The New Normal (ePub)

Benjamin H. Bratton is the new Programme Director of the Strelka Institute. As one of the most important global design theorists, he brings an extraordinarily interdisciplinary scope to our research.

He is Professor of Visual Arts and Director of the Center for Design at the University of California, San Diego. He recently founded the school`s new Speculative Design undergraduate major. 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).

He has recently published two books of design theory, strategy and fiction. In The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty (MIT Press, 2016) 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. Dispute Plan to Prevent Future Luxury Constitution (e-flux/ Sternberg Press, 2015) is a collection of short fictions on architecture, utopias and dystopias.

His current research project, "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.