Benjamin H. Bratton

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 recently founded the school's' new Speculative Design undergraduate major. He is Program Director of The Terraforming think-tank at Strelka Institute in Moscow. He is also a Professor of DesignTheory at the European Graduate School, Distinguished Visiting Faculty at SCI_Arc (The Southern California Institute of Architecture) and Visiting Professor at NYU Shanghai. See www.bratton.info

In The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty, MIT Press (2015) Bratton 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 apparatus and a new governing architecture. The book outlines an interdisciplinary design brief for the composition of The Stack-to-Come.

Dispute Plan to Prevent Future Luxury Constitution, e-flux/ sternberg Press (2015) is a collection of short fictions on architecture and political violence. The book weaves fact and fiction to dramatize the symmetries and complicities between terrorism, counterterrorism, designed violence and the violence of design: their plots, schemes, utopias and dystopias,

His current project, working title: Theory and Design in the Age of Machine Intelligence, is on the unexpected and uncomfortable design challenges posed by A.I in various guises: from machine vision to synthetic cognition and sensation, and the macroeconomics of robotics to everyday geoengineering.