The New Normal

What is the new normal? Something has shifted, it seems. We are making new worlds faster than we can keep track of them, and the pace is unlikely to slow. If our technologies have advanced beyond our ability to conceptualize their implications, such gaps can be perilous. In response, one impulse is to pull the emergency brake and to try put all the genies back in all the bottles. This is ill-advised (and hopeless). Better instead to invest in emergence, in contingency: to map the new normal for what it is, and to shape it toward what it should be. Part manifesto and part syllabus, this essay by design theorist, Benjamin H. Bratton describes his vision for how design should approach and intervene in the new normal and what kinds of cities we should be planning for now. Bratton is Programme Director of The Strelka Institute of Architecture, Media and Design in Moscow, a resilient beacon of generous futurism in a time and place at the centre of contemporary twists and turns. The essay outlines The New Normal post-graduate think-tank at Strelka, which brings together architects, programmers, interaction designers, game designers, artists, philosophers, filmmakers, novelists, economists, and 'free-range' computer scientists. They study with Keller Easterling, Lev Manovich, Metahaven (Vinca Kruk and Daniel Van Der Velden), Casey Reas, Liam Young, and many others.

Benjamin H. Bratton is the new Programme Director of the Strelka Institute. As one of the most important global design theorists, he brings an extraordinarily interdisciplinary scope to our research. He is Professor of Visual Arts and Director of the Center for Design at the University of California, San Diego. He recently founded the school`s new Speculative Design undergraduate major. He is also a Professor of Digital Design at The European Graduate School and Visiting Faculty at SCI_Arc (The Southern California Institute of Architecture). He has recently published two books of design theory, strategy and fiction. In The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty (MIT Press, 2016) Bratton outlines a new theory for the age of global computation and algorithmic governance. He proposes that different genres of planetary scale computation-smart grids, cloud platforms, mobile apps, smart cities, the Internet of Things, automation- can be seen not as so many species evolving on their own, but as forming a coherent whole: an accidental megastructure that is both a computational infrastructure and a new governing architecture. The book plots an expansive interdisciplinary design brief for The Stack-to-Come. Dispute Plan to Prevent Future Luxury Constitution (e-flux/ Sternberg Press, 2015) is a collection of short fictions on architecture, utopias and dystopias. His current research project, 'Theory and Design in the Age of Machine Intelligence' is on the unexpected and uncomfortable design challenges posed by A.I in various guises: from machine vision to synthetic cognition and sensation, and the macroeconomics of robotics to everyday geoengineering.