This conversation with Caren Kaplan introduces the work she has been conducting for her forthcoming book dedicated to a genealogy of aerial photography (and painting) and its militarization leading to the ‘age of the drone’ we currently experience. We begin with the development of the balloon, the progressive learning necessary to understand this new point of view on the world and the simultaneous success of panorama paintings. We then evoke the creation of the British Board of Ordinance and its survey of Scotland as part of the counter-insurrectionist effort to control the terrain against the Jacobites. We conclude the discussion in ...

Air Raid Precautions, Handbook No.11 1939/2014   The majority of errors in the field of aesthetics spring from the eighteenth century’s false premise in the field of ethics. – Charles Baudelaire Camouflage of Large Installations is a rare World War II handbook created by the British Government as a guide for factory owners to implement the then new theories of camouflage in order to protect industrial assets.  The handbook is composed of three sections: instructional, advertising by corporations supplying camouflage services and full-page colour swatches.  The full-page colour swatches are particularly beautiful and when viewed aesthetically are interesting forerunners to the history of monochromes, specifically Yves Klein’s ...

Today, communication unfolds merely between two or more conscious entities but often includes an invisible third party. Inspired by this drastic shift, this volume uncovers new meanings of what it means “to communicate.”

‘Today we are facing extreme and most dangerous developments in the thought of security. In the course of a gradual neutralisation of politics and the progressive surrender of traditional tasks of the state, security imposes itself as the basic principle of state activity. What used to be one among several decisive measures of public administration until the first half of the twentieth century, now becomes the sole criterion of political legitimation. The thought of security entails an essential risk. A state which has security as its sole task and source of legitimacy is a fragile organism; it can always be ...

DRONE is the first issue to be published from the Unmanned, Architecture and Security Series research project and publication series. Drones are unmanned vehicles [UAV]. They are either remotely controlled or, increasingly, autonomously following a pre-programmed mission. Initially, they were developed for use in conflict situations, but the technology also lends itself to a variety of civic purposes, from urban surveillance to monitoring agricultural fields and poaching. UAVs can transport objects, from bombs to books and pizza boxes. In conflict situations they can be used for targeting and killing individuals, but also for providing medical assistance. Drones are cheap to produce and have ...

Drones – unmanned aerial vehicles – are becoming ubiquitous, yet remain almost invisible. This is a guide to drawing them.

The first issue of the journal was dedicated to repositioning art in the landscape of reason. This issue is focused on the fabric of reason itself, and to the ways in which it is currently altered by the emergence of artificial intelligence. While the capacities of thought are being externalized in machines that increasingly mirror human intelligence, the question of the technical artifactuality of mind and its political ramifications becomes particularly pressing. For us, far from being limited to the computational instantiation of intelligence, understanding the politics of these developments in artificialintelligence requires acknowledging that mind has always been artifactual. Site 1: Logic Gate, the Politics ...

Berlin-based designer Cade, a specialist in weaponized design, discusses the collateral (human) damage platforms cause as they scale; questions big tech’s G-rated ideation of the average subject; considers the functionality of personal mobile devices within precarious communities, and remarks on the actual inefficiency of the cloud.

Feat. theorist and philosopher BENJAMIN H. BRATTON, this episode offers a high-gear, macroscopic mapping of Earth and its systems circa 2019 — incl. how notions of “the artificial” and “intelligence” differ across cultures; hemispheric zones of citizenship and exclusion in the age of AR; and a view of human consciousness as a geological phenomenon, a layer through which Earth’s planetary system is coming to know itself. Plus much, much more. Bratton, whose work spans philosophy, art, design, and computer science, is currently preparing (alongside 5 other books) a much anticipated follow up to his 2016 volume The Stack: On Software ...

Algorithmic identity politics reinstate old forms of social segregation—in a digital world, identity politics is pattern discrimination. It is by recognizing patterns in input data that Artificial Intelligence algorithms create bias and practice racial exclusions thereby inscribing power relations into media. How can we filter information out of data without reinserting racist, sexist, and classist beliefs?

Realeyes is a commercial platform that performs real-time measurement of emotional responses to video stimuli through facial recognition AI modeling. Using (with consent, for now) the intake of webcam feeds, the platform records and analyzes the shape of facial responses while a subject watches a video, telling advertisers and marketers how to more effectively reach a consumer’s core sense of decision-making. Founded at Oxford University in 2007, Realeyes shares some traits with the now-famous Cambridge Analytica company, deriving actionable and expensive) data from the aggregated emotional reactions of thousands of users. This stunningly benign-seeming white paper lays out the psychological ...

Ruben Pater, working under the name Untold Stories, describes his work as creating “visual narratives about geopolitical issues” and creating “new relations between journalism and design”. He most recently is the author of the book, The Politics of Design, where Pater explores the cultural and political context of the typography, colors, photography, symbols, and information graphics that we use every day. In this conversation, I talk with Ruben about the book and the relationship between design and journalism, showcasing his process as the artifact, the importance of studying design outside of the traditional Western canon, and why he still calls himself ...