[courses]

The Image of Program: Interfaces, Networks, Territories, UCSD

[02.2009]

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The Image of Program: Interfaces, Networks, Territories
A Graduate Seminar on the Aesthetics of Computation, Society and Globalization
Benjamin H. Bratton U.C. San Diego, Dept. of Visual Arts Spring 2009 Syllabus instructor email: benjaminbratton@gmail.com


Computation on a planetary scale effects, and perhaps even determines, the architectures of social, cultural, political, urban and economic systems. Through the convergence, divergence and replication of media, technologies, and processes of production, we see new forms emerging from the bits and pieces of older institutions.

What are these new forms, and how can they be deliberately designed? Are these processes just beginning or are they already over?

In this seminar, we will develop theoretical perspectives and projects that analyze globalization as a function of the computational systems that link people, information, objects and spaces into unfamiliar configurations. Interfaces are any point of contact between two complex systems, digital or physical, that govern the exchange between those systems. Networks are the tangible or conceptual structures that emerge through the integration of specific interfaces. Territories are geographic positions, far-flung or close-at-hand, that provide location and structure for networks.

Computational programs, architectural programs, and political program share interdependent constitutions and horizons. What kind of image projects or is projected by these transitive forms? Do the new isomorphic regularities of globalization, in their entropic, sludge-like churn, suggest an unlikely new form of mechanical solidarity, a logistical solidarity? If so, is that solidarity desirable, defendable or even designable? In other words, in this age after ?the age of the world picture,? what is the image of the world? And, more importantly, is the world itself at odds with this image, under attack by this image even? Where does that position art, affect, territorialization, and vision itself?

This seminar examines how images become programs (all three kinds) and how programs become images. We look at what it means to design or designate the becoming of the world, and what the role of subtractive and transitive strategies (removal, elision, opacity, remoteness, relay, miniaturization, compression, expansion) may have in this.

We will focus on a particular type of image, the interfacial image, as an embodied and embodiable system of formation and exchange. Toward this, and against disembodied or purely informational theories of the virtual, we?ll seek a image of proprioceptive spatial practice, one that augments and grounds perceptual and interpretive theories of semiotic differentiation and reproduction. The social figure of the interface, even and especially in a software society, is activated by a body?s capacity to internally map its habitual momentum, to express its spatial practices in the image of those embodiments, and to externalize and artifactualize them. Through image instrument becomes language, and through instrument image becomes territory.

In light of all this, the seminar positions the professional and unprofessional practices of ?design? (designation) as a model of for social analysis of the particular and for cultural purpose in general; a model based on the production, reproduction, programming, transmission, disruption and evasion of programmatic imperatives and projections.

The seminar will be of strong relevance to those with artistic or theoretical interest in: pervasive/ubiquitous computing, architecture and urbanism, design theory, information and network theory, interface design, complex systems, post-governmental politics, globalization and culture.

Course Readings are available at:
http://www.amazon.com/Interfaces-Networks-Territories-Seminar-Readings/lm/
R3D4QMDB88YYAQ/ref=cm_lm_byauthor_title_full
though obviously you are encouraged to acquire these through any appropriate method.



Week 1: The Image of Program, overview

Andreas Gursky, Centre Georges Pompidou
This acceleration of the computational intensity of each node in the network, and of the network?s circulatory capacity as a whole allows for a radicalization of other economies of mobility. However, more mobility also means less contiguity of interfaces, less visibility of the assemblage line, less visible conditions of program, and an increased reliance on designed diagrammatic narratives about those disembedded chains of association, production and consumption.

No Readings:
Introductions, Syllabus, course overview



Week 2: A Particular History: a Bauhaus for the Singularity?

Control Data Systems, `160
But where the thing is neither for nor in itself, but a relay to the worlds both from which assembled and toward which it connects, toward which the thing itself becomes-interfacial. The interfaciality of the thing is its capacity to mediate the forces that channel its temporary objectivity. A word is a word, but a word on a button connected to an information network is an interface to a sequence of events figuratively related to the meaning of the word itself. A line is a line, but a line in the sand is the thick membrane between one juridical space and another, and a mechanism for the translation of their terms and conditions. The interfaciality of the thing is itself not a unique feature of our Modernity or of Industrialization, but it plays now a more structuring role in the elaboration of nearness and remoteness. It works in the parallel contingencies of object enchantment -iconicity, remote agency, machinic intelligence- and of object disenchantment -procedure, recombinant diagrammatics, and a comprehensive technologiztion-- helping to couch one within the other.

Readings:
Friedrich Kittler, ?History of Communications Media?
Martin Heidegger, ?The Thing,? ?The Question Concerning Technology?
Cornelia Vismann and Markus Krajewski, ?Computer Juridisms?(handout)
Karl Chu, ?Metaphysics of Genetic Architecture and Computation? (handout)

Recommended Readings
Vernor Vinge, Rainbow?s End
Douglas Engelbart, demonstration video and essay
Friedrich Kittler, ?There is No Software?
Lewis Mumford, ?Technical Syncretism and Organic Ideology? (handout)
Norbert Weiner, ?Men, Machines and the World About? (handout)
Felix Guattari, ?Machinic Heterogenesis? (handout)
Sanford Kwinter, ?Architectures and the Technologies of Life?
Louis Armand, ?Language and the Cybernetic Mind? (handout)
Please Wikipedia/ Google: Wolfram and automata, the Singularity, Kurzweil, OOP and Alan Kay.
View Online: Please watch: Dangerous Knowledge, pt.4 on Turing and the Enigma machine (many other Turing-related videos online, please watch several)
See www.corememoryproject.com



Week 3: Interfaces, Figures of Conjunction, Is All Design Interface Design?

Jacques Tati, Playtime
Program is then understood not only as the reproduction of some structural imperative into the field at hand, but also a language of innovation, mutation and productive perversion. However, the condition of design, the very possibility of programmatic projection and of forming an artifactual field of interfaces through which social cultures would navigate the future, is never in fact decidable by design itself. The world never employs urban architecture, computational architecture or political architecture as the designer?s program would intend. One person?s weak interface is another?s strong interface. But the projection of program, the casting it into the world, is a gesture precisely toward the productivity of such an accident; the unplannable but necessarily programmed assumption of risk. This is the social form and content of the interface, and of a politics of the transitive polis.

Readings:
John Rajchman, ?Constructions?
Bruno Latour, ?A Cautious Promethia? On Peter Sloterdijk?
Bruno Latour, ?A Collection of Humans and Non-Humans?
Mattew Fuller, ?Interface? definition from Software Studies
Adam Greenfield and Mark Shepard, Urban Computation and its Discontents http://www.lulu.com/content/1554599

Recommended Readings:
Niels Albertson and B?lent Diken, ?Society With/Out Organs?
Paul Dourish, Where the Action Is: Foundations of Embodied Interaction
Adam Greenfield, Everyware: the Dawning Age of Ubiquitious Computing
Julian Bleecker, ?Manifesto for Networked Objects? http://www.nearfuturelaboratory.com/files/WhyThingsMatter.pdf.
Screening: Manufactured Landscapes.




Week 4: The Interfacial Economy, the Image-Instrument of Relationality


Moscow Subway Map
the interface conditions an aesthetic of logistics, a necessary image-instrumentality not on top of social formation but substantive of it. It suggest as well something like a logistical solidarity, and its narrowly threaded and differentiated division of labor, and a microdivisibility of the object as sourced assemblage as one condition of formation, of what connects and disconnects, what makes the nearness of assemblage possible, and the structuring that it gives and which gives it: interfaces. As media this is not only a convergence culture, but is predicated on this continued radicalization of material divergence of technologies, techniques, formal and informal labor.

Readings:
John Thackara, In the Bubble: Designing in a Complex World
Benjamin H. Bratton, ?iPhone City?
Anthony Dunne, Herztian Tales

Recommended Readings
Bill Moggeridge et al., Interaction Design
William J. Mitchell, ME++: the Cyborg Self and the Networked City
Miles Kemp and Mike Fox, Interactive Architecture

Screenings:
Timecode



Week 5: Objective and Informational Networks


In addition to its work as a complex of networks --variously invisible or hypervisible, anonymous or over-identified, embedded or ephemeral?partitions, and protocols that form a emergent infrastructure of global flux and flow, logistics is also a rhetorical and stylistic system of affect. Logistics draws the unlikely arcs of things from here to there and from there to here, but can do so only to the extent that it successfully performs as a narrative aesthetic (less an aesthetic of logistics, than logistics as aesthetic) The tracing of ideally configured routes of flux produces many complex images of movement and connection. Such pictures of logistical flux (architectural, organizational, cinematic pictures) can take on an effective life of their own, and their relative grace and beauty in turn elaborates a aesthetics of logistics of the multiple cultural economies that they mediate.

Readings:
Mark Wigley, ?Network Fever?
Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker, The Exploit: a Theory of Networks
Bruce Sterling, Shaping Things
Bruno Latour, Nicholas Gane, ?Bruno Latour: the Social as Association (interview)?

Recommended Readings:
Duncan Watts, Six Degrees: the Science of a Connected Age
Manuel Castells, ?The Space of Flows,?

Screenings:
Two or Three Things I Know About Her.
The Way Things Go
shapes of the invisible




Week 6: Biopolitical Networks

Bird Flu
The question of how architecture becomes animal is entwined, especially today, with how animality (and in fact, animals) become architectural.

What Agamben calls the anthropological machine constructs a contingent boundary between human-animal and non-human animal, and a definition of politics in the image of what sits on the ?human? side of that line.1 Animal is a kind of ?medium? between human and thing: I mean both the position that is transitional or in-between humans and things, and also animals as media for humans to act on things, and things to act on humans.

The human body (and its image) is by tradition, a first architecture: a dwelling that precedes the worldly habitat. From Vitrivius to Virilio, an architecture has looks toward the specific humanity of the body for its telos. its image of a unified singularity, and a continuous historicity. The condition of embodiment and its material poetics of scale, temperature, solidity and pliability, reproducibility and singularity has located the horizon of design form.

But the genomic animal, sliced into component sub-variables and statistical predispositions, are imaged now as genomic territories, as mobile cities of genetic expression. Several and incompatible projects contribute to the historicizing and unknotting of the foundational distinctions between humanity and animality. Human body and the human species ?in relation to other animals and other objects- is deterritorialized as is made into a kind of bare life or open territory available to design.

Readings:
Scott Lash, ?Life? ?Vitalism? ?Biopolitics? from TCS edition.
Roberto Esposito, Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy, excerpt
Hardt and Negri, Multitude excerpt.
Benjamin Bratton and Natalie Jeremijenko, ?Suspicious Images and Latent Interfaces?

Recommended Readings:
Eugene Thacker, Global Genome excerpt
Paul N. Edwards, ?Meteorology as Infrastructural Globalism?
Manuel DeLanda: Language from 1000 years
Aihwa Ong, Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Soverienty
Eugene Thacker, Biomedia

Watch: Children of Men, + commentary. by Zizek, Klein, Sassen, et al.



Week 7: Territorialization and Globalization

US-Mexico Border
Earth/Land (terre)
1. = THE body without organs, the virtual plane of consistency upon which strata are imposed.
2. part of the earth-territory system of romanticism, the becoming intensive of the strata, hence the gathering point, outside of all territories, of all self-ordering forces, or forces of the earth, for intensive territorial assemblages (the virtual seen from the point of view of territorializing machinic assemblages) =MAP.
3. The NEW EArth, the nouvelle terre, the becoming virtual of intensive material, that is the correlate of absolute deterritorialization, (the leaving of all intensive territorial assemblages to attain the plane of consistency) (a return to the One?) tapping cosmic forces (the virtual seen from the point of view of the abstract machines composing it, not the machinic assemblages that actualize a selection of singularities); hence new potentials for creation....

Readings:
Deleuze and Guattari, from A Thousand Plateaus: ?Rhizome? ?The Smooth and the Striated? ?Nomadology, or the War Machine?
Deleuze, ?Postscript on Societies of Control?
Arjun Appadurai, ?Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy?
Rem Koolhaas, ?Junkspace?
Benjamin H. Bratton, ?the Logisitics of Habitable Circulation?

Recommended:
Paul Virilio, Speed and Politics: An Essay on Dromology
David Singh Grewal, Network Power: The Social Dynamics of Globalization
Keller Easterling, Enduring Innocence: Architecture in the Age of Globalization
Fundamentalisms of the New Order, Brandt, Larsen, Massera, et al., ed.
Zygmut Bauman, ?Liquid Sociality: interview?
Saskia Sassen, Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medeval to Global Assemblages, 2006.
Globalization Arjun Appadurai, ed.

Screenings:
Notebook on Cities and Clothes and Tokyo-Ga, Wenders
Code 46,
London, Patrick Keller



Week 8: Territory and Plurality

Hemispherical perspective
The second thing that I think is characteristic about this whole area of knowledge that makes it suitable for investigation and interpretation by diverse, active participants is that ecology is inherently complex. Environmental systems are by definition multi-parametered, unwieldy, uncontrolled and contingent. Partially because of this, the science of urban ecology and urban systems has stayed in these little ecology departments and has never been a big science. The previous tools of scientific investigation have not been able to take on these kinds of questions. In a way it?s too big and too social and too specific. The third thing is that we have to do something about them. There is a popular urgency to re-imagine our relationship to natural systems. This is not about reading the great books for your intellectual edification, this is a situation where the urban systems we have created are failing and the global climate is changing, and so what are we going to do? It is critical to have access to the kind of knowledge around complex adaptive environmental systems and socio-economic systems if there is going to be a sufficiently effective change. These three aspects make it suitable and in fact urgent that environmental issues are investigated by a diverse citizenry, particularly because not in spite of the fact that it does not fit into a clear scientific or academic discipline.

Nor does it fit in a clear political geography. It is not clear at what scale political action can be best motivated to enact this kind of change. Let's imagine a situation where the citizen-scientist tracing and modeling localized events , thereby coming into a more reflexive relationship with how those localized events are linked to non-local events, and is able to make claims for them that are confident and informed, and shared and communitarian. How does it scale? What and where is the institutionalization necessary for the sufficiently effective change? Is there an emergent political geography that is as big as the issue, that is regional, planetary? Or as some would argue, is such thinking exactly the wrong path to go down, and that this needs to remain very tactical and liquid, resolutely unglobal? For your when and where does institutionalization take place? When does the insight and participation become a new kind of governance? Or Economy? Or Supply-chain? Can it scale, or is it a micropolitics only? Can we design how it scales, or is that impulse also exactly the problem?

I am ambivalent about this, and even about how I?ve framed the problem. It is a truism (or clich?) on both the political left and right that a network topology represents the future of political formation, displacing Enlightenment-era centralized models. But even in assuming this, it is a parable, not a program.

Readings:
Manuel De Landa, ?Aassemblages Against Totalities?
Eyal Weizman, ?The Politics of Verticality?
Melinda Cooper, ?Orientalism in the Mirror:The Sexual Politics of Anti-Westernism?
Fredric Jameson, The Geopolitical Aesthetic, excerpt

Recommended Readings:
Chantal Mouffe, On the Political, excerpt
Irit Rogoff, Terra Infirma
Bruno Latour and Albena Yaneva , ?Give Me a Gun and I Will Make All Buildings Move?

Screenings:
Battle of Algiers
Sans Soleil.
Iran: A cinematographic revolution





Week 9: Configuration not Representation, or the Becoming-World

Line
But so much hybridization is signal that the terms at work (the purification) is sort of broken. So if design is a kind of putting the world in order, how to classify things if we think the world through connections and not contiguous organic essences?

As ever, these integrations and disintegrations point designers toward even more bodies of    experimentation, that leave us without adequate ?expert systems? to arbitrate them, or their ethics, and without certain capacity to adjudicate in advance our own risky, inevitable involvements as both producers and consumers, of both each other and our habitat; of architecture as part of the food supply, and food as part of the architecture supply.

That is, what happens to ?care? of the world, what is eco-philosophy when cultured tissue, artificial but real flesh is a an architectural medium, when the things are made of the same stuff as we are. What is to care for the substance of the world as if it were our own body, because it is, and to instrumentalize our own body as if it were substance of the world, because it is. The designer becomes Things, and Things become him. Does design become, again, an extended mirror-stage of phased re-recognition, this time a recognition as object more than subject?

Readings:
Jean-Luc Nancy, The Creation of the World, or Globalization
Bruno Latour, ?A Cautious Promethia?? (yes, again)
Alejandro Zaero-Polo, ?The Politics of the Envelope: A Political Critique of Materialism,? Volume 17, 2008. Jacques Derrida, ?Autoimmuinity: Real and Symbolic Suicides? interview from Philosophy in a
Time of Terror by Giovanna Borradori, 2003.

Recommended Readings:
Mark Bonta and John Protevi, Deleuze and Geophilosophy, 2004.
Nicholas Bourriaud, Altermodern. 2009.
Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattair, What is Philosophy?, 1993
Rosi Braidotti, Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics, 2006

Screenings:
Southland Tales
The Wall.
Godard, Notre Musique
Manda Bala




Week 10: Art?: Envelope, Affect, Sensibility, Relationality

auto-territorialization
Program is both typologically inherited as works as medium of conjectural innovation. Architecture is already a critical logistical imaginary, in that the professional role of architecture is to translate all manner of incongruous conditions and demands, and to provide a singular formal medium for their interchange and resolution. Site conditions, programmatic needs, formal beauty, mytho-historical memory, available materials and technologies, the affective play of a given piece of software, and any other forces come to bear on the project. The resulting building serves a meta-interface for all of these. It is a tangible configuration of their ideal contact and interplay. So it is also to architecture, as a public discourse of imagining spatial alternatives, which we turn for imagery of socio-technical and aesthetic alternatives to how such interfaces may take shape. The extant built form is then that highly aestheticized logistical machine in situ.

Readings:
Elizabeth Grosz, Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth, 2008
ArtForum, Interview...Ranciere
Nicholas Bourriaud, The Radicant, 2009
Alphonso Lingis, First Person Singular
Sensorium: Embodied Experience, Technology and Contemporary Art, Caroline Jones, ed. 2006.

Recommended Readings:
Dorothea Oikowski, Gilles Deleuze and the Ruin of Representation, 1999.
Design and Art, Alex Coles, ed. 2007
Nicholas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, 1998.
Nicholas Bourriaud, Altermodern, Tate Trienniel 2009.
Benjamin H. Bratton, ?Mind the Pollocks, Notes on Art & Software? 2008
Jacques Ranciere, The Politics of Aesthetics, 2006.
Paul Virilio and Sylvere Lotringer, The Accident of Art, 2005.
Network Practices: New Strategies in Architecture and Design, Burke and Tierney, eds. 2007.

Screenings:
Things to Come,
Pasolini, Whoever says the truth.
Rene Daalder, Bas Jan Ader

Tags: bio media, theory, culture industry

Published: 02.09.2009

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