7 documents
Positions
Touchlessness
Benjamin H. Bratton
Architecture Essay
Posted: July 3, 2021
Category
Bodies
Subjects
Affect, Health & Disease, Biopolitics, Intimacy, Subjectivity
# 72
The Role of Megastructure in the Eschatology of John Frum (On OMA’s Master Plan for the Spratly Islands)
Benjamin H. Bratton
September 30, 2001
The South Pacific Ocean (which some call simply “the Ocean”) is composed by an indefinite and perhaps infinite number of geometric configurations with vast planes of salt water in between, surrounding very low carpets of sand. Among these are the Spratly Islands, claimed by no less than seven countries: China, Malaysia, the Philippines, Brunei, Indonesia, Vietnam, and Taiwan. From any of the Spratlys one can see, on the interminable horizon, the upper and lower…
e-flux Journal
Posted: April 1, 2016
Subjects
Fiction
Dispute Plan to Prevent Future Luxury Constitution
Benjamin H. Bratton
A kaleidoscopic theory-fiction links the utopian fantasies of political violence with the equally utopian programs of security and control.
e-flux Books
Posted: January 1, 2016
Category
Utopia, Architecture, Design, Technology
Subjects
Fiction, Violence, Infrastructure, Science Fiction, Games & Play
# 69
El Proceso (The Process)
Benjamin H. Bratton
I.
Xefirotarch makes vampire architecture. The reasons for this go beyond the now well-known series of incidents at the group’s 2006 SF MoMA show, during which, over consecutive days, several children were left bleeding and traumatized by their encounters with the installation. Each claimed to have been “bitten” by its forms, but more likely, the children had fallen upon one of its dangerous, fang-like angles, and left punctured by the sharp contours. One boy was hospitalized for nearly…
e-flux Journal
Posted: January 1, 2016
Category
Architecture, Latin America, Film
# 65
On Deprofessionalizing Surgery
Benjamin H. Bratton
Overview
At the Center for the Future of Surgery at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine, medical students learn to operate surgical robots. The surgeon sits at a control station with her eyes focused into a fixed stereoscopic viewer. In each hand she manipulates extremely nimble rotational controllers to guide four robotic arms through the procedure. At the tip of each arm may be a scalpel, scissors, a Bovie cauterizer, a fiberoptic camera or light, or any of…
e-flux Journal
Posted: May 1, 2015
Category
Technology
Subjects
Health & Disease, Automation
# 53
The Black Stack
Benjamin H. Bratton
Planetary-scale computation takes different forms at different scales: energy grids and mineral sourcing; chthonic cloud infrastructure; urban software and public service privatization; massive universal addressing systems; interfaces drawn by the augmentation of the hand, of the eye, or dissolved into objects; users both overdetermined by self-quantification and exploded by the arrival of legions of nonhuman users (sensors, cars, robots). Instead of seeing the various species of…
e-flux Journal
Posted: March 1, 2014
Category
Technology, Internet, Data & Information
Subjects
Infrastructure, State & Government
# 46
Some Trace Effects of the Post-Anthropocene: On Accelerationist Geopolitical Aesthetics
Benjamin H. Bratton
1. Frame
Any conjunction between aesthetics and politics (for a political aesthetic, an aestheticized politics, a geopolitical aesthetic, a politics of aesthetics, and so forth) is necessarily fraught by estranged agendas—all the more reason for us to conceive of their inter-activation from a willfully ahumanist perspective. Aesthetics and/or politics of what and for what? The cascade of Anthrocidal traumas—from Copernicus and Darwin, to postcolonial and ecological inversions, to…
e-flux Journal
Posted: June 1, 2013
Category
Capitalism, Aesthetics, Image
Subjects
Accelerationism, Anthropocene, Algorithms