Epilogue: Beyond Smartness
in Data Power in Action, Urban Data Politics in Times of Crisis, Ayona Datta and Ola Söderstrom, editors (Bristol: Bristol University Press Dec. 21, 2023
How did we come to understand big data as political solution to urban issues of race, climate, economy, and politics? And how do we move beyond this state that only encourages dispossession, inequity, violence, and the erosion of the public sphere…
Financializing Intelligence: On the Integration of Machines and Markets
E-flux Architecture, Special Issue On Models, Nick Axel, et.al. eds. March (2023).
In 1986, Fischer Black, one of the founders of contemporary finance, made a rather surprising announcement-- bad data, incomplete information, wrong decisions, excess data, and fake news, all make arbitrage possible. In the famous article “Noise Trading,” Black posited that we trade and profit from misinformation and information overload.
Thus opens the story of how artificial intelligence and derivative markets are intimately related…
Surplus Data
w/ Patrick Jagoda, Jeffrey Kirkland, and Leif Weatherby, Critical Inquiry, Volume 48, Number 2, Winter (2022): 1-9.
While dominant business models continue to espouse the value of more data, is it possible this paradigm has now become one of surplus data? And to what effects?
Resilient Futures
Perspecta: The Yale Architecture Journal, Issue 55, January (2023): 101-113.
Today, we appear to be in an era beset by catastrophic events. Pandemics, anti-democratic insurrections, wars, climate change. If there is a unique feature, however, to this barrage of catastrophic events, it is their seeming banality and ubiquity. These ongoing events appear to evade historical demarcation as events either revolutionary or catastrophic. How did we come to reimagine systems from biology to brains to economies to political institutions as volatile, unstable, and constantly changing…This article examines the linked histories of neo-liberal economic thought, financialization, and ecology in the 1970’s and 1980’s.
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Planetary Intelligence
book chapter in Jonathan Roberge and Michael Castelle (Eds): The Cultural Life of Machine Learning, London: Palgrave (2021)
In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, we assume that artificially intelligent tracking systems will guide public health, new social media and video conferencing technologies will support our economy and personal lives, and automated logistical systems will provide goods and services. This phenomena where the continuation of life is imagined as contingent on the on-going penetration of computation into the environment marks a new form of governmentality. This article is a speculative genealogy of how this new condition, that I label the “smartness mandate”, emerged. Using a series of case studies, the event horizon telescope, the lithium fields of the Atacama desert, and new centers for applied mathematics, I trace a historical reformulation of histories of extraction, knowledge production and energy to begin outlining how we have come to believe in ubiquitous computing and Artificial Intelligence are central to human survival.
Scenes from a Reclamation
with Tekla Aslanishvili, E-Flux Architecture, Special Issue New Silk Roads, February (2020).
The act of dredging, or “reclaiming” land serves as a metaphor, practice, and image to think through our logistical present. As a term, it signifies a logic that defines an emerging world order. As an engineering practice, it is a term that defines the grafting of land, usually from the sea. Among the most common reasons for this activity in our present is the reconstruction of territory lost to sea level rise, the creation of structures for geo-engineering, the construction of ports, real estate speculation, the strategic and military production of new territories, and the creation of new spaces for settlement in the face of rapid urbanization and demographic change. The term thus unifies climatic transformation, financialization, and post-Fordist political economies. As a political and historical concept, however, reclamation is more complex, and can be about many things ranging from returning or reasserting territorial rights or sovereignty to taking back or re-appropriating concepts, language, and identity. In Anaklia, Georgia reclamation of the distant past has become the grounds for a speculative future, one that escapes all resource, material, and monetary limits. This article looks at the new geopolitics of reclamation and smart cities in the landscapes of the former Soviet Union.
The Planetary Test
Zeitschrift für Medien and Kulturforschung, Vol 10, October 1 (2019).
In 1943, in the midst of the war, the famous architect Richard Neutra was commissioned by the government of Puerto Rico to build hospitals and schools. In response, he produced a number of prototypes and processes investigating different ways to ventilate and climate control buildings in the sub-tropical environment of the island. His prime concern was to improve social conditions with limited capital outlay through attention to the management of climate. Neutra famously labeled his work in Puerto Rico a “Planetary Test”. My argument is this form of demoing and testing has now become the central vision in design, planning, and engineering for managing human (and planetary) life in an age of real and imagined terran-scale disasters.
Golden Futures
Limn, Issue 10, January (2019): 107-114 .
In the Northern Quebec region of Abitibi lies the Malartic gold mine, the largest open-pit gold mine in Canada. Standing at the edge of this 4km-wide hole in the earth, one can envision what it might mean to inhabit another planet… This article examines the future of extraction, technology, big data, and maybe life on the Canadian Shield.
Demoing unto Death: Smart Cities, Environment, and Preemptive Hope
with Gokce Günel, Fibreculture , August (2017).
Today, growing concerns with climate change, energy scarcity, security, and economic collapse have turned the focus of urban planners, investors, and governments towards infrastructure as a site of value production and potential salvation from a world consistently defined by catastrophes and crisis. This paper will interrogate the different forms of futurity and life that are currently emerging from this complex contemporary relationship between technology and design by engaging with two contemporary case studies of greenfield: 'smart' and 'green' developments in South Korea and Masdar in Abu Dhabi. In doing so, the paper will ask how these contemporary practices in ubiquitous computing and green technology are shaping large scale infrastructures and our imaginaries of the future of urban life.
Cybernetic Rationality
Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory, Vol. 15, No. 2, (2014): 1–16.
This article interrogates the relationship between temporality, memory, and reason in cybernetic models of mind to excavate a historical shift in knowledge and governmentality. Cyberneticians reformulated ideas of reason to reimagine both minds and machines as logical circuits; in doing so, early pioneers in neural nets and computing such as Warren McCulloch, Walter Pitts, and John von Neumann also created the epistemological conditions that underpin contemporary concerns with data visualization, big data, and ubiquitous computing.
Test Bed Urbanism
Primary Author Orit Halpern with Jesse LeCavalier, Nerea Calvillo, and Wolfgang Pietsch, Public Culture, special issue on the Future of the City, Volume 25, Number 2, Spring (2013).
This essay interrogates the new forms of experimentation with urban territory emerging as a result of ubiquitous computing infrastructures. We label these protocols “test-bed urbanism.” Smart, sentient, stupid, and speculative all at once, these new methods for spatial development are changing the form, function, economy, and administration of urban life.
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Schizophrenic Techniques: Cybernetics, the Human Sciences, and the Double Bind
Scholar and Feminist Journal On-Line , Special Issue on Iterations of Social Difference, Issue 10.3, Summer (2012).
This article examines a history of Gregory Bateson’s work on the double bind stemming from his ethnographic photographic work in Bali during the 1930’s and stretching to his engagement with porpoises and animal behavior, family interaction, and cybernetics. I argue that through this genealogy we can trace how colonial practices folded into cybernetics after the war. I trace how structural issues of coloniality, race, and violence were transformed into technologies for therapy and machines… opening and foreclosing different possibilities for life and encounter between human and more than human beings.
Dreams for Our Perceptual Present: Archives, Interfaces, and Networks in Cybernetics
Configurations, 13:2, (2007): 283-320
In his memoir Ex-Prodigy, the MIT professor and cybernetics re-searcher Norbert Wiener once wrote: “I longed to be a naturalist as other boys longed to be policemen and locomotive engineers. I was only dimly aware of the way in which the age of the naturalist and explorer was running out, leaving the mere tasks of gleaning to the next generation.” Developing this theme, he would later write: “even in zoology and botany, it was diagrams of complicated structures and the problems of growth and organization which excited my interest fully as much as tales of adventure and discovery.” In a series of popular books and technical manifestos, Wiener would go on to interrogate this “problem” that complexity posed. Written in a reflective moment after World War II, his comments sought to mark the passing of one age to another—the end of “exploration,” and the emergence of another type of “organization.”
This was no small claim… This article develops an account of cybernetic reorganization of archiving and temporality that laid the basis for contemporary forms of attention, perception, and memory.
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