 So I'm Felicity Scott along with Marcus Souter co-director of the the CCCP program here at GSAP and it's really a great pleasure to be able to welcome Keller Easterling tonight to give this year's CCCP lecture under the title medium design. So we're very excited that Keller accepted our invitation. She's been both a great inspiration for and a friend of the CCCP program since it began I think nine years ago as a sort of initiative to forge a cross-platform experimental institutional space for thinking about architecture and architectural pedagogy through an expanded range of research and dissemination practices from critical and creative writing to curating and making exhibitions to other forms of visual and conceptual interventions indeed her work has served as an important and much cited model of how to think about and how to sort of do architecture otherwise how to complicate its critical tools its conceptual frameworks its geography and its materialities and through all of these how to let's say sort of understand and speak about what architecture is where it is what it might do or what we might do to it we could say and how we can identify its modes of sort of operating and some of its effects so her readings of architecture as a technique of political organization as a set of logistical protocols and infrastructures bearing political dispositions as spatial products that are implicated within global political machinations and geopolitical machinations all of these among with many other ways of thinking about the discipline have very much impacted or left a profound mark on our thinking about the discipline as I should say have that the formats through which Keller has worked or through which her work really enters the the so-called public sphere in addition to print media books and articles and lectures she's worked extensively with digital media including a laser disk publication as early as 1992 and I should say that she was really important protagonist in the discipline's experimentation of so-called digital turn at that moment moreover she has around 20 exhibitions to her credit along with a series of television broadcasts and web-based works and even theatrical plays she moreover has helped us all I think to see architecture not only through the lens of objects or the figure and a so-called figure-ground relationship but through tracing fields of information of actors you know networks and sites from which we find something still recognizable as architecture emerging into visibility you know quite literally as elements or sort of complex of elements that you know within unstable and highly politicized force fields and fields these fields I presume this is part of what you're going to talk about today feels that are not sort of grounds or backgrounds in a conventional sense but really the sort of material of her research so that Keller's work has been a central reference for CCCP as a program is evident not only through repeated citations of that work and other evident traces that it has left but in the remarkable fact that without Mark and I prompting the students the CCCP students invited her to speak in almost every symposium they've organized and she's proven time and again to be an important and very generous but critical voice in CCCP thesis reviews for which we're very very grateful so a few professional details before I hand the podium over to Keller Keller is currently professor of architecture at the Yale School of Architecture where she's taught since 1998 she's also principal of Keller Eastaling Architects here in New York she's the author of seven books and the co-editor of three more books and among her sole author monographs or extra statecraft the power of infrastructure space and a book called subtraction both of 2014 enduring innocence global architecture and its political masquerades of 2005 and organization space landscapes highways and houses in America of 1999 and among her exhibition practice I just wanted to note that this year she is an exhibitor in the American Pavilion of the Venice architecture Biennale and four years ago she presented a floor or the floor section within the central pavilion elements exhibition at the Biennale directed by rim Coolhouse and OMA her work is also featured in the 2016 Istanbul designed by annual and her remarkable exhibition called some true stories traveled from its initial showing here and New York at storefront for art and architecture to the University of Michigan she's been awarded far too many honors and awards to be named here all in line I think with her remarkable and wide ranging contribution and they're not just awards in in architecture they range across many fields so in some Keller is not only an important and challenging voice in and for architecture for whom from whom we've all learned so much but she's a paradigm of what we value in the CCCP program and we're extremely pleased to have her speaking here for us tonight so Mark and I are going to join color after her talk I know we've been listed as respondents I since we don't yet know what we're going to hear I don't know that it'll be a response in a conventional sense but we'll be opening up a conversation around her presentation so please join me in welcoming Calary Stirling thank you so much many thanks to Felicity and Mark it's a it's a privilege to be invited by the CCCP program you know a program whose reputation is growing and redoubling I'm a great admirer of your work so my I'm showing you a bit of Muhammad bin Salman's new porn and there'll be a bit more urban porn sprinkled throughout you'll see but my I suppose you might call my work something like medium design if for those of you who don't know anything about my work I always say that I'm often looking with half closed eyes at the urban world focusing not only on buildings with shapes and outlines but also on a matrix of rules and relationships in which those buildings are suspended an almost infrastructural matrix but but not an infrastructure like pipes and wires under the ground but a matrix that's made up of repeatable formulas and spatial products you know them skyscrapers malls golf courses resorts franchises parking lots airport ports free zones and these almost infrastructural rules and relationships are far from hidden and all too visible developing medium maybe something like a spatial technology or something like multiple spatial operating systems for the city and this technological matrix is arresting not only because of its wild mixtures of violence and candy colored fairy tales because it's a secret weapon of stealthy political power because it's creating de facto forms of polity that are outpacing law and because it's rapidly 3d printing a new layer of the earth's crust but this medium thinking or medium design is a habit of mind that's ever present and practiced in many disciplines oncologists analyze not only the tumor but chemical fluctuations in the surrounding tissue actors transmit information not only in their lines but in a string of interdependent actions that are unfolding in time geologists don't merely tax on a my specimens they read them as traces of a of a process but still this medium thinking is maybe under rehearsed in in the face of more dominant cultural habits in some kind of fatal error the beautiful soft watery human organism accidentally assumes a habit of mind that loves being right culture is is good at pointing to things and calling their name but not so good at describing the relationships between things or the repertoire as they enact it privileges declarations right answers universals telos elementary particles it's captivated by circular logics by by modernist scripts that celebrate freedom and transcendent newness narrative arcs that are bending towards the utopian or the dystopian ultimate and this collective mind that that looks for the one or the one and only is so often then organized like a closed loop and since the loop that only circulates compatible information can't abide contradiction it it lashes out with a binary when when it is challenged these are the communist bunny rabbit cartoons but so favoring successive rather than coexistent thoughts or practices the new right answer must kill the old right answer your freedom has to rob another of their freedom then the fight should build to a revolution or an apocalyptic burnout cue the brooding music the oscillating between loops and binaries an unnecessarily violent creature having eliminated the very information it needs is then often banging away with the same blunt tools that are completely inadequate to address perennial problems and contemporary chemistries of power so a bully is elected a migration of refugees swells in number a financial crisis makes properties worth less than nothing an industrial disaster kills thousands shorelines flood due to global warming and and if economic and military templates of causation provide no explanation if new technologies don't provide the solution if if the consensus surrounding laws and standards and master plans provide no relief little sense can be made of the problem assuming that these problems are simply impossibly deadlocked or unresponsive to rational thought even the smartest people seem to stand with hand to brow these are the hackneyed plot lines of our humanities the binaries of war and the chest beating Westphalia and sovereignty of nation remain in place as the darlings of history homoeconomics is allowed to upstage and hold forth sci-fi's assume the structure of ancient tragedies dark conspiracies for our hero smart is confused with new empowered is confused with free and descent also adopting a binary exists in a world of enemies and innocence and since the world's big bullies and and bulletproof forms of power thrive on this oscillation between loop and binary it's as if there's nothing to counter them what do we have the against these things like the orange one only more ways of fighting and being right and providing the ranker that nourishes their violence so how do you drop through a trapdoor and engage the flip side of these logics on that flip side where then nothing is new and nothing is right there are no dramatic manifestos but but maybe there's a chance to rehearse a habit of mine that's been eclipsed and it would then be something you already know how to do you're already able to detect with those half closed eyes a world at a different focal length so rather than only declarations and right answers and objects and determinations you can detect and manipulate the medium or the matrix and and just as this medium thinking inverts the typical focus on object over overfield maybe them the medium design can invert some habitual responses to the mechanics and aesthetics and politics of stubborn problems many people here are in our architects and urbanists but speaking to any discipline we're treating anyone like a designer medium design might use space to prompt some productive thought about both spatial and non spatial problems like like those like those media theorists contemporary media theorists who are not bound by communication technologies and who are returning to elemental understandings of media as a surrounding environments of air and water and earth maybe this medium design can treat the lumpy heavy material of space itself as an information system and and a broad inclusive mixing chamber for many social political and technical networks and so space then doesn't need the screens and sensors of the Internet of Things to make it stiff arrangements dance they're already dancing and and even at a moment of digital ubiquity and innovation space then might be an underexploited medium of innovation with the capacity to make other information systems dumber or smarter and and maybe these these large socio technical organizations that I've been showing you before the repeatable formulas for formatting space all over the world maybe they're even a good thing to think with because they are everywhere and nowhere from the micro to the macro scale from institutions and cities they are too large or too widely distributed to be assessed as a discrete object with a name or shape or outline they don't respond to singular solutions or determinations and they can really only be assessed by the activity or disposition imminent in their organization as it unfolds over time and territory but in any context large or small designing the medium is managing the potentials of relationships between objects the activity or disposition that's imminent in their organization the disposition of any organization makes some things possible and some things impossible like a growth medium it decides what will live or die like an operating system it sets the rules of the game the things that link and activate the components of an organization and on this flip side where stock narratives about new technologies and sci-fi futurologies and lubricated freedoms don't make sense they would be little authority given to declarations and master plans and standards and laws instead you might focus on some extra maybe probably unanticipated political and aesthetic capacities found in indeterminacy and discrepancy in temperament and in latency in organizations in determinacy so since unreadable politics easily unravels reasonable politics being right is a is a really bad idea in medium design it's it's too weak it doesn't work against gurus and totalitarian bullies and maybe cultures spectacular failures together with some underexploited powers of medium design inspire another way to register the design imagination sort of form making another key or another part of speech designers are very good at making things with shapes and outlines but medium design is really less like making a thing and more like having your hands on the faders and toggles of of organization it's the design of interdependencies and chemistries and chain reactions or something like ratchets it benefits from an artistic curiosity about spatial wiring or reagents in spatial mixtures a curiosity about designing not only a single object but a platform for inflecting populations of objects or setting up potentials within them and there's an artistic comfort with dynamic markers and unfinished processes so that the dispositions of space are manipulated then not with right answers and solutions and master plans but but with time-released active forms multipliers switches or other you know what you could call organs of interplay with some extended temporal dimensions that allow them to unfold and remain in play so so medium design would then be something like playing pool where knowing about one fixed sequence of shots is of little use but but being able to see a branching network of possibilities allows you to add more information to the table so in pool you know you don't you don't know the right answer you only know how know know how to play pool you only know something about what to do next you know how to respond to a string of changing conditions over time with something like an organ of interplay and and maybe you will gas but what is to come next but but medium design is then is then indeterminate not to be mysterious or unknowable or equivocal but to be practical so that I mean I would say this habit of mind is is pretty bored with the safety of the purely rhetorical I mean there is the sort of nose-breathing art of reportage about pool but then there's the art of playing it which which far from vague involves a number of explicit precision moves that are just sequenced with some indeterminacy so so medium design then interests a very uncomfortable realm of performance with all its inevitable mistakes and embarrassments and I think it's probably a subtext of this of this talk or something that I wanted to talk to you about the ways in which we might sometimes protect ourselves from another degree of criticality that comes with that performance so so how do you practically design and organ of interplay for instance in design you know usually in design you can only add more built material but if you consider an interplay of spatial variables that adjusts an ecology of building ebbs and flows and even then even the subtraction of architecture as possible like in floodplains or distended suburbs and I won't I won't go into detail about this protocol because it takes a little while to unwind but but it imagines reverse engineering the mortgage that was a multiplier of sprawl and even global financial environmental disaster so it's saying you know what if you introduce interplay by simply considering mortgages in groups that are rated for complementary or counterbalancing attributes that reduce collective risk so it works it works it like a ratchet like one one move after another and and all the protocols I'll show you are anything can be gamed and this interplay could be dangerous or productive but but the idea of interplay might have enough temporal dimension to react to changing conditions or more importantly to respond to the moment when it's politically outmaneuvered and and an interplay is not a solution but something that actually shouldn't always work so designing this protocol that is in that is indeterminate to be practical there would be something like medium design but instead of a kind of paradoxical quest for freedom more empowering or information-rich are situations that gain strength to interplay through mutual obligation or checks and balances or offsets or bargains and replacing the kind of parboiled master plans what are also the pop culture cinematic time-lapse documents that that show these ratcheting changes here's another protocol of interplay with completely different content in the jungles of Kenya or this is a rainforest of Ecuador we already know that there are strong relationships between roads and erasure of forest so while roads typically regarded as conduits of progress and opportunity the means to deliver broadband and other infrastructures in rural or wilderness areas they can also erase the information that's imminent in cities and villages and landscapes again space itself as an information system so this protocol considers an interplay between broadband roads and forest or jungle so it's asking you saying maybe it might be more productive to dial down roads the gray lines when dialing up broadband this sort of red radiating circle in order to preserve farms and forests which are kind of a green information system that attracts whatever that is you know more global resources for for for tourism or education that happened to be also broadband hungry so so digital and spatial platforms can make each other more information richer information poor and in this case changing a road as well as changing a bit of code can hack into a telecommunications network and and while in a world of of closed loops organizations and institutions are usually trying to eliminate any contradiction or error it's it's standard industrial policy but it but medium design I would say probably works better when you're multiplying problems so like Perando's paradox the game theory that demonstrates that if you play a losing game with the probability of losing you will continue to lose but if you alternate between two losing games each with a probability of losing you you can begin to generate wins it's as if the losses create a kind of ratcheting traction against which you make small gain so it's not homeostasis but imbalance not fixed pools of information but extrinsic information contradiction mixtures of information that provide a wealth of potential to disrupt that closed loop or binary so maybe it's not the existence or the is not it's not the content of the problem but the interplay between problems that's important medium design like pool is also a game that's surrounded by hustlers it has a and it has a currency and discrepancy so to assess and manipulate medium it's almost as if you have to cultivate a capacity to perceive in a split screen to straddle mental partitions that separate the nominative from the active and the dispositional so you develop something like a canine mind or a dog here's you saying the words in English or some language good girl but and those words have assigned meanings but a dog would never lie only on these signed meanings of the words good and girl they would only see things within within a thousand affective cues those two words good girl how how close you are to the door of the dog bowl or where whether you have a leash in your hand or even degrees of violence would all be assessed equally with the sound of words and their assigned meanings so in this split screen kind of turning the sound down on declarations is maybe easier to detect the difference between what an organization is saying and what it's doing how organizations decouple their messages from their real activities and their underlying dispositions so on so on one side of the screen so many stories about socio-technical organizations whether they're railroads or hydroelectric networks or blockchains this is a theorem you know you know it always always the message is about decentralization and freedom when often the real disposition of the organization may be concentrating power and authority with a with a universal ambition or the smart city you know maintains the shine of the new even when it centralizes information in ways that violate privacy even if the network is in its disposition quite primitive or crude a dumb binary of likes and dislikes filters a social media network that purports to be information rich a global network of Dubai style free zone cities facilitates not it's sort of storied free trade but manipulated trade a centralizing power espouses a populist message in the world's super bugs and bulletproof forms of power there at once kind of masters of monistic demagoguery and binary you know head-on brutality but they're also masters of the split screen and like a confidence man then they know how lies work and and just like being right is a bad idea in this kind of world telling one lie is a bad idea because telling many lies works really well you know one lie calls for reconciliation truth many lies creates Teflon and unburdened by truth running rings around earnest declarations the super button that's how to make words dance and fascinate in the absence of meaning and information so lies are then everywhere animated in color they lubricate they insulate and the discrepancies that others are trying to futilely reconcile is just the raw material of mediated rumor contagious fiction that can batter the walls work the back channels stunning with stunning success and again it's not what lies say but how they bounce that's important how often they're repeated and so the super bug becomes pure medium activity divorced from from content so so while I said you know bored with the safety of the purely rhetorical design that has any hope of affecting change manipulates the organization as well as the instrumental narrative that attends it you know with moves that are potentially sneakier and more politically agile it it may be a dissonant story that has nothing to do with the organization it may be you know however non-physical has physical consequences it may be a narrative that makes something contagious or the generates a Teflon surface of its own it may have an emotional message that renders some power more vulnerable it may have a surprising cultural bounce because of its irrationality or its outrageousness or its cuteness or its creepiness or its violence here's a here's a super saturated ad about automated vehicles you know that are that are touted as the means to perfect driving reduce emissions increase productivity but we know that this kind of pure embrace of the technology it creates a kind of boomerang effect so if cars just to go through it if cars provide the same hands-free ride that transit does and if they're used in lieu of transit so imagine the space of the seat in a transit car now all the size of a car they will actually create unprecedented congestion and emissions and sprawl even with carpooling and platooning so the very smart vehicle can be trapped in a very dumb traffic jam and to to remedy the boomerang effects related to automated vehicles you know then the habitual response is to look for the salute for the solution in the next emergent technology like you know like sort of futuristic flying cars or something like that but but an alternative response might be to alter a relationship or to rewire the network with a spatial variable in the spatial information system like a physical architectural volume that acts like a switch when placed between existing transportation networks the switch like an like an intermodal node for upshifting or downshifting into transportation of different capacities and when we did a long study of this it ended up being you know promising as a model for organizing maintenance and and innovation even investment even liability in this shifting transportation ecology so designing that switch would be something like medium design but but if you really want to do it and you know reduce emissions this brawl while increasing ridership and transit wouldn't wouldn't you also have to have the stomach for the spin you know the sort of sneaky story you know telling in the soft focus ads that that portrays the seduction of switching the story you know that would somehow pry the car from the cold dead hands of Americans or would we be too embarrassed for that so to observe organizations in this canine split screen not only the stories and lies on one side but also the oscillation between loop and binary on the other to do that is already to observe I temperament something like temperament in organizations as the potential for concentrating or distributing power as well as a potential for escalating or reducing violence and the reasons that I study graphically model cultures violent tendency to form closed loops that only circulate compatible information and expel any incompatible or inconvenient circumstance or challenger the other which in this case is usually the worker and workers are always on the receiving end of that violence in an environment that's also are you know ironically kind of saturated with best practice acronyms and bullet pointed lists and mandalas and motivational aphorisms of management ease that only serve to inoculate power against change it's another loop the house always wins continually closing the loop squaring off in a binary against the worker and while this global infrastructure space is perfectly streamlined the movements of billions of products and tens of millions of tourists and cheap laborers at a time when 65 million people in the world are displaced more than any other time in the history of the planet there's somehow no way to move several million people away from atrocities like those in Syria or or facilitate other movements related to climate or labor if the nation-state has a dumb on-off button for for granting or denying citizenship or asylum again the closed loop lashes out with a binary this time set against the immigrant and the extra state layers of governance like a kind of engeocracy offers their best idea storage in a refugee camp of a form of detention lasting you will know now on average set 17 years if the free zone is kind of the chief node of a privileged movement for goods and people outside of the constraints of national law it's like the refugee camp is its perverse carceral cousin so in the medium can can you adjust stories and organizational potentials on both sides of the screen in a way that is attuned to temperament we don't usually talk about that so in addition to declarations or confrontations the designer might also operate like a parent of squabbling children when you when you encounter them you don't you don't try to parse the content of their argument but you swiftly change the disposition of the context you lower the temperature of the room you move a chair into light you increase the blood sugar of one child or you introduce a pet into the arms of another you're changing the chemistry of the room in a way that no longer induces or supports violence and and there are countless ways to adjust the solids and liquids of the urban world to reduce violence and tension it's it's maybe something a little bit like material advantage in chess so it's after the game the game is over and it's beyond market value beyond the real estate game but urban morphologies and topologies and relationships embody potentials in urbanism 101 and a concentrate and distribute power they have the capacity to include or include and the urbanity that we treasure typically relies on breaking loops and binaries by multiplying or diversifying components placing them in interdependent relationships migrations of of of recent years have been especially polarizing and migration is portrayed as a as a as a crisis instead of a constant resource those migrating are portrayed as victims or the other in a binary opposition to to right-wing xenophobic sentiments and and while there may be a kind of artistic familiarity with a portrayal of victimhood what if you wanted to alter the temperament and dispositional potential of the organization by moving away from the sharp end of the conflict to work on a remote set of switches in in larger networks so countering the violence of the loop in the binary can you work on the medium to multiply one-to-one exchanges that that have long sponsored some of the most successful travel so if you could do this then kind of speaking dispositionally and temperamentally you might be moving from the one the loop the binary to the one-to-one and the many so this project of many is an online platform I'm working on that's designed to facilitate migration through an exchange of needs so it first refuses to regard migrating people as victims and and it serves those who might want to resettle but also those who want to keep traveling you know who never wanted the citizenship that the nation withholds or reluctantly bestows so by saying you know I don't really you know want your citizenship or your victimhood or your structured racism or your bad jobs it kind of leaves the right wing to throw itself against an open door and so instead we want another kind of cosmopolitan mobility based on a more robust networking of short-term project-based journeys that can maybe be aggregated for global credentials so so as this project is asking you know could there be a kind of global form of matchmaking between the sidelined talents and needs of migrating populations and a multitude of needs and opportunities around the world where there are no haves and have nots as with Perando's paradox you need problems are good needs and problems are the necessary assets and and cities might bargain with their underexploited spaces like the spaces you see you know in material advantage and chess they might bargain with those underexploited spaces to attract a changing influx of talent and resources so matching their needs with the needs of mobile people to generate some kind of mutual benefit space and time problems maybe opportunities for training mix could mix in these non-market exchanges where there's a kind of group-to-group exchange to increase security so could could some kind of cosmopolitan mobility organize around intervals of time or or seasons of life to form a branching set of options that's more more politically agile the visa game is fraught ugly dangerous this is not in any way a kind of sunny one-world sharing economy and if medium design that I've been talking about all this time is is arguing for mixtures of information systems that don't privilege new technologies then then then the app shouldn't really be an object of design it's really just kind of aggregator or or or prompt for including spatial variables that might also have more authority in global global governance but it's a it's a heavy information system and it's low tech kind of like a bulletin board there's the kids this sort of graphic conceit is nods to the work of your guess machunas or or or Paul elements typographies or hobo code or cuneiform so you know can can them can many though avoid the very dangers it critiques can these strings of journeys be anticipated or celebrated or accredited as leadership credentials can it develop that interplay of obligations that's more empowering than freedom so at the Venice Biennale will present about a hundred representative examples from research that that generate more and more combinations as we will continue to develop the platform but you know our our solution is mine you know tells you that it doesn't work you know even though it shouldn't always work and I think also you know the narrative of victimhood is is hard to give up even in favor of of of persistence and resourcefulness so I wanted to talk with you about this not only because of the discomfort it creates but also because of the wisdom of cccp and sort of asking the question you know how do you also get it out of the gallery and in into a more atomized condition so finally the the punctuating events like crises and competitions and victories and defeats those are things that usually capture the attentions of the most familiar cultural narratives but in medium design the disposition that we've been talking about it doesn't really happen because it's ever present as a latent property just like glass doesn't have to break to be brittle a dispositional quality is kind of unfolding and and it this is the ronoplasa collapse as you know but and if an unsafe factory collapses or burns there's an event to mark the violence but in but in countless factories and industrial parks that don't happen to buckle under the weight of their own denial and violence there is no event there's no drawn sword there's only the constant aggressions of blatant impalanced imbalanced power dynamics with their drumbeat of daily effects so medium design might enhance an ability to detect and manipulate latent potentials even in the absence of event or declaration the kind of slow-moving persistent violence or or the interplay of rich potentials for which there is no history so the histories of things that don't happen and shouldn't always work you know might might be structured like an epidemiology or a branching set of thresholds and points of leverage they might be largely concerned with how to modulate violence in organizations by making them more information rich or they might be asking you know what are the sort of spatio-political reagents and accelerants in moments of political metastasis and remission like that amazing shift in temperament in Stanley Kubrick's 1960s movie Spartacus you remember the story where the the Roman authorities they you know make it look like they're doing some kind of magnanimous thing by announcing to a field of slaves that are all shackled to each other that they will that they will crucify the insurgent leader Spartacus but spare everyone else and Justice Kirk Douglas who Spartacus is about to stand up and identify himself by saying I am Spartacus Tony Curtis stands up and says I am Spartacus and then all the slaves in the field stand up and say I am Spartacus I'm Spartacus so it's kind of an instant remission where the slaves turn the tables on their captors and in a kind of history of things that don't happen moments like these would not be mysterious but were anecdotal but but would be central so might might some of the world seemingly intractable or unresponsive problems the superbugs and losing games might some part of it respond to medium design I don't know and with the ability to detect and manipulate indeterminacy and discrepancy and temperament and latency what are the techniques for a stealthier form of activism that you know without being targeted as an opponent makes organizational changes and what are the documents of this medium design of the they might be you know might look across between a novel and an actuarial table on a platform and a film and a blockchain and you would be manipulating the gifts and pandas and rumors and meaningless distractions and other totemic fictions that are so effective in culture so here on the flip side right answers are mistakes obligations are more empowering than freedom histories follow latent aggressions as well as gunshots messy is smarter than new you deliberately address problems with responses that shouldn't always work and maybe you can steal some of the powers of infrastructure space to design a kind of snaking chain of moves to worm into and generate leverage against intractable politics and like a really good pool player you wouldn't call your shots but keep them guessing and then I always say this but you know it would be like being too smart to be right thank you first thank you very much Keller for fantastic introduction or the insight into new work and your current project which I'm very much looking forward to reading as well I I mean again your presentation you know touched on so many different sort of registers that that I'm not going to try Mark and do this a grand act of synthesis here but but I had a couple of sort of small questions and just to try to get you to talk about and the first is I'm to a very fascinated by figures of switching and at a van Bivelen certain but I'm talking about somebody very indebted to switching protocols tomorrow so you'll excuse me of this is sort of coming from some of things I'm thinking about but but one thing that that is I think quite studying is that the switching that that you're proposing in refusing the the binary logic that that you set up as a sort of epistemological you know foundation that drives so many of these sort of initial protocols sort of embedded protocols it's not it's not a switching that's a simple reversal yeah yeah it's a more complicated switching it's like a switching that that you know isn't that of the on-off switch of a conventional electronic circuit yeah but something else yeah and so I'm so it's just wondering if we can get you to talk about something like the you know how we think the sort of ethical political logic of a of that switching which is more I'm thinking of course of you know Foucault's long-standing reading of of of the you know potential of the reversal of power and you know any any any system and and but he would use a language like reversal which is not identical to a language like switching as you presented so wanted to see if you had thoughts on what type of switch this is or how we think that switch and the second question is a really sort of I guess it's very basic question but and maybe I won't try and complicate it but it's around the the incredible sort of fascinating relationship I know you have better words for these I don't know maybe I can find them but between the I'm just looking I'm gonna get it right here but between the the so all of the incredibly rich and at times disturbing visual material and the and the way that resolves into the graphic design of your interface yeah for the phone yeah for the phone for the app yeah and so I'm thinking because you know there's many moments of design one of the sort of the design that intervenes with the dispositional aspect but there's also an interface design and that that that is sort of haunted by a type of populism and yeah I'm wondering if I know I know that's not where the design lies but the design necessarily has to sort of materialize into into into those graphics yeah and so I'm wondering how you think that that relationship yeah but between the the all you know the difficulties of looking sometimes at the hyperpopulism of the yeah and and the way it gets translated into a you know sort of sort of icons and things like that yeah so just that makes sense too I don't know what to say I I don't know maybe I instead of instead of answering a question I will ask a question because because I'm curious you know when that kind of material is presented does it does it appear to be sort of a purely theoretical presentation or can't or can you see the kind of and that's why I was talking about embarrassment or can you see the kind of potentially foolhardy sense that there that there are that some of these techniques have have ways of thinking however obvious or elementary they are offer some practical responses to stubborn problems so you know when the switch that I'm talking about is and again you may think me foolhardy is it is a is a real project that is based on tons of research about automated vehicles and about investment in about an unbelievably dry set of things that are you know and I've long been looking at the potentials for switching you know from from looking at the history of the highway and history of the interchange and the ways in which that was a kind of dumb switch when it could have been a smart smarter switch and you know so the the kind of switch that I was presenting there is is one that's looking at a long history of cross purposes and false logics in transportation and looking at us just right when the Trump era is about to introduce a kind of Eisenhower a right Eisenhower era set of highway improvements just at the same time that automated technology is coming it looks like we're you know ready for another like perfect perfectly stupid set of moves so that this is I mean that that project is quite real as a as a as a us and as a suggestion for how to organize innovation and investment and for a new technology change I wasn't trying to suggest a theoretical I was just drawing on sort of theoretical tool it's interesting question because because I let's say something like the evidence you draw far yeah I mean absolutely the the ways in which it's sort of imminent from you know current you know you know technical political system I think is is incredibly clear so so I don't think that and I and I think I mean the there's a the full hardiness I would recast as something like a sort of knowing risk-taking in which the way in which you draw from that material and identify its potential vulnerabilities and how one might operate through those vulnerabilities to make things do other things is is is not something again that resolves into something like an answer or solution or something clear and so so I don't think it's I mean full honey I think it's let's say risky in a way that one needs to take risks yeah so is that makes sense so I think that's the disposition let's say of the your voice here as as a way of intervening in these unstable systems so yeah what I was trying to confess to you all almost so they bring you all a problem was that that you know what is it like then to also engage in in the pop culture soft focus ad that changes tastes about what constitutes switching I mean it it's not it's not working from within it's not collusion it's manipulation but I'm still wonder if we have a stomach for it if we would find it embarrassing or low but part of what you find it embarrassing but isn't part of the I mean that the challenge the risk and and the participation in listening to you and reading you is is how we want to do it there's you listen to this talk and I want to be a medium designer I I want latency and temperament and we try to follow what that is and and the cunning in the presentation is that it never solidifies into a set of procedures even when you're describing protocols they're protocols for evasion rather than they are direct confrontation and and and so there's something about how one both glimpses what medium design might be but struggles to figure out exactly how it might operate so in it at the same time as we see a glimpse of it we're also given I think in a very helpful way a set of cautions I was going to call them prohibitions but they were cautions like we don't want to be solutionist because that won't work and we don't want to avoid lying because and we want to avoid the the disposition of wanting to be right etc and and and so it is like a complex game field I'm not sure if that's exactly the right analogy because the other analogy that it seems like and this is what I wanted to ask you about is that it in some way it seems like an altered version of what we might have known as general systems theory right when we're looking at complex new integrations of technologies and and complex players but the result there was always to produce the type of stability that was identified as homeostasis whereas you so clearly demarcate that the project is not about homeostasis it's it's about some other conclusion and so that conclusion would not be the instability of the systems that you're identifying but some other type of instability and it seems like that's where medium design gets us it gets us into thinking and performing another type of instability which is not the instability of the systems of representation of technologies that you're showing us so how so what is that other instability and maybe there's no way to answer that simply but it's it's to follow these chains that you set out for us for us to to arrive at that answer but I don't know I don't know if that gets us anywhere I think that's that's yes that there's not I'm trying to not talking about systems and you know if anything like the pool player or the confidence man is still like a better but it worries me a little bit that that you know in a short talk like this where we're the the person speaking he's saying it's this but it's not that but and it's not that so that it's this constant hedge between you know like it's almost exactly like a confidence man you know but I but I but I would assure you that perhaps that is in part for fear of of the solution this that is in all of us because if you gave me time you know the little the little blue tiles that we're going by if you gave me time I would in the most boring detail unwind that protocol and exactly how it works and how you know the history of the FHA mortgage and you know and then there is there is it's not in fact it that has probably little dreams of being a success you know and even I mean I I think it is one of those things as a kind of reverse contagion of the mortgage and it's maybe even just a little bit deceptively simple but it just to say that the mortgages that we used to group in 17,000 houses for a Levittown or something like that what if you group them according to a slightly different logic and if they used to be if they use if you used to get your underwriting approval based on a design that considered their bank ability according to the FHA what would it be what would it be like to score them to begin to aggregate a number of indices that already exist about proximity to transportation to slosh maps and and sea level rise maps and so on to gather a number of indices and score them according to those things and then watch their effects of start to compound because you're allowing them to do it in groups so I mean there's I all that to say that that there is like a there's like a practical you know and we work on this quite seriously maybe open up to questions from a very healthy looking audience oh I just thought I would I would take the silence as an opportunity to to take you up on the question of the sort of compounding problem notion in the context of say a place that has experienced a sort of endless series of failures that it might be a kind of an interesting case study or situation to introduce that question of you know in a place where there's a continual decade after decade of people coming and offering solutions to the problem and and every decade offers its new set of failures to kind of you know go into that situation offering to compound the errors and and and and offer an opportunity for experimentation and likely failure something like that in and I suppose a lot of the environments that we all look at but think of something like you know Detroit or New Orleans or something where the you know the municipal fathers sort of throw up their hands and say the financials just don't work here that's kind of them that's kind of like where you're ready to roll up your sleeves because it's because then then properties stop being trafficked mortgages and end up being solids again in gravity they can you one can work with their potentials outside of other abstractions and so the those those places where there are enormous problems are so incredibly rich because of their because of the problem a lot of the map those sort of matches in the many project are are a match between problems so they complement each other in their problems yeah to your question about a kind of the practical application of some of your theories when I read your work I couldn't help but think of kind of legal code and like written law as being this very rigid form that's very prescriptive that's very here's what you should do here's how you should carry something out whether it's in a really boring government office or in a police force and that there's also kind of simultaneously with these really rigid laws this kind of unofficial component to it let's say judicial discretion or a particular police officer deciding not to engage on something that that there's so much in these rigid structures that allow for decisions sometimes can be very evil bad decisions when you get a bad actor or can be this kind of negotiation where they can have a positive effect and I guess yeah I was just wondering if that fits or if that kind of makes sense as kind of this algorithm that you may be mentioned in extra statecraft right well the law was one language that is given one practice that is given enormous authority in the world and I suppose I'm trying to introduce spatial variables as often variables that are missing from a lot of those calculations I mean even when we're looking at the automated vehicles it's amazing that you know there is a pretty obvious like thumping spatial variable that's missing from this very smart you know unbelievably sophisticated technology technological plans so a part of what I am trying to do in as a teacher you know we're teaching in a place like Yale where it's filled with little you know budding McKinseyites and Deloitte consultants and CIA agents and so on is to sort of say that there are in they own they almost only understand kind of management ease and econometrics you know so I'm trying to introduce spatial variables and irrationalities as something which we must know about and microphone is coming your way thanks for your talk I just wanted to ask about sort of the kind of tapping into non or uncommodified that you said after the game is over like sort of other con activities that people have that they share that aren't yet commodified and I was wondering if you could maybe talk about how that might be problematized as well in terms of you know then absorbing them into a kind of digital system kind of interpolates them into commodity and kind of taps into a kind of another frontier for that regime as well or like I guess I wanted to ask what the threshold of failure and say perpetuating accidental further violence or other kinds of dispossession and where that tolerance lies accidental what like if if failure in a system might exacerbate violence or you know by accident kind of commodify social relations on the ground or something yeah I mean that that I suppose that the thing that one of the things that I find sort of really uncomfortable and frightening about working on this many project is that it you know it you know it could facilitate the thing that it critiques but but I but I do think there is that there and it's again it sounds so elementary that it's almost too obvious to say but but that you know the things that we know as urbanism 101 you know things about relationships and proximities and potentials in space that are that are not commodified not always commodified or or there's a dissonance between the way these things are commodified and the way there and these other kind of potentials or like the material advantage that the object that the heavy information system has I think being able to read that is it has enormous potential is it fraught with potentials for failure as well completely fraught any any one of these things I was showing you it take it take nothing to game it to the worst possible intentions but then one's also saying at least it's at least it's not that's you know the answer solution at least it has enough temporal dimension to rework and remanuever you know it has built into it the capacity for reactivity against against to move but it's a different kind I mean it was a different kind of artistic intention or pleasure even that's probably not for everybody I may have another question I was very struck by the I wrote down at one point everything's an information environment in the sense when you talked about the way in which the the work we situate or or in dialogue with sort of media theoretical term that moves out of you know media infrastructure systems are things that we conventionally associate with histories of media technologies and media systems into seeing a sort of broader spectrum of objects with disposition that that can be conceived as as a media environment I was trying to think think you know when you bought in the two fantastic examples of the the squabbling children yeah and the way in which one could intervene in that system and the and the Spartacus example and trying to you know think through how those forms of of sort of redispositioning take place through objects I mean not just people or or media systems with the capacity to switch but you know how we think that moment how we think of a and I understand this with the protocols come in and the reading of the shifting of the mortgage structures and yeah just wondering if the yeah how we how we how we think that as an object I don't know do you know what I mean to think that relationship like how we I'm I'm hoping that that you know those media theorists who are you know now contemplating this other kind of elemental responsibilities that have you know a lot to do with environment and other other political like John Durham Peters but in and in there in their thinking is sometimes often this crisis like we were we weren't trained for you know a certain kind of thinking so what I was hoping was that maybe this this contemplation would be a friend to their contemplation and one that would use space to model I mean because we are we as designers on urbanists we already sort of you know we have some skills that we can offer to their conversation that are in the space can model some of the things that they're talking about some of the can and can rehearse some of the capacities of thinking in in relationship in chemistry and interplay so I hope I hope that it will be in dialogue with the question of the back of two questions of the back here okay so my first question is kind of a joke but I'm wondering how many lies are your presentation and then my follow-up question is just I'd love to know a little bit more about your feeling about intent like it seems like a lot of the meeting design is finding a new affect for intent but I'd just love to hear more about what that any any other words to describe that that have to be more than one lie we let that yeah I someone over the weekend asked me no if I was if I was trying to you know promote lying or something like that and I you know or or you know someone will use some idea about rumor and gossip that that I intend to be related to the most stubborn global politics you know to to that I intend to be directed to the super bugs you know the sort of Putin Trump and and the non-human super bugs as well so I'm I fear that I am you know like sort of pretty earnest you know in in my intent here you know I don't want to disappoint you but I am not I am in I am certainly impure but but but but but I I feel strongly about some I'm embarrassed to tell you you know that I and that's part of the embarrassment I was talking about like when when we were actually like engaging and taking on some kind of performance where we're not it's not for good or bad but I think it is there is an intent to make things more information rich daughter yeah thank you very much for the presentation I have a kind of a kind of a technical sort of question in extra statecraft you make a very profound point about how the ISO 9000 family of standards which you also reference in your presentation hasn't just inflected and transformed an impacted corporate culture but also the culture of government and governance and you talk for example about the Clinton and administration and its own reckoning with this family of standards the question I have is do you feel that this this language this logic has also transformed education the production of knowledge what we do the accrediting institutions that we have to reckon with do you find that in the context of your own work ISO 9000 is in the room so to speak it's certainly in the in the academy and you know there are I mean I don't know about Columbia's situation but at Yale you know they're all kinds of very well-funded mysterious offices that are there to help you with your you know the espousing management ease and they have kind of unclear parameters and and then one one is also as a faculty member you know taking part in the rituals of management ease the surveys the retreats the breakout sessions the magic markers the stuffed animals the little aphorisms and charts and so on all with the sort of like this constant feedback of information until this app till it all turns to nothing you know and it is sad that that and and if this management culture believes itself to be correcting the academic who you know so misguided that they they don't know how to really do anything so it is sad it is sad to see that you know that that there can't just simply be a distinction between a corporate culture and an academic culture that they can't operate in different ways that they couldn't even critique or learn from each other that there's a kind of infantilizing of of academic culture by this management culture anyone else have a question thank you Doug hi thank you you spoke of medium design as and you gave the analogy of toggles togglers and faders I think it was how many of these mixing boards would there be and would you give these over and to like a grassroots movement or how many of these togglers would there be who would be toggling yes who would be toggling yeah well I mean it's just that I think there's no way to you know answer that question I mean I know I mean it's a no specific amount I mean I get other than to say that and you know I mean I'm trying to work within a design discipline to rehearse what that might mean and working in you know design studios and looking at what working that way what happens and you know if you were to stand back and look at the wall at a final review or something like that you'd see you would see what you would see is that kind of backing up into a macro organizational strata ends up ends up with a lot of architectural precipitates a lot of even conventional like stuff with shapes and outlines and I mean that the wall is filled with stuff that looks like architecture and it might be sites that are slightly different the site might be a detail that one sees as a multiplier or or something like that but there there it what what I'm guess I'm saying is that we once we have started working in this way there's kind of like a lot more to do just a lot more to do and a way also of seeing around a conventional kind of fee-for-service practice it there's so much to do and so many reasons why a designer could be involved I maybe have my last question for me just not to say other people can't ask other questions and I don't know how much you can say about this but but since you tempted us with your upcoming Venice installation for the for the Biennale wondering if you could talk a bit about how the project is going to be translated into the exhibition context and also when you were discussing that you made a provocative remark about about these projects leaving the gallery so just wondering if we could get a little bit of more of preview of what you're doing yeah well I I said something about it today I suppose because in a way I really needed critique I need a I need some I need to yeah I needed critique but the the intention is that you're previewing a platform that is really I mean it is really being developed through a consortium of players at Yale will see like how far that goes obviously it I think it's a good project for students to rehearse with because there's a lot of students both in race ethnicity and migration and other programs and at Yale as well as computer science and other things who are already kind of it's a tiny little cohort about a half dozen people but we we are trying to expand that as something so that this platform can be something that students cut their teeth on to work on figuring out okay what would it take you know to do something like this and then of course it would have to leave Yale as well but the the the so at the Biennale you're only seeing a kind of a set of a hundred examples and you can so you can see then X numbers of combinations and so on and you see if you see a video which sort of shows some of that it's meant to just show from our research even even if you look at something like the J1 visa here in the United States there are you know almost 4,000 J1 visa sponsors with all of their partners and so you start to see a lot of multipliers and if you add these spatial variables and problems and failures to it then it then it starts getting it starts to be even more so what we want to show is just the the the immense potential for this kind of trading and matching that and try to also show what kinds of legal ingenuity we might be working on instead of a lot of legal ingenuity to keep people out there's a lot of effort there but so it's trying to suggest a lot of things like that with the video and so on but by getting out it's it's that gesture that gesture is a gesture that we want to to leave the gallery to be found elsewhere and that that's I'm not I haven't done as much as I wanted to do with that because you know that that's the most interesting thing that the Biennale that it has these silly national pavilion you know and when and when you know the Swiss pavilion wanted to to store some chairs and Spanish pavilion it was like a national diplomatic incident or something like that so we were wanting to do more in kind of infecting of other places we'll probably have to settle for the making contagious a certain kind of gesture there's some stamping that will happen but it's very funny but it is supposed to be like hobo code like that there's there's marks that people leave for each other this is this is not the nation's business this is between us between persistent resourceful people more so I have a question about this idea of switching and I know kind of epistemological terms are shifting in the way you're talking about them so my question might be outmoded in a sense but what is the kind of distant horizon of the kind of strategies of resistance and kind of tactics of switching that you've kind of presented tonight is there do you merely see them as a way of kind of rewiring or patching up the systems already in place or do you actually see a possibility of them beginning to break parts of the system that we become so accustomed to without knowing or there's any kind of moment where that begins to chip away once it becomes less opaque or where do you exactly situate your work given the fact that you're kind of rejecting the category of an ultimate end goal well the way the way you were just talking about it you know makes sense to me no you were just you were just talking about a potential for us a switch to you know break binaries or to add more information to a system or to make a system more information rich I mean it's it's all it's pretty I mean the kinds of things I'm talking about are really elementary you know I'm some level and yeah it the intention is to is to add more is to add more information and to break down concentrations of of power do you see a moment where there will be no more information to add any more like what would happen after well I don't I mean as you probably can tell I don't really think in terms of ultimates you know or or or I'm suggesting that we have a tendency to think that that way to look for the ultimate you know like apocalyptic moment of the end of all and so on but but but I'm wondering like if we were thinking on the flip side of that what would that be like you know where you're not finished there is no ultimate you just keep you keep playing you know and you keep reacting to the this the situation until the cheaters kind of cheat you back and then you figure out what to do next because they they will okay so we wrap up yeah so thank you again Keller for fantastic presentation and thank you everybody for coming