Benjamin H. Bratton

Benjamin H. Bratton’s work spans Philosophy, Design and Computer Science. He is Professor of Visual Arts and Director of the Center for Design and Geopolitics 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; Visiting Faculty at SCI_Arc (The Southern California Institute of Architecture); and, for 2016-18, Program Director at the Strelka Institute for Media, Architecture and Design in Moscow.

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 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.His current research project,Theory and Design in the Age of Machine Intelligence, is on the unexpected design challenges posed by A.I.