In today’s La Lettura supplement to the Italian daily Corriere della Sera I published a brief intervention, alongside Francesco Casetti and Christine Macel, on the subject of how art objects are (or aren’t) framed and flanked by wall labels. The English version of the text reads as follows: Over the course of recent decades there has been a resurgence of philosophical interest in the forms of life that are compacted into physical objects: their affordances,…
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The following is the unpublished transcript of a talk I presented over two years ago at the Festival/filosofia in Modena, Italy. Written before the latest generation of humanoid robots (including Elon Musk’s laughable Optimus, slated to “replace human workers on the factory floor”), I would stand by the core argument that it makes about the urgency of overcoming anthropocentric models of thought, whether in the humanities (humanities without humans) or technology fields (robotics). It was…
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First conceived in 2018, largely carried out during 2019, repeatedly delayed and reimagined due to the covid-19 pandemic, metaLAB (at) Harvard’s exhibition Curatorial A(i)gents is closing this weekend after a 2.5 month run at the Harvard Art Museum. The exhibition was composed of eleven separate experiments: Not all of the above were part of the original design. But all shared a common experimentalist ethos and a commitment to explore the use of AI-based techniques…
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When the pandemic is over and as venues reopen, what will be the state of the performing arts? Will there be a return to the old normal or, instead, will some of the lessons and experiments that were undertaken under pandemic conditions begin to shape a new and expanded concept of performance, liveness, streaming as a medium, and the like? [Read more]
I recently published a short essay on the topic of recent monument wars that places my experience as part of the team that developed BZ ’18-’45 in the northern Italian city of Bolzano in dialogue with the conversations taking place in North and South America over monuments and historical memory. The essay begins: Where do monuments go to die? The question may appear incongruous given the urges that have motivated the making of monuments since…
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MuseoFuturo (“Future Museum”) is an experiment in museum-based education that reaches out not to museum professionals but rather to young practitioners in a range of creative and technical fields, inviting them to participate in the development of nine alternate visions of the future museum, while bringing the Madre’s own permanent collection –which, as is the case in most art museums, is mostly in storage– into public conversation. [Read more]
I recently had the honor of delivering one of the keynote addresses at the 2020 festivalfilosofia in Modena, Italy, one of Europe’s leading idea festivals. This year’s theme was the machine and the machine at the center of my talk was the robot understood in humanoid terms. Under the title of Let Robots Be Robots! I called instead for a non-anthropocentric ontology for robotic agents. The opening section of the talk ran as follows: In the…
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Over the course of the past month, I have been involved in a series of conversations–webinars, online conferences, television programs–regarding the effects of the ongoing pandemic on the contours of the post-pandemic world. These were prompted by commissioned opinion piece on the spatial logic of quarantine that I published on the website of Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, entitled ““When the world is again unparked, will it know how to unplug?” Subsequent to that initial…
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It is often the most modest media that prove successful, adaptable, and resilient over the long term. Such is the case of the podcast, a mode of communication born in the early 2000s, derived from radio, whose monthly US audience has now grown to around 90 million and whose global audience reaches well into the hundreds of millions. Even more striking are the numbers behind the numbers: a content production pipeline, for instance, that counts…
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What comes after mobility? Or, rather, what comes after mobility when the word is understood, much as it has been during most of the course of the 20th century, as automobility? According to a manifesto that I wrote in the late summer of 2016, the answer is MOVABILITY. Movability is a word I encountered in the course of research in the Piaggio archives in Pontedera. Apparently coined by an advertising agency in the 1960s, it…
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Long before curatorial practice became integral to my work, I devoured exhibition catalogs. As a scholar/curator, however, I have tended to chafe at some of the limitations of the standard notions of the catalog. Here’s a post on an experimental alternative to those conventional notions: the catalog for the Universo futurista / Futurist Universe exhibition (April 21, 2018 – May 19, 2019) at the Fondazione Sonia e Massimo Cirulli in Bologna–a catalog in the form…
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Alongside our rethinking of Asimov’s Laws, the PFF team has also been actively engaged in rethinking SAE International’s “Taxonomy and Definitions for Terms Related to On-Road Motor Vehicle Automated Driving Systems”: its six-level classification system to describe the levels of driver intervention and attention required to drive a vehicle. These extend from level 0 in which an automated system communicates with the driver without, however, assuming control of the vehicle, to level 5 in which…
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It’s easy to poke fun at some of the tics and tropes that have come to define TED over the course of its 32 years of “spreading ideas that matter.” But the fact remains that TED has had an enormous impact and the TED stage is one of the world’s leading communications and innovation platforms, now fully global, interconnected with a multiplicity of television, radio, and web-based channels, and followed by audiences that number in the…
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Here’s a gem from the archives that is more than worthy of your attention: the televisual translation of the Fiore/McLuhan/Agel experimental paperback The Medium is the Massage, courtesy of McGraw-Hill “text films,” several Pennsylvania libraries, and Internet Archive. It’s a prescient piece of cybernetic pop, starring McLuhan qua new media oracle, circa 1970. Aside from the psychedelic lighting and special effects, it’s the excitement with which the words electric and electronic are pronounced that holds…
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Printing was never monolithic as a technology. Over the course of its history, it has been employed in the service of producing everything from nimble playing cards designed to last for months to hulking tomes destined for millennia of consultation. And within the ever shifting universe of print, books have routinely been perceived as too available or unavailable, too large or small, too cheap or luxurious. This pendulum of concerns, inflected by transformations in the media…
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