Two shifts in relationship between culture and technology inform my thinking about the contemporary state of imagination and trust at the ground level. Both involve the ever more intimate co-mingling of humans with machines. The first is the emergence of cobotics as a pivot point within conventional robotics, particularly as robots move out into the built environment and become entangled with our everyday lives. For millennia humans have imagined the robotic according to a substitution…
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Tag: design
Forthcoming this fall with Inventory Books is the first English translation of Bruno Munari’s 1967 volume Fantasy – Invention, Creativity, and Imagination in Visual Communication. Designed by IN-FO.CO, the edition meticulously mirrors the layout and typography of the Italian original –its graphic flavor and texture– and is accompanied by a critical apparatus as well as by an introductory essay. I am responsible for the translation, the notes, and accompanying essay. Fantasy is perhaps the richest…
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The classroom is conventionally understood as a space of contemplative retreat where conversation and intellectual labor occur in a world apart: the world of learning. What if, rather than being cut off from public view, the world of the classroom, particularly those privileged classrooms that lie at the heart of elite universities, opened up on the main square? Not at every moment or during every lecture, discussion, and debate, but at special moments of saliency…
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The following is the unpublished transcript of a talk I presented over two years ago at the Festival/filosofia in Modena, Italy.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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I don’t do much self-chronicling but, between 1980 and 1983, I was involved in an intellectual adventure that I’d like to believe left some enduring traces in the field of cultural studies: the launch of a scrappy, serious, militant publication entitled Tabloid: A Review of Mass Culture and Everyday Life. Opposing both the acritical, celebratory tone of studies of mass cultural phenomena then emerging from within the field of American Studies (and, in particular, from…
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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 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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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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L’archivio animato – Lavori in corso // Work in Progress. An Animated Archive opened at the Fondazione Massimo e Sonia Cirulli in Bologna, Italy on November 23, 2019 and will run until May 17, 2020. I developed the concept for this somewhat anomalous exhibition and served as a consultant during the curatorial process; my long-time collaborator, Daniele Ledda (the founder of xycomm, Milan), did the design work. Rather than following conventional museological models, the exhibition…
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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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The Thing Tank is an exhibition of design fictions currently on display on the ground floor of Gund Hall at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. It was developed within the setting of a spring 2019 seminar/studio that I taught structured around a sequence of case studies of exemplary 20th century Italian artifacts devised to suit fundamental needs of modern life: sitting, drinking, lighting, walking, moving about, cooling, cooking, writing, calculating, and entertainment. Though…
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Redundancy has a bad name. Already in antiquity redundantia implied excess: literally, the superabundance of a resource (such as water); figuratively, an overflowing stream of words as in the Ciceronian “illa pro Roscio juvenilis redundantia” (Or. 30: 108). In the era of industry and post-industry, the word retains a ring of inefficiency. If something is redundant, by definition, it is something to be trimmed, something that is misaligned with history’s headlong rush into the future.…
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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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Isaac Asimov’s 1950 classic I, Robot is remembered for many things, but especially for its formulation of the “Three Laws of Robotics” (sometimes referred to as “Asimov’s Laws”). They run as follows: A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. A robot must protect…
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