Podcast appearances and mentions of Benjamin H Bratton

What kind of cultural theory would be adequate for the age of climate disturbances, technological shifts, and large-scale infrastructures? In this episode, Jussi Parikka, a media theorist and author of 'Geology of Media', talks about the materiality of media, slow environmental violence, and the way to apply his theory to The Terraforming. Design research program The Terraforming is a three-year (2020–2022) initiative of the Strelka Institute, directed by Benjamin H. Bratton. Each program cycle runs for 5 months and brings together a group of 30 interdisciplinary researchers in Moscow. Application period for the spring of 2021 is open till November 10, for more information visit our website: https://theterraforming.strelka.com

While we cannot imagine our lives without the internet, it is hard to think of it with the same optimism with which it was perceived in the late 1990s. Over the past 30 years we have witnessed the internet’s coming of age from a platform used for connectivity, instant communication, and unrestricted access to information to a space of false information, data miners, targeted advertising, and open surveillance. In Mechanisms of a Surveillance State, a group of artists and thinkers whose work investigates the mechanisms of surveillance and technology discuss the current state of the internet and its future.   With: Benjamin H. Bratton, professor of visual arts and director, Center for Design and Geopolitics, University of California, San Diego Carmen Weisskopf, artist, !Mediengruppe Bitnik, Berlin/Zurich Trevor Paglen, artist, Berlin Moderated by Doreen Mende, curator and theorist, associate professor and head of CCC Research-Based Master Program, HEAD Geneva, and co-director, Harun Farocki Institut, Berlin

Hosted by Julieta Aranda, the podcasts focus on some of today’s most important issues, intersecting art, politics, environmental action, and gender disparity. The podcasts bring together the voices of highly respected experts and thinkers such as Benjamin H. Bratton, Coco Fusco, Stefanie Hessler, the Otolith Group, Otobong Nkanga, Trevor Paglen, and Lucia Pietroiusti, among many others, who jointly reflect on how art addresses issues including how to tackle and reduce the emission of carbon footprint, the challenges of being an artist and a mother, the persistence of surveillance states, and the rise of new nationalisms. 

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 & Sovereignty. For more: http://www.bratton.info/ https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/stack WARNING: EXOGENOUS STIMULANTS MAY BE NECESSARY FOR ABSORBING DISCUSSION AT FULL RESOLUTION.