Keller Easterling: Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space (2014)

“Extrastatecraft controls everyday life in the city: it’s the key to power – and resistance – in the twenty-first century.

Infrastructure is not only the underground pipes and cables controlling our cities. It also determines the hidden rules that structure the spaces all around us – free trade zones, smart cities, suburbs, and shopping malls. Extrastatecraft charts the emergent new powers controlling this space and shows how they extend beyond the reach of government.

Keller Easterling explores areas of infrastructure with the greatest impact on our world – examining everything from standards for the thinness of credit cards to the urbanism of mobile telephony, the world’s largest shared platform, to the “free zone,” the most virulent new world city paradigm. In conclusion, she proposes some unexpected techniques for resisting power in the modern world.”

Publisher Verso, 2014
ISBN 1781685878, 9781781685877
252 pages

Project website

Reviews: Self (AR 2014), Wark (2014), Garrett (Antipode 2015), Chan (Art Papers 2015), Owens (Icon 2015), Coggan (Oculus 2015), Harwood (Artforum 2015), Barber (CAA 2018).

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF (added on 2019-7-8)
EPUB, EPUB (3 MB, updated on 2019-7-8)

Bernhard Leitner: P.U.L.S.E.: Spaces in Time / Räume der Zeit (2008) [English/German]

Bernhard Leitner (*1938) is an artist widely known for his sound sculptures and sound installations. P.U.L.S.E. documents a range of his works made between 1999 and 2008.

“Sound spaces are not simply spaces in which sounds can be heard, but rather, where sounds first create the space, shaping its special characteristics. Audio events can create not only a special experience of the external, surrounding space, they can also make it possible to experience physical space as ‘internal’ space. Leitner’s work leads to acoustic qualities (of space) that remain hidden in the stream of stimuli, and it shows us opportunities for sensuous experience that we are barely aware of, since they have been lost or because their potential has remained unrecognized.” (Cathrin Pichler)

Texts by Boris Groys, Detlef B. Linke, Peter Weibel, conversation with the artist by Stefan Fricke.

Publisher Hatje Cantz, Ostfildern, 2008
A ZKM Book
ISBN 9783775720472
208 pages

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF (from the author)

Luciana Parisi: Contagious Architecture: Computation, Aesthetics, and Space (2013)

“In Contagious Architecture, Luciana Parisi offers a philosophical inquiry into the status of the algorithm in architectural and interaction design. Her thesis is that algorithmic computation is not simply an abstract mathematical tool but constitutes a mode of thought in its own right, in that its operation extends into forms of abstraction that lie beyond direct human cognition and control. These include modes of infinity, contingency, and indeterminacy, as well as incomputable quantities underlying the iterative process of algorithmic processing.

The main philosophical source for the project is Alfred North Whitehead, whose process philosophy is specifically designed to provide a vocabulary for “modes of thought” exhibiting various degrees of autonomy from human agency even as they are mobilized by it. Because algorithmic processing lies at the heart of the design practices now reshaping our world—from the physical spaces of our built environment to the networked spaces of digital culture—the nature of algorithmic thought is a topic of pressing importance that reraises questions of control and, ultimately, power. Contagious Architecture revisits cybernetic theories of control and information theory’s notion of the incomputable in light of this rethinking of the role of algorithmic thought. Informed by recent debates in political and cultural theory around the changing landscape of power, it links the nature of abstraction to a new theory of power adequate to the complexities of the digital world.”

Publisher MIT Press, 2013
Technologies of Lived Abstraction series
ISBN 0262018632, 9780262018630
392 pages

For a New Computational Aesthetics: Algorithmic Environments as Actual Objects lecture by Parisi (2012, video, 72 min).

Reviews: Lecomte (Mute, 2013), Ikoniadou (Computational Culture, 2014).

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF (24 MB, updated o 2021-10-28)