Open Worlds, Universal Design:
Geopolitics of the Multiverse

Instructor: Ed Keller & Carla Leitão Date & Time: March 26, April 2nd, 16h, 23rd. // July 30, August 6th, 13th, 20th 14:00-16:30 ET // 09:00-11:30 ET

DESCRIPTION: Across eight lectures with guests, this Seminar invites leading thinkers and designers to present their current work engaging the impact of artificial intelligence and emerging infrastructures [blockchain/cryptocurrency] on ‘worldmaking,’ with a specific provocation asking what the role of open world and universal design thinking might be in advancing planetary scale transformations- of cities, architecture, infrastructure, culture, biology, and cognition.

There are mathematical, formal & logical systems that underwrite nearly all the infrastructures within which we live today: increasingly subject to various ‘formal systems’ that subscribe to completely different ontologies of being and action. Thus for perhaps the first time in history, infrastructures and the Marxist notion of fixed (frozen/slowed) capital are sensitive and responsive to those alternate ‘belief systems.’

What’s at stake today is the extrapolation and amplification of a moment in European history, at the end of WW2, when Kojeve wrote a recommendation to DeGaulle suggesting that the French Empire was no more and that the way forward was to foster a simultaneously linguistic, cultural, gestural, and quotidian practice that would bind France and the Latin Empire together – even into North Africa- thus making possible a coalition built on a form of what he termed “neuropolitics.”

We can ask to what degree neuropolitics might be part of a ‘structure of feeling’ (R. Williams) that would bring a people –a mass, class or group– to awareness- or would bring them to a fever dream where, to paraphrase Goebbels’ words, they knew the words of the song in their dreams without knowing how they knew it or even without knowing that they knew it.

A psychologically oriented neuropolitics has precisely transformed the game of designing planetary infrastructures/systems. But, instead of relying on low-resolution models and the preexisting knowledge of how neuro-capture might operate, the new companies, sensors, algorithms have microsecond-length engagements in fine details with hundreds of millions of pulsing entities consisting of humans and non human nodes. This Seminar will take up these themes in the context of the guests’ work to speculate on tactics and strategies and to imagine near and mid-term design outcomes.

Guests recruited for this Seminar so far are Marcos Novak, Ezio Blasetti & Danielle Willems [MAETA Design], Lydia Kallipoliti and Jillian Crandall

IMAGE: Mauritius Commercial Bank, Quatre Bornes, Mauritius

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