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Keller Easterling
Åzone Futures Market is a Guggenheim online exhibition that enables you to take a position on the future of a world increasingly shaped by emerging technologies.
New technologies are challenging our social foundations and destabilizing the ethics, practices, institutions, and worldviews that have structured our collective experience for centuries. The accelerating rate of this flood of transformations exceeds the limits of our capacity to understand the consequences and to create the lives we want to live. We need new cultural forms to help make sense of the situation.
The Guggenheim is testing a new exhibition architecture in the form of an online ...
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 shock-and-awe 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 ...
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
Architecture remains the most tangible way of constructing the social. Yet, the system we call “architecture” is not reducible to the physical, the tactile, the obvious. In the history of avant-garde architecture, immateriality and intangibility carried a promise of liberation, of escape from the heaviness of building, from completion, from gravity or reality. A new contemporary architecture would be built out of pure knowledge—drafted on paper as an idea to be shared, never bogged down by the technicalities of constructing in dimensional space, or even any spatial paradigm altogether. The history of the avant-garde can’t—as Beatriz Colomina has pointed out—be separated from its engagement with media ...
Extrastatecraft controls everyday life in the city: it’s the key to power – and resistance – in the twenty-first century.
Infrastructure is not only the underground pipes and cables controlling our cities. It also determines the hidden rules that structure the spaces all around us – free trade zones, smart cities, suburbs, and shopping malls. Extrastatecraft charts the emergent new powers controlling this space and shows how they extend beyond the reach of government.
Keller Easterling explores areas of infrastructure with the greatest impact on our world – examining everything from standards for the thinness of credit cards to the urbanism of ...
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, ...
Consider a shifte 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 ...
The dominant architectures in our culture of development consist of generic protocols for building offices, airports, houses, and highways. For Keller Easterling these organizational formats are not merely the context of design efforts — they are the design. Bridging the gap between architecture and infrastructure, Easterling views architecture as part of an ecology of interrelationships and linkages, and she treats the expression of organizational character as part of the architectural endeavor.Easterling also makes the case that these organizational formats are improvisational and responsive to circumstantial change, to mistakes, anomalies, and seemingly illogical market forces. By treating these irregularities opportunistically, she ...
Neoliberalism as a wealth redistribution imperative has made property ownership impossible or unprofitable for much of society. Whether in the form of mortgages or rent, we are consigned to living in conditions of perpetual debt.
Real Estates: Life Without Debt explores the moral, political and economic ramifications of property and ownership in neoliberal debt economies, and asks what role the architect might play in addressing widening social and spatial inequality in the built environment.
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.
Strelka Press is a digital-first publisher of new writing on architecture, design and the city. Reviving the essay as a popular form, we publish critical writing in digital and print editions.
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, ...
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