#except here there is no algorithm to blame so it's gard not to think it's because of my art

[homosexualcitron]

the way i should leave tumblr forever zz

[ogxref]

THE NEW NORMAL MANIFESTO / Benjamin Bratton

A strong emphasis on emerging technologies and speculative philosophy

The program itself is also an experiment → mix seminar, studio and technical workshops in an alternating sequence of modules that closely link conceptualization and prototyping, one folding into the other.

Moscow → a century or more of unmourned, unprocessed utopian regimes.

The think-tank we are hosting at Strelka takes urbanism as as medium whose messages are both determinant and up for grabs

The New Normal

TNN → several connotations:

The first is that design must map these bizarre circumstances anew if it has a hope to ever designate their futures.

From there a second connotation, working to enforce new normative claims is clear.  Design’s reaction to the new normal can’t be phrased only in terms of acceptance or resistance, but of re-determining what norms will be.

In order to make new normative claims, we need a language to do so. It may very well be the that the most valuable thing we could hope to design is a viable glossary with which to name our situations directly.

The curriculum is structured as a series of intensive modules in which students will critically engage urban futures in traditional and non-traditional ways: formal analysis, scenario development, site modeling and programming, speculative design, quantitative cultural data analysis and visualization, and the contemporary philosophy of technology, design, and aesthetics.

As our program considers what Russian urbanism may be and do, our brief takes the year 2050 as a target. But whereas, for others, that year may underwrite “design futures” (where the future is an alibi into which present problems are deferred) for us it does not. 2050 is not the future. We are designing 2050 right now, with every little and large system we use or abuse.

Longer circuits between decision and outcome should be more carefully internalized, not because it would be ideal but because it is the most practical approach. It presumes a “thick now” in which the depth and complexity of this wider moment (roughly 1850CE -2050CE) is seen more comprehensively. Cities and ecologies operate at rhythms that are both much faster and much slower than human social time. To engineer them one incremental decision at a time sets in motion a trophic cascade that can, in principle, coalesce into an emergent intelligent order, but which also lets local pathologies pile-up into landscape-scale irrationalities.

With our 2050 brief in mind, the urban is taken more as a format for design than a genre of design. Cities are media for the circulation of potentials (as well as the encapsulation of foregone conclusions) and to search that potential this means getting out of our own skins.

Among our trending trends is demeaning the real by conspiracy, fake intrigue, superstitious populism, clickbait science, causality/correlation fallacies, and motivated inference.

In the exact spot where a viable future should be, something insufferably backwards fills it in: a psychotic simulation of medieval geopolitics burning as bright as creepy clown hair. 

Notion that the segmentation of stacks may force diversification and speciation of software and hardware by hemispherical ‘Galapagos effects’ 

Synthetic Sensing:

the cuttingest-edges of urbanism are at the level of sensing and sensation, both human and machinic. Smart city scenarios are full of sensors in the service of administrative loops, but they tragically undersell the potential of machine sensing at urban scale.

the surfaces of the city are made more vital as they respond to light, touch and motion in new ways, and for the other the living inhabitants’ sensory apparatuses are infused with new layers of hot and cool stimulus.

Biosensing, 360 video, 3D-scanning, virtual reality and augmented reality, studying how these sensory systems ‘read’ the world.

Speculative Megastructures:

It is in datacenters, distribution warehousing zones, ports, crop fields and energy farms where the logistical sublime of algorithmic urbanism has reshaped the built environment perhaps most decisively.

Given their scale they surely count as megastructures, but of a different sort than the now-canonical 1960’s-era utopian models of the Metabolists, Buckminster Fuller, or Constant.

This urbanism for inanimate objects is not a speculative exercise, but now one pillar of what is and will continue be the norm.

Megastructures have played a starring role in urbanism’s own historical ‘speculative design’ avant la lettre. They have been a way to make sense of planetary scales and non-local integrations; they have extruded diagrammatic plans of utopian society into domed section; and they have been —from Exodus: Voluntary Prisoners to Biosphere 2 — a figure of totality, social or ecological or both. Their currency is traded for and against ideas of what those totalities should be, and so they are, at least in this way, models that are at once descriptive, predictive and projective. Now as the Anthropocene binds social time to geologic time, the totality of totalities becomes a yet more critical, and in no way hypothetical, geodesign brief.

interest in discontiguous megastructures as the essential platforms. The cloud urbanism that now drives core-periphery dynamics links moments of production, distribution, habitation and consumption into fantastically regular cycles.

Murmansk: we will take the think-tank north to the Arctic coast where Russia (along with Norway, Canada, and others) is building automated shipping ports in anticipation of the further melting of the polar cap and the opening of the Northern Passage. There is little that is more “new normal” than a networked archipelago of hyperborean robot cities, sending containers back and forth to one another across the top of the planet.

Accordingly, while our projects will illustrate integrative scenarios, we will also focus on micro-protocols, games and ruses, not as minor exceptions but as a primary grammar for how spatial systems work

Pattern recognition 

We are a species whose success is based in pattern-recognition but this comes at the price of false positive and negatives. Cognitive biases run deep.

Perceptual/cognitive prostheses, like the telescope and microscope, allow us to see things that we could not see before, and to see things as we could not see them before. With them we deduce and induce different, less wrong patterns in how things work, but this requires counter-intuitive and even anti-intuitive methods 

Upon querying the world, we need a summary of a summary of the answer before we can make sense of it, so make use of interpretive prosthetics like data visualization and statistics. This is, however, a “new normal” shift on which our knowledge institutions and economies are choking.  In principle and sometimes in practice, new cognitive information tools, such as formal data analysis and visualization, are important ways of finding and sorting unusual patterns.

The trick is to use quantitative methods not only for analysis (to compose descriptive models) but also as a drawing method as well (to compose predictive and projective models) and to use statistical visualization to specify rich fictive detail for our scenarios. 

Platform Aesthetics

The development and communication of speculative urban platforms will feature plan, section, elevation, and satellite scale diagrams, and also work with/against tropes of branding, POV jump cuts, paradoxical use-case narratives, and all the ‘known-unknown’ sleights-of-hand that turn audiences into users, developers, believers, and collaborators.

platform systems are not reducible to politics or markets, but have their own economics and aesthetics that allow them to work as they do. As urbanism itself variously sprints and meanders toward platform economics, those aesthetics take on more gravity.

New Urban Practices 

comfortable with counterintuitive perspectives and working across differing scales than their current circumstances may allow them.

In recent decades, design practices may have been divided into sub-disciplines (graphic, industrial, interaction, architectural design, etc.) and now they are supplanted by another distribution (robotics, ecology, biotechnology, software-augmented intelligence, etc.) I counsel applicants that the latter does not directly replace the former as some more-proper avant-garde, and so instead new urban practices should mix a few of older and the newer.

the real “deliverables” of our program are new design practices.

new hybrid practices: our programme will provide room for such practices to be incubated and prototyped. Here, however,  the connotation of “hybrid” specifies not just interdisciplinary synergy, but is more in line with forms of now normal asymmetrical battle, operating on many fronts with dissonant messages aimed at the same goal and sometimes without clear attribution of blame, credit or authorship.

The questions of what is the new normal, what it should be, and what should be resisted and never normalized are poorly served by the simplistic narratives that brand this moment

Design always takes a risk when addressing any state of exception, in that its techniques of mitigation may prematurely normalize, and so sustain, a pathology that would otherwise dissipate by its own failures. In hopes of protecting what is good, design interventions can smooth the way for what is harmful to carry-on. Sometimes the best defense is to let something destroy itself.