself. We mapped automated landscapes, near and far, that have been designed to exclude humans, and considered how that principle might scale, in relation to both automation and ecological remediation. In mapping cities beyond their borders, we considered the global expanse of discontiguous megastructures: supply chains, communication networks, agriculture, housing, manufacturing, energy flows, and more. By modeling the modularity of these systems, we ventured to prototype their radical rearrangements better suited for the years to come.

The role of software as an urban medium was treated not as a solution but as a substance, another material from which cities are made and experienced. “Artificial intelligence” lives in the world, not just the lab, and how we interact with it depends on what we think it is. Bringing together leaders in AI, from product design to philosophy, we approached AI at urban scale; less as a centralized disembodied mind but as distributed and embedded augmentation of objects, surfaces, machines, and processes that could sense, evolve, and adapt at the granular scale.

Cities have been designed according to models for millennia, but today computational model simulations of cities don’t just represent them; they also recursively act back upon them. Because simulations are tools of administration, they are also a leverage point to consider alternative forms of representation, governance, and planning. As cities are organized around software protocols as much as legislation, it is clear that the platform economics we have are not the ones we need. Viable alternatives are essential for urban design.

4Strelka The New Normal

EDITORS Benjamin H. Bratton Nicolay Boyadjiev Nick Axel

PUBLISHERStrelka PressMoscow, October 2020

Page 5: THE NEW NORMAL · 2020. 11. 17. · Keller Easterling Yuk Hui Lydia Kallipoliti Geo! Manaugh Lev Manovich Metahaven Trevor Paglen Robert G. Pietrusko Patricia Reed Rival Strategy

5Strelka The New Normal

Selection of spreads of THE NEW NORMAL

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Tuda Syuda 88, 48778 Projects

204 Russian Fieldwork Urals

Hong Kong / Shenzhen362 Exploration

overexploitation of natural resources. Mera is a new jurisdictional platform that defi nes spatial and temporal logics of governance that link the deep time and shifting dynamics of ecological systems with the micro-scales of human temporal perception. It redefi nes territory based on the primary logics, the dynamic relations, and the cascading resource fl ows of watersheds. Post-Soviet maps become perforated; borders and boundaries become gradients more than lines.

Alternative geographies cohere through the deliberate reframing of a different way to organize a given landscape, as well as through the identifi cation of conditions that already exist but which are not yet identifi ed and formalized. Some alternatives may exist alongside normal geographies, and others may be exceptional zones that become increasingly normal over time. Whatever planetarity comes to cohere over the coming decades, it is likely to emerge as a fractious combination of anthropogenic biomes with different origins and purposes. Just as a nation may be terraformed into existence, the artifi cial ecologies of the anthropocene also shape the emergent forms of “geopolitics” that will attempt to administer them. The form and content of a preemptive political science is more than speculative; it is a geography of survival.

110 Alt-Geographies Benjamin H. Bratton 102 Alt-Geographies Vault 43, 491

How do you see cosmotechnics playing out in the world today?

The necessity to diff er has been obscured by the understanding of technology as universal, as fundamentally tied to industrial capitalism, as well as ideologically transhumanist. But when, for instance, Google announced it would not update its Android operating system on Huawei phones, a space for techno-diversity emerged. Huawei responded by saying it was going to develop its own operating system, but what kind of operating system is it going to develop? Is it going to be a Chinese simulation of Android, or is Huawei capable of inventing a new operation system with diff erent experiences, aesthetics, and social functionalities? Operating systems aren’t bound to any specifi c geographical place, but to technical objects. They can travel on their own as soft ware, engaging with local contexts in diff erent parts of the world and evolving differently in relation to them.

386 Productive Incompatibility Yuk Hui

330 AI Urbanism Benjamin H. Bratton

126 Immersion

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Tuda Syuda 88, 487 79Projects

205Russian Fieldwork Urals

Hong Kong / Shenzhen 363Exploration

IMMERSIONIntroduction to the local context and conceptual foundation of the programme.

THE RUSSIAN RESOLUTION 69Anastassia Smirnova

KEEPING IT CLEAN AND CONTAINED 79Lydia Kallipoliti

A SPECULATIVE CARTOGRAPHY 87Robert Gerard Pietrusko

111Immersion 103Alt-Geographies Vault 43, 491

How can a culturally-situated technical practice such as an operating system be understood to aff ect, determine, or even fundamentally transform the cosmology that is giving it context in the fi rst place?

It’s important to distinguish epistemology from episteme. In The Order of Things, Michel Foucault used periodization to claim that in Europe, from the fi ft eenth century on, there have been three epistemes: the Renaissance, the Classical, and the Modern. Foucault’s concept of episteme is not simply a synonym for knowledge. Episteme is the sensible condition under which knowledge is produced. New scientifi c discoveries may bring about new senses, like the microscope or telescope, but then there is the sensible condition under which a particular form of knowledge is produced. Newly discovered realities are not totalities, but rather become integrated and developed into larger epistemic schemes.

What would you say is at stake in the concept of cosmotechnics?

Cosmotechnics does not merely allow one to say that a place like ancient China, or ancient Russia, simply had diff erent types of technology than other parts of the world. Rather, it allows us to rethink the possibility of developing a techno-diversity. Cosmotechnics is a way to think through the incompatibilities that have arisen between diff erent cosmologies and epistemologies over the past 100 years of globalization and modernization. When a partial form of knowledge is taken as totality, such as the universal, Eurocentric idea of technics that has propagated around the world, incompatibilities are ignored; they’re seen as a kind of traditionalism, of lagging behind. But incompatibility can instead be the source of innovation, the motivation for invention. It enables a multiplicity of futures to be opened. We have yet to succeed in appropriating incompatibility, in making it productive.

387Productive Incompatibility Yuk Hui

Protocols and Programs

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Benjamin H. Bratton

Patternist 335Alt’ai 339Common Task 343

127Immersion

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Projects

INTRODUCTION 37

AIR KISSKarina Golubenko, Egor Kraft , Alina Kvirkveliya, Pekka Airaxin

ALT’AIPaul Heinicker, Lukáš Likavčan, Qiao Lin, Daria Stupina

ATOLLArtem Konevskikh, Natalie Mezhetskaya, Tom Pearson, Leo Stuckardt

COMMON TASKMichaela Büsse, Konstantin Mitrokhov, Alina Nazmeeva, Jariyaporn Prachasartta

CURRENTMary Anaskina, Eli Joteva, Provides Ng, Alexey Yansitov

DOMAMelissa Frost, Maksym Rokmaniko, Enrico Zago

GEOCINEMAAsia Bazdyrieva, Alexey Orlov, Solveig Suess

MERANabi Agzamov, Antonia Burchard-Levine, Olga Cherniakova, Nashin Mahtani, Evgenia Vanyukova

OF EARTH AND SKYAlexander Geysman, Olesia Kovalenko, Anna-Luise Lorenz, George Papamattheakis

PATTERNISTLina Bondarenko, Martin Byrne, Holly Childs, Kei Kreutler, Jelena Viskovic

PHICalum Bowden, Cory Levinson, Aliaksandra Smirnova, Artem Stepanov, Aiwen Yin

PODKOPValdis Silins, Natalia Tyshkevich, Tony Yanick, Hira Zuberi

PRESENSESveta Gorlatova, Artem Nikitin, Gleb Papyshev, Igor Sladoljev

SEICHEMikhail Anisimov, Tomás Clavijo, Yulia Gromova, Katya Sivers, Andrei Zhileikin

SEVERIldar Iakubov, Alexey Platonov, Inna Pokazanyeva, Francesco Sebregondi

SHIFTDmitry Alferov, Liza Dorrer, Christian Lavista, Arthur Röing Baer

SIMPTOMKatya Bryskina, Denise Luna, James Kubiniec, Pedro Moraes

SIR-AHADana Baddad, Nikolay Nikolaev, Anna Paukova, Joy Zhu

STANDARD DEVIATIONChristopher Burman, Huey Chan, Konstantina Koulouri, Vsevolod Okin

SYBLGrigory Chernomordik, Mariia Fedorova, Ricardo Saavedra, Mark Wilcox

TUDA SYUDAThomas Grogan, Paul van Herk, Ivan Puzyrev, Liudmila Savelyeva

VAULTSofi a Pia Belenky, Alyona Shapovalova, Ksenia Trofi mova, Don Toromanoff

ARCHIVE 447

The New Normal

FOREWORD 4Varvara Melnikova

THINK TANK 8Nicolay Boyadjiev, Olga Tenisheva

THE NEW NORMAL 11Benjamin H. Bratton

ALT-GEOGRAPHIES 83OF EARTH AND SKYMERAVAULT

SPECULATIVE MEGASTRUCTURES 135SEICHESEVER

SYNTHETIC CINEMA 187CURRENTGEOCINEMAAIR KISS

RECURSIVE SIMULATION 251STANDARD DEVIATIONSIMPTOMATOLLSYBL

PROTOCOLS AND PROGRAMS 311PATTERNISTALT’AICOMMON TASK

PLATFORM ECONOMETRICS 371PHISHIFTDOMA

HAIID 427PRESENSESIR AHATUDA SYUDAPODKOP

INVISIBLE MOSCOW 493Benjamin H. Bratton

APPENDIX 518Program Timeline Faculty and ContributorsResearchersCredits and Colophon

2 Table of Contents

Geocinema

If early cinematic apparatuses decisively transformed how it was possible to see and compose images, then the infrastructural optical complex that has been constructed over more recent decades must be as well. At planetary scale, a vast geocinematic apparatus built from roving satellites, surveillance cameras, geosensing arrays, and billions of cellphones produces not one master image but multiple possible composites, each of which overfl ows the frames of single-point perception. What kinds of cinema can be composed with this already existing apparatus—what durations, what perspectives, what contortions of narrative, what distribution of “screens?” Whatever the answers may be, they will come to defi ne visual culture. As the planet observes itself, it is composing an archive both of and for an uncertain future-present. The source material is too large and comes too fast to see at once, and so secondary summary images are calculated into interactive diagrams that help carve the staggering noise of all-images-at-once into graspable form. Among many other things, one genre of such summary images is called Earth Science.

Geocinema is a proposal—perhaps even retroactive—for a new kind of cinema, one based on seeing how we are seen by planetary-scale optical perception. If human sapience has led us to track our attention to our own refl ections, faces, friends, foods, and foes, then we might yet be trained instead to look for what this meta-apparatus looks for and to see through its eyes. This way of looking may be motivated less by the compulsions of personal refl ection than by the traces of events, sub-events, and non-evental unfoldings constituted by the open-endedness of the planetary itself.

The project’s foundational work is archaeological, as it traces and interprets the far-fl ung terrestrial footprint of this planetary-scale optical apparatus. Essential details come from prosaic infrastructural sites and foregrounding the manned and unmanned labor necessary to keep a permanent vision machine going. Even if we often ignore the geocinematic machine except for the glimpses we can see of it in ourselves and our dreams, Geocinema shows how much we don’t know what to do with it. The fi lm demonstrates how we could learn to see what is already there, to allow ourselves to see ourselves being seen for other forms of vision and audiences.

198 Synthetic Cinema Benjamin H. Bratton

WHO TRAINS THE TRAINERS?Any urban AI system that is built is only as good as its training data. At the start, any neural network is raw links and nerves, and any training set is a stream of noisy protuberances which bend that network into shape. Training the layers to recognize regular signals is as much like training a stone to become a spear tip as it is like training a dog to sit. But in practice, training sets are built from available opportunities and resources. These are sometimes robust and broadly representative of what the set means to model, and sometimes they are bizarre artifacts of legacy bias, repeating and reinforcing the same all-too-human prejudices over and over again. When can increasing the scope and depth of

training data help to correct the model, and when does it dilute the pattern?

INSTITUTIONAL FORMWhat are the constitutive anatomies of AI governance? Will its emergence as an information infrastructure show how the modern political order was the eff ect of a modern bureaucratic informational apparatus? AI can and does contribute to the governance of both discrete and diff use polities with diff erent scales, locations, and legal forms. The intensifi cation of its formal and de facto governing eff ects traces these diff erences and works against them. Whereas states identify and coordinate the lives of citizens, macro-economic futures, and military gambits, cities

278 Directed Research: AI Urbanism Benjamin H. Bratton

SCULPTURES IN POSSIBILITY SPACE

Ben Cerveny

292 Sculptures in Possibility Space Ben Cerveny Image from AI Urbanism module

Medium Design: It is not what you think. It is not new. It is not right. It is not magic. It is not free. It does not happen. It does not always work.

The oncologist follows not only the tumor, but also the chemical fl uctuations in surrounding tissues. The actor in the theatre transmits information not only through words but also through interdependent actions. The architect sees not only buildings with shapes and outlines but also the matrix of activities that infl ects them. The geologist does not merely taxonomize specimens, but rather reads them as traces of a process.

Still, while this medium thinking is practiced in many disciplines, it is perhaps under-rehearsed in the face of more dominant or ingrained cultural habits. Culture is good at pointing to things and calling their names, but not so good at describing the relationships between things or the repertoires they enact. It privileges declarations, right answers, litigious proofs, universals, elementary particles, and telos. It circles modernist scripts that celebrate freedom and transcendent newness—narrative arcs that bend toward a utopian or dystopian ultimate. This collective mind that looks for the one or the one and only is so oft en organized like a closed loop.

And since the loop that only circulates compatible information cannot abide contradiction, it also oft en lashes out with a binary fi ght against any challenger. Fighting is essential to being right. There is no growth or ideation without argumentation or debate. There is no literature without confl ict. Favoring successive rather than coexistent thoughts or practices, the new right answer must kill the old right answer. The newest redemptive technology will make you free, but the freedom of one group must rob another of its freedom. And the fi ght should build to a revolution or an apocalyptic burnout. Cue the brooding music.

Oscillating between loops and binaries, an unnecessarily violent culture, having eliminated the very information it needs, is often banging away with the same blunt tools that are completely inadequate to address perennial problems and contemporary chemistries of power. A bully is elected, a migration of refugees swells in number, a fi nancial crisis makes properties worth less than nothing, an industrial disaster kills thousands, shorelines fl ood due to global warming, or teenagers join ISIS. If economic and military templates of causation provide no explanation, if new technologies do not provide the solution, if the consensus surrounding laws, standards, or master plans provide no relief, little sense can be made of the problem. Assuming that these problems are simply impossibly deadlocked or unresponsive to rational thought, even the smartest people in the world stand with hand to brow.

These are the hackneyed plot lines of our “humanities.” The binaries of wars and the chest-beating Westphalian sovereignty of nations remain in place as darlings of history. Homo economicus

Keller Easterling

MEDIUM DESIGN

348 Medium Design Keller Easterling

208 Experimentation

186 Russian Fieldwork Urals ChelPipe Plant

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44 Projects: Introduction Common Task 322, 454

Essays

THE RUSSIAN RESOLUTION 106Anastassia Smirnova

KEEPING IT CLEAN AND CONTAINED 116Lydia Kallipoliti

A SPECULATIVE CARTOGRAPHY 124Robert Gerard Pietrusko

ARCHITECTURE WITHOUT PEOPLE 154Liam Young

THE BUILDING WHERE WE KEEP THE WORLD 174Liam Young

DIGITAL TARKOVSKY (PART I) 210Metahaven

EXCESS OUTPUT 226Julieta Aranda

INVISIBLE IMAGES (YOUR PICTURES ARE LOOKING AT YOU) 240Trevor Paglen

VYING FOR THE VERNACULAR 290Molly Wright Steenson

SCULPTURES IN POSSIBILITY SPACE 292Ben Cerveny

AI AESTHETICS 298Lev Manovich

INFINITE INVESTIGATION 334Geoff Manaugh

MEDIUM DESIGN 348Keller Easterling

PRODUCTIVE INCOMPATIBILITY 360Yuk Hui (in conversation)

ON NON-ADAPTIVE ARTIFACTS: INTERACTING WITH PLANETARY COMMONNESS 394Patricia Reed

WHY LENIN WAS A FAN OF FORD 406Stephanie Sherman

YOU LIVE THE SURPRISE RESULTS OF OLD PLANS 416Rival Strategy

Think Tank

IMMERSION 99Introduction to the local context and conceptual foundation of the program.

RUSSIAN FIELDWORK 147Relocation to remote cities and extreme environments to work with fi lm and fi ction.Y1 MurmanskY2 MagadanY3 Urals

EXPERIMENTATION 203Quick and iterative design charrettes linking conceptualization and prototyping.

DIRECTED RESEARCH 271Focused conceptual exploration of a theme over a longer timeframe.

AI URBANISM 272Benjamin H. Bratton

INTERNATIONAL FIELDWORK 327Traveling abroad to gather research from relevant experts, sites, and institutions.Y1 Los Angeles / San DiegoY2 Hong Kong / ShenzhenY3 Tokyo / Fukushima

DESIGN PUSH 387Interdisciplinary design teams working to develop and present fi nal projects.

3Table of Contents

199Synthetic Cinema Geocinema 50, 460

mediate the encounters of inhabitants, the platform infrastructures of everyday life, and the logistics of circulation. AI can organize each of these, of course, but how may it also shift the eff ective roles of state vs. city?

AI AS GEOPOLITICAL GAMBITIn 2018, Xi Jinping released China’s plan as part of a larger China 2020 initiative that benchmarked the country’s progress in AI to match the USA’s by 2020 and surpass it by 2030. At around the same time, Vladimir Putin remarked to a group of students that whoever controls AI will control the world, and suggested that the technology should be a shared, open resource. Emmanuel Macron authored an EU AI

plan that focused on social responsibility, citizen-fi rst data models, and supporting regional research. The USA followed suit with a more vague white paper, reiterating the importance of AI to its industries and ambitions, etc. Each of these are a genre of hemisphere-scale speculative strategy. Can they all come true at once, or do they map a more zero-sum game?

ALGORITHMIC GOVERNANCEPolitics and technology are interwoven as a means to remake the world by design. Not only does technology express a political arrangement, but any polity emerges only within a technical milieu. In an age of planetary-scale computation, the dynamics of

279Directed Research: AI Urbanism Benjamin H. Bratton

The design of a tool is not the design of an instance, but the design of the possibilities of instances. Tools provide the potential for activity towards a goal. The city, in this sense, can be understood as a stack of tools, and the idea of inhabitation as a set of verbs. The city is an emanation of possibilities. Cities collectivize possibilities. Rather than singular tools providing people with a set of verbs tied to their person, civilization has been a process of people coming together and pooling their tools together into a construct that inverts the relation between person and tool. In a city, a person no longer surrounds the object, but instead, the object surrounds people. The city is where culture is written by our activation of possibilities. It’s a place where the dance of society happens inside a given rule-space.

Messaging among biological actors creates emergent patterns in space and time. The most fundamental of those is a process called chemotaxis which, on a cellular level, describes the movement of an organism in response to a chemical stimulus, or its chemical bath. In chemotaxis, there is no sentient will, no feedback loop of stimuli response as in cognition, but biochemical response to a chemical gradient. What does it mean, then, that the desires, goals, and activities of both individuals and communities are expressed as signaling into the environment? Can the environment respond in a way that is similarly emergent?

293Sculptures in Possibility Space Ben Cerveny Image from AI Urbanism module

is allowed to upstage and hold forth. Rom-coms align with the ancient folktales of a patrilineal society. Sci-fi s align with ancient tragedies, and dark conspiracies foil our hero. Smart is confused with new. Empowered is confused with free. Dissent, also adopting a binary, exists in a world of enemies and innocents. Since the world’s big bullies and bulletproof forms of power thrive on this oscillation between loop and binary, it is as if there is nothing to counter them—only more ways of fi ghting and being right and providing the rancor that nourishes their violence.

So how do you drop through a trapdoor and engage the fl ip side of these logics?

On that fl ip side, where nothing is new and nothing is right, there are no dramatic manifestos. But maybe there is a chance to rehearse a habit of mind that has been eclipsed. You are already able to detect, as if with half-closed eyes, a world at a diff erent focal length. Rather than only declarations, right answers, objects, and determinations, you can detect and manipulate the medium or matrix in which they are suspended and in which they change over time. Just as this medium thinking inverts the typical focus on object over fi eld, maybe medium design can invert some habitual approaches to problem solving, aesthetics, and politics.

Speaking to any discipline or treating anyone as a designer, medium design uses space to prompt productive thought about both spatial and non-spatial problems. Like those media theorists who are returning to elemental understandings of media as surrounding environments of air, water, or earth, the approach treats the lumpy, heavy material of space itself as an information system and a broad, inclusive mixing chamber for many social, political, technical networks. Space does not need the screens and sensors of the internet of things to make its stiff arrangements dance. It is already dancing. And even at a moment of digital ubiquity and innovation, space may be an underexploited medium of innovation with the capacity to make other information systems dumber or smarter. Not bound by notions of media as communication devices, analysts of socio-technical networks, political theorists, designers, and artists, among others, share a scaff old of thought or engage in medium thinking.

The largest sociotechnical organizations of space—the repeatable formulas for formatting space all around the world—may prompt innovative thought because they are everywhere and nowhere. From the micro to the macro scale, from institutions to cities, they are too large or too widely distributed to be assessed as a discrete object with a name, a shape, or an outline. They don’t respond to singular solutions or determinations, and they can really only be assessed by the activity or disposition immanent in their organization as it unfolds over time and territory.

But in any context, large or small, designing the medium is managing the potentials and relationships between objects, the activity or

disposition immanent in their organization. The disposition of any organization makes some things possible and some things impossible. Like a growth medium, it determines what will live or die. Like an operating system, it sets the rules of the game that link and activate the components of an organization.

Since unreasonable politics easily unravels reasonable politics, being right is a bad idea in medium design. It is too weak. It does not work against gurus or totalitarian bullies. Stock narratives of history about the succession rather than coexistence of knowledge, sci-fi futurologies, persuasions about lubricated freedoms, or righteous activism do not make sense. Instead, multiplying problems can be helpful. Messiness is smarter than newness. Obligations are more empowering than freedom. Histories can expand to include things that do not happen. Problems can be addressed with responses that do not always work.

Culture’s spectacular failures together with the underexploited powers of medium inspire alternative ways to register the design imagination—form making in another key or part of speech. Inverting the authority given to declarations, master plans, standards, and laws, medium design discovers extra political and aesthetic capacities in indeterminacy, discrepancy, temperament, and latency in organizations.

Indeterminacy

Designers are very good at making things, but medium design is less like making a thing and more like having your hands on the faders and toggles of organization. It is the design of interdependencies, chemistries, chain reactions, and ratchets. It benefi ts from an artistic curiosity about spatial wiring or reagents in spatial mixtures, a curiosity about designing not a single object, but a platform for infl ecting populations of objects or setting up relative potentials within them.

There is a comfort with dynamic markers and unfi nished processes that are indeterminate to be practical. The dispositions of space are manipulated not with solutions but with time-released active forms—multipliers, switches, governors, or other organs of interplay with extended temporal dimensions that allow them to unfold and remain in play. Since urban space is not a steady state, a master plan can always be gamed or corrupted. But interplay might have both the practical capacity to react to changing conditions and the political capacity to respond to the moment when it is outmaneuvered. Instead of information canceling loops, or instead of a paradoxical quest for freedom, maybe empowering or information-rich situations gain strength through interplay—mutual obligation, checks and balances, off sets, and bargains. An interplay is not a solution, but something that should not always work.

349Medium Design Keller Easterling

209Experimentation

Synthetic Cinema

Benjamin H. BrattonSynthetic Cinema 187

Benjamin H. Bratton

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45Projects: Introduction Common Task 322, 454

6Strelka The New Normal

Selection of spreads of THE NEW NORMAL

Page 7: THE NEW NORMAL · 2020. 11. 17. · Keller Easterling Yuk Hui Lydia Kallipoliti Geo! Manaugh Lev Manovich Metahaven Trevor Paglen Robert G. Pietrusko Patricia Reed Rival Strategy

Credits & Practical Information

TITLE THE NEW NORMAL

EDITORSBenjamin H. Bratton, Nicolay Boyadjiev, Nick Axel

DESIGN AND LAYOUTPIN (Switzerland)

NUMBER OF PAGES548

FORMATPaperback, 20 × 27 cm

LANGUAGEEnglish

PUBLISHERStrelka Press www.strelka.comPark Books www.park-books.com

DISTRIBUTIONIn RussiaStrelka PressBersenevskaya Naberezhnaya, 14/5 119072 MoscowRussiawww.strelka.comISBN 978-5-907163-08-9

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7Strelka The New Normal

CONTACT [email protected] for inquiries and additional information

STRELKA PRESS Strelka Press is the publishing program of Strelka Institute. Launched in 2012, Strelka Press publishes books and digital essays on modern issues of architecture, design, and emerging technologies in English and Russian.

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