“Instruments of Service” is a class of legally protected work products defined in the American Institute of Architects’ “A201-2007 General Conditions” as “representations, in any medium of expression now known or later developed, of the tangible and intangible creative work performed by the Architect.” In practice, instruments are any drawing, model, calculation or specification created for a client, copyrighted by the architect as a design “recommendation” and trafficked between intellectual, digital and real property. As research, everyday and experimental instruments are assemblages of tools and materials, allography and autography that move from Skype to ‘the street’ through theaters of peer ...

Computational Fashion is a survey of topics explored during Eyebeam’s public events on wearable technology and fashion in 2012-14. This publication features excerpts from panel discussions and presentations covering 3D printed fashion, smart textiles, energy harvesting, intellectual property, and other issues impacting designers and entrepreneurs in this emerging field.

In this first episode of the podcast, we talk to design researcher Sara Hendren, who teaches at Olin College of Engineering, about disability, critical design, and poetic creation.

How do disability culture and design practices shape contemporary disability art? In this episode of Contra*, Critical Design Lab member Cassandra Hartblay and I talk to disability dancer Alice Sheppard about her project, DESCENT, which includes choreography, spatial design, and technology design.

There is no doubt that we live in exciting times: Ours is the age of many ‘silent revolutions’ triggered by startups and research labs of big IT companies; revolutions that quietly and profoundly alter the world we live in. Another ten or five years, and self-tracking will be as normal and inevitable as having a Facebook account or a mobile phone. Our bodies, hooked to wearable devices sitting directly at or beneath the skin, will constantly transmit data to the big aggregation in the cloud. Permanent recording and automatic sharing will provide unabridged memory, both shareable and analyzable. The digitization ...

Emma Rae Norton is interested in the computer mouse and coding slowly by hand.

Following a recently published text in e-flux journal issue 98 (March 2019), Tyler Coburn joins Contributing Editor Elvia Wilk to discuss the project Ergonomic Futures. Coburn’s Ergonomic Futures asks questions about contemporary “fitness” through the lens of speculative evolution. The multi-part project includes furniture designed with Bureau V and a website of stories designed with Luke Gould and Afonso Martins. –Watch a performance delivered at e-flux in 2016 as part of Ergonomic Futures on e-flux Video & Film. –Read “Ergonomic Futures,” published in e-flux journal issue 98 (March 2019).

This conversation is the first one I recorded for Archipelago (hence the not-so-great quality of the sound, sorry!). In the first part of the discussion, Sarah and I attempt to introduce the philosophy of Gilbert Simondon through his concepts of individuation, allagmatic, milieu, the body as “always more than one.” His work is important to us as Sarah explains because it went from a metaphysics of “being” to one of “becoming,” allowing things not to have an essence, but rather to be involved in the process of their individuation. In the second part of the conversation, I ask questions to Sarah ...

Trained in the twilight of legacy media and skilled in the dark arts of the extremely online, BEN DITTO bridges communication systems and cultural logics of the 90s-00s-10s and 20s. In advance of launching his new channel, Ditto Nation, the London-based creative-director/artist/cultural-analyst speaks to NM about the physical limits of the self and the technology that defines it, platform death-tripping, ML trend consulting, and the new magick of natural language spellcasting.

Natural Magic takes as its point of departure a historical period—the mid-sixteenth century—in which the scientific method, magic, and philosophy still had processes, knowledge, and interests in common. The exhibition unfolds throughout three rooms—Space 1, the Vaults Room, and the Protocol Room—interconnected by devices that trick visitors’ senses, through which Leonor Serrano Rivas generates a cosmos governed by its own rules and logic. To use the Renaissance terminology of magia naturalis for naming inventions, these devices are “instruments of the imagination” that give rise to alternative experiences of the world by pushing time-space boundaries.

The philosophy of Gilbert Simondon has reinvigorated contemporary thinking about biological and technological beings. In this book, Jean-Hugues Barthélémy takes up Simondon’s thought and shows how life and technology are connected by a transversal theme: individuation. In the first essay, Barthélémy delivers a contemporary interpretation of Simondon’s concept of ontogenesis against the backdrop of biology and cybernetics. In the second essay, he extends his reflections to propose a non-anthropological understanding of technology, and so sets up a confrontation with the work of Martin Heidegger.

Nik calls in from lock-down in Shanghai to talk art, aesthetics and nutrition.