The Terraforming: Synthetic Intelligence at Urban Scale

Lecturer: Benjamin Bratton

Date: Monday, October 25th, 2021

Time: 19:30 CET

Location: Online – Zoom 

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Lecture Abstract

Benjamin Bratton outlines the argument behind The Terraforming: Synthetic Intelligence at Urban Scale. It is the comprehensive project to fundamentally transform Earth’s cities, technologies, and ecosystems to ensure that the planet will be capable of supporting Earth-like life. Artificiality, astronomy, and automation form the basis of that alternative planetarity.

About Benjamin Bratton

Benjamin Bratton’s work spans Philosophy, Architecture, Computer Science and Geopolitics. He is Professor of Visual Arts at University of California, San Diego. He is Program Director of The Terraforming program at the Strelka Institute. He is also a Professor of Digital Design at The European Graduate School and Visiting Professor at SCI_Arc (The Southern California Institute of Architecture) and NYU Shanghai.

He is the author of several books, including The Revenge of The Real: Politics for a Post-Pandemic World (Verso Press, 2021. 166 pages), which sees the COVID-19 pandemic as a crisis of political imagination and capacity in the West and in response argues on behalf of a positive biopolitics. It frames the pandemic as an involuntary experiment in comparative governance, one that demonstrates the failures of populism and the need for an epidemiological view of society based on sensing, modeling and collective organization. The book examines the complexities of sensing vs. “surveillance”, quarantine urbanism and platform automation, the mask wars and the ethics of the object, and the failure of philosophy to properly address the crisis. It calls for a new politics of rational and equitable infrastructures of knowledge, planning and intervention.

More information about Benjamin is available here.