Space is a technology. Buildings and the cities they inhabit have become infrastructural – mobile, monetized networks. For the world’s power players, infrastructure space is a secret weapon, and the rest of us are only just beginning to realize. If Victor Hugo came back to give a TED talk, he might assert that architecture, which he once claimed had been killed by the book, is reincarnate as something more powerful still – as information itself. If this space is a secret weapon, says Keller Easterling, it is a secret best kept from those trained to make space – architects. Meanwhile, ...

Equal parts Borges, Burroughs, Baudrillard, and Black Ops, Dispute Plan to Prevent Future Luxury Constitution charts a treacherous landscape filled with paranoid master plans, failed schemes, and dubious histories. Benjamin H. Bratton’s kaleidoscopic theory-fiction links the utopian fantasies of political violence with the equally utopian programs of security and control. Both rely on all manner of doubles, models, gimmicks, ruses, prototypes, and shockandawe campaigns to realize their propagandas of the deed, threat, and image. Blurring reality and delusion, they collaborate on a literally psychotic politics of architecture. The cast of characters in this ensemble drama of righteous desperation and tactical trickery shuttle ...

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, a “global” art world began to form. Sure, there were already a number of world’s fairs and established international biennials, but this would be different. From the 1990s onward, national boundaries would dissolve, centers and peripheries would level out, and the internet would host worldwide cultural exchange. In many ways this really did happen, but some other things also happened. As people and ideas began to move across borders, money did too. Faced with an unmanageable planetary scale, capital became a more efficient regulator of flows than laws or nations. Suddenly, capital rose ...

As we continue to reflect upon the chain of political upheavals of 2011, it may be interesting to consider a particular shift in the status of information technology, now that it has been deployed as such a powerful force in facilitating the rise of a new popular voice… Editorial Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Anton Vidokle An Internet of Things Keller Easterling Notes on the Inorganic, Part I: Accelerations Gean Moreno After OWS: Social Practice Art, Abstraction, and the Limits of the Social Gregory Sholette General Performance Sven Lütticken The Sound of Breaking Glass, Part II: Agonism and the Taming of Dissent Grant Kester

Edited together with Nikolaus Hirsch, this first part of a special double issue of e-flux journal focusing on architecture invites a number of the field’s most audacious and adventurous thinkers to consider how these invisible and intangible forces are rebuilding cities and reformatting space over and above the role that architecture once served. They are not only reducible to data streams and technocratic information pathways, but also convert ethical questions of whose hands do the actual work of building into material expressions of labor markets, economic flows, and colonial memory. They include the passage from the formal domain of building ...

The first issue of this journal, as well as Glass Bead’s project at large, is directed towards rethinking art as a mode of rational thought. It starts from the assumption that any claim concerning the efficacy of art—its capacity, beyond either its representational function or its affectivity, to make changes in the way we think of the world and act on it—first demands a renewed understanding of reason itself. The site on which this issue focuses is Castalia, the fictional province imagined by Hermann Hesse in The Glass Bead Game (1943). Set in Central Europe some five hundred years in the future, ...

Architect and writer KELLER EASTERLING joins New Models to speak about her recent book “Medium Design: Knowing How to Work on the World” (Verso, 2021), which invites us to expand our thinking about infrastructure from one of discrete things to the messy, polyvalent relations and conditions they share. Along the way we touch on the potentials of Web3 and ramifications of small changes at scale. / This conversation is presented as part of Stolbun Institute’s inaugural season, “Shadowlands.”

The internet does not exist. Maybe it did exist only a short time ago, but now it only remains as a blur, a cloud, a friend, a deadline, a redirect, or a 404. If it ever existed, we couldn’t see it. Because it has no shape. It has no face, just this name that describes everything and nothing at the same time. Yet we are still trying to climb onboard, to get inside, to be part of the network, to get in on the language game, to show up on searches, to appear to exist. But we will never get ...

Consider a shifted focus from architectural objects and silhouettes to the matrix in which these objects are suspended. Look at the places where we live: the parking places, skyscrapers, turning radii, garages, street lights, driveways, airport lounges, highway exits, big boxes, strip malls, shopping malls, small boxes, free zones, casinos, retail, fast food restaurants, hotels, cash machines, tract housing, container ports, industrial parks, call centers, golf courses, suburbs, of ce buildings, business parks, resorts. The retinal afterglow is of a soupy matrix of details and repeatable formulas that make most of the space in the world whether—what we might call matrix ...

Privileging declarations, right answers, proofs, and universals, culture is often banging away with the same blunt tools that are completely inadequate to address contemporary chemistries of power. On the flip side, medium design offers no dramatic manifestos where things are new or right. Instead it only rehearses a habit of mind that has been eclipsed. Even at a moment of digital ubiquity, medium design treats space as an information system and a broad, inclusive mixing chamber for many social, political, and technical networks. And just as it inverts the typical focus on the object over the field, it may also ...

Keller Easterling is an architect, writer, and professor at Yale University. Her most recent book, Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space examines global infrastructure networks as a medium of polity, and she’s written about architecture, design, and building for various publications. In this conversation, Keller and I talk about studying theater, how she ended up in architecture and her desire to move away from it, and the role of criticism in the discourse.