Quote Unquote Design

Join us for a three-part lecture series with writer, philosopher and design theorist Benjamin H. Bratton exploring the relationship between artificial intelligence and urbanism.

These events are organised and hosted by Claudia Pasquero and Roberto Bottazzi as part of the B-Pro Prospective Lecture Series.

Alphaville and the city layer: sensing, sensibility and exceptions

6.30-8.00pm, 2 May 2018

UCL at Here East, Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, London, E15 2GW

This lecture will consider the role of artificial intelligence (AI) and its relationship with the urban landscape. Better models of what AI is are needed to enable better models of what AI should do. Instead of AI in a black box or a petri dish, cut off from the world, it should be considered at an urban scale: cacophonous orchestras of automation amalgamated in uneven landscapes, and capable of unexpected creativity and cruelty.

The conversation continues at Goldsmiths University of London on 3 May and ICA on 4 May.

The deep: learning, time, state, ecology

6.30-8.00pm, 3 May 2018

Room LG.02, Professor Stuart Hall Building, Department of Art and Visual Cultures, Goldsmiths University of London, New Cross, SE14 6NW

In this lecture and discussion, writer Benjamin H. Bratton will consider the role and limits of aesthetics in modeling complex systems operating at scales that confound normal human intuition. Such models may include limited and conditional feats of cognitive, technical, formal, figurative and gestural abstraction. 

"The whole age of the computer has made it where nobody knows exactly what’s going on" 

6.30-8.00pm, 4 May 2018

Cinema 1, ICA 

In this talk, writer Benjamin H. Bratton will discuss planetary computation in relation to platform economics. This will include public data and private data versus data privacy and data publicness, the futile complicity of overtly utopian and dystopian narratives, multipolar hemispherical stacks, and how Universal Basic Income may be used to curtail the agency of non-citizens.

Biography

Benjamin H. Bratton is a writer whose work spans philosophy, design and computer science. He is Professor of Visual Arts at the University of California, San Diego. In his book, The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty (MIT Press, 2016), Bratton outlines a new theory for the age of global computation and algorithmic governance.

His current research project, Theory and Design in the Age of Machine Intelligence, is on the unexpected and uncomfortable design challenges posed by AI in various guises: from machine vision to synthetic cognition and sensation, and the macro-economics of robotics to everyday geo-engineering. 

Find out more 

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