 Hi everybody. Thank you so much for coming to our virtual event today. I'm Laura Kurgan and I'm the director of the computational design practices program, and we're hosting this panel discussion today. So I'm super excited because in fact this is a new program so everything we do this year we do for the first time. And this is something that we're going to repeat every year this future present symposium. And I'm really delighted to have four amazing participants today who I will introduce as we move along. But right now we have Imani Jacqueline Brown on the screen and Elaine Gan, who are going to be giving the first presentations, and also thanks to Adam Vosberg who's also on the screen right now he's the assistant director of the program and has helped to organize and conceptualize this panel discussion. So just before we start just a little bit about the new program just so that you all know what it's about. So we're a computational design practices program and you know that word design is right in the middle of of what we aim to do, but we're in an architecture school. And so we think about computation, mostly in terms of the built environment across all the scales of the social digital and physical environments and what all of that means to to each of our disciplines in the built environment. So we're a creative, critical and technical platform and program, and our students are creative technologists their activists and their entrepreneurs, and any combination of those three things, especially as they move out of the school it's a very intensive three semester program. So I'm hyper aware that computation has done a lot of harm and a lot of good in the world. And so here we are at this moment of the future present symposium, which acknowledges that as with designers, we look closely at all the layers that constitute the present in order to imagine a better future. We'll start. And I'm going to quickly introduce Imani Jacqueline Brown. She's at home at Columbia and she will be coming to give a lecture later in the semester so hold on for that, but her undergraduate is from Columbia she's an artist activist and researcher from New Orleans living in London. She's currently a PhD candidate at the Queen Mary University of London and a research fellow with forensic architecture and an associate lecturer in the MA architecture at the Royal College of Arts. Her work investigates the continuum continuum of extractivism, which spans from settler colonial genocide and slavery to fossil fuel production. Elaine Gan is someone I've known for around seven to eight years. She is an artist theorist and professor who teaches at Wesleyan University in the science and society pro science in society program. That's a, that's a, you'll have to tell us about that. She's co editor of an interdisciplinary anthology arts of living on a damaged planet, ghosts and monsters of the Anthropocene from Minnesota in 2017. And she directs a multi species world building lab and experimental podcast about climate change. So, I'm super thrilled and both of you will speak for about 20 minutes. Let's ask the first question. I hope that you'll ask each other questions so that it becomes a conversation. And we're also very happy to take questions from the audience as well and Adam will moderate moderate that through the through the zoom interface. Okay. So, Imani take it away. Thank you so much Laura, Adam and Lane it's a pleasure to be here in conversation with you. So, as Laura said my work investigates the continuum of extractivism which stands from settler colonial genocide and slavery to contemporary environmental injustice and climate change. Extractivism is a cosmology, which is to say that it's a worldview that holds capitalist accumulation value in the form of wealth as its chief principle. To extract value agents of extractivism, apply the force of segregation to divide and conquer existence, segregating human beings from our wider ecologies and black bodies from the body of humanity. So the continuum of extractivism comes into visibility in the US state of Louisiana, my homeland. And we can trace it by tracking the fossil fuel production cycle in reverse. So we begin here in Louisiana coastal wetlands, the coastal zone, where over 10,000 miles of canals have been dredged in order to drill over 90,000 reach oil and gas deep within the earth. This graph which I captured in January of last year by a three passenger propeller plane, you can perhaps just make out New Orleans, the Crescent City against this smog covered horizon. We're looking here at the Lafitte oil field, once one of the most productive sources of oil and gas in the state, which offered one of the most productive sweets of oil and gas fields in the US. And the Lafitte oil field is one of the sites with the highest rates of coastal erosion in the state. And indeed Louisiana bears one of the highest rates of coastal erosion in the world, a rate of one football field American football field every 45 minutes. As a result of these oil and gas now we have lost over 2000 square miles and counting of our precious land since oil was first discovered in the 1930s. These oil and gas canals have a myriad of ecological impact. They impact more than human communities by allowing salt water to funnel in from the Gulf of Mexico. The salt is ushered into brackish and freshwater wetlands killing the vegetation that holds sediment together as land that sediment then disintegrates out into the Gulf of Mexico. Over time, even the spoil bank the artificial levees created by the placement of dredged sediment on either side of the recently dredged canal starts to fragment into the sea so here you see photographs of these canals, where even the canals themselves are becoming increasingly indecipherable. On the right, we see the impact of a hurricane passing over this canal network wetlands author a very critical function and the protection of more than human coastal communities from the impact of the more frequent and powerful storms rolling in off the Gulf of Mexico. Healthy wetlands actually absorb energy from these hurricanes, slowing them down, decreasing their force, but these fragmented and desiccated wetlands are hit with this bomb forth of the hurricane and quite literally explode. From the 90,000 oil and gas wells in Louisiana's wetlands over 50,000 miles of pipeline stretch upriver to a region known as the petrochemical corridor. Here there are over 200 of the nation's most polluting petrochemical plants tank farms and oil refineries producing a myriad of products including fertilizer, which is produced here at the mosaic aggregate plant in Donaldsonville, Louisiana, as well as of course aviation fuel and a myriad of plastic. Each of these facilities actually stands a top. At least one and usually several now fallow formally slave powered antebellum sugar cane plantation. And each one of these plantations is at least one burial ground that holds the remains of historically enslaved people. So we can find these burial grounds by them groves of trees, such as this one here. So this continuum of extractivism is, you know, not a concept that I've just pulled out of thin air in fact it is first articulated by the state itself, not only so many words. This issue of the Louisiana conservation review a magazine put out by the State Department of Natural Resources houses very interesting anecdote, buried in a 1938 edition of the magazine. It says the first chapter in the romantic history of natural gas in Louisiana begins with a picture of 15 husky Negro slaves laboriously toiling under a crude tripod on the banks of the. River at Bermuda 10 miles south of Natchitoches. And we can start to see actually the beginning of this algorithmic governance that has been adopted and perfected by the fossil fuel industry. The early era of enslavement with these documents that they call schedules, early spreadsheets that are documenting the death rate of enslaved people on the plantation, the production of agricultural products per plantation, and calculating tabulating the number of enslaved people held on each plantation often with no more than a tick mark to indicate a human life. Today we have these oil and gas permits that map the trajectory of new pipelines and canal networks. Here's one from the colonial pipeline company again self articulating the fact that the fossil fuel industry is air to the era of. To the logics and logistics of colonialism and slavery. And these permits actually go further to calculate the amount of land that would last per acre of wetland dredged in order to create a canal layer pipeline. So I wanted to bring more clarity more visibility to more legibility actually to these these this fossil fuel production cycle and the continuum of extractivism. And so I worked with a good friend and colleagues got used to set healthy golf to get access to the data sets available. At the Louisiana Department of Natural Resources for quite a long time, they have all the permits for oil and gas canals and pipelines that they call coastal use permits available online. As of April of 2021, those are no longer publicly accessible for still unclear reason, but thankfully I was able to download all of these data sets before they disappeared, and I spent most of the pandemic sorting them by company. Here you can see the inside of my QJS quantum geographic information systems it's a free open source software that I learned to use during my master studies, dividing all of this kind of mesh of hundreds of thousands of lines each representing the coordinate expressed in a permit. And all of these permits are issued to over 100 oil and gas companies that are going through a constant process of acquisition, merger and succession. So I wanted to take all of this data and make it available to the Louisiana public because I realized that there was no way for folks to really grasp the immense scale of operations and devastation, nor to really understand the specific role and responsibility of fossil fuel corporation. So I use this software called map box. This is also free to use up to a certain point. And I imported all of this data and I use corporate logos to map the oil wells of all of the carbon majors and other prolific corporations in Louisiana. And I was really excited to find one pipeline that served as the perfect narrative device to enable this us to traverse the wet, the fossil fuel production cycle from this cluster of wells in the wetlands called the Chevron oil. Sorry, the Chevron wagon wheel, which is so called because there are a number of circular canals that are transmitted by over 50 folks. And the circular canals are actually tracing the sub-aqueous geology, these salt domes that actually squeeze up through strata of sand underneath the surface and form the architecture around which oil and gas fields pool. And so these corporations finding the most cost effective way to access oil and gas decided to dredge all around the perimeter of said salt dome. Chevron predecessor corporations dredge most of those wells and over time they all became a part of Chevron holding. And we continue through this platform up to the Lofi oil field where users can see the an example of a well permit which was issued by the state to Texaco formerly the Texas company now actually Chevron for a mere $50. And we can actually start to see the dollar value of oil extracted from each well over a sample of just 20 years. So I was able to access a sample of 250 wells that had production data over a 20 year period. And I was able to calculate that adjusting the amount to inflation calculate the dollar value of oil extracted from each well over time. Converting each of these figures into dollar coins, we can then start to step back and get a sense of the vast quantities of wealth extracted from all of these well extracted from Louisiana, which mind you is the second poorest and perhaps incidentally perhaps not the second blackest state in the United States. And we're cutting now across the narrative and it carries us to the petrochemical corridor. To the terminus that mosaic agricultural, we skipped over the whole part where it really goes into the deep history of slavery on this land and showing how the oil and gas industry has inherited these their logics and legacies. But ultimately here it culminates with the legal doctrine of unjust enrichment, which says that profits that are made by one entity. One profits are made by an entity by impoverishing another entity those profits are unjust and need to be restituted. The platform ends there. And my work, excuse me, my work then continues on from that point through a collaboration with forensic architecture, an investigation called environmental racism and death alley in Louisiana. The region called the petrochemical corridor has also been known over the decade. First, it's cancer alley due to the fact that the residents there bear some of the highest cancer risks in the US due to the massive quantities of carcinogens released by these facilities. Recently, local fence line community activist group rising James, along with the concerns citizens of St. John the Baptist parish renamed the region. And we at forensic architecture thought that this was a really key framing concept for this continuum of extracted violence, the fact that death has been the chief product of industry in this region since the era of slavery. So in order to express the state of this investigation, I will pass the mic over to right St. James. My name is Sharon Levine. I'm the director and founder of right St. James, right here in St. James parish, and we are here to commemorate the greatest of our enslaved ancestors. And we're going to stand together and we're going to fight for most. We will not allow them to take our ancestors out of this ground and put them somewhere else. We are right St. James and we're going to stand up for St. James Perry. This is our home. We're not going anywhere. So more so have a fight on their hands. Yeah. So, as Sharon Levine, one of our key partners articulated a new company has decided to move in to the petrochemical corridor into deaf alley. They want to construct a 3.5 square miles. They're going to have a 3.5 square miles. They're going to have a 4.5 square miles. and members of Ryde St. James, including Sharon, including Gail Mabuff, had been saying from the beginning that there were burial grounds on that site. Ryde St. James and the Center for Constitutional Rights teamed up with an archaeologist, Don Hunter, and looked into the cartographic record and were able to find evidence that indeed there were three burial grounds on Formosa site, and also one additional burial ground on the adjacent facility ground owned by Mobe, which is where the pipeline in my mapping project terminated. So forensic architecture was asked to intervene to bring visibility to the contemporary conditions that residents of St. James and other parishes in the river district of Louisiana are being subjected to by existing industry and the threats that they would face if Formosa and other pending plants were actually given construction permission. We began by working with Imperial College London to visualize the emission of six criteria and toxic air pollutants from 33 facilities within a 60 kilometer area. This 3D fluid dynamic simulation looks at three different prevailing wind conditions on three different days and simulates the movement of those particulates, both carcinogens and PM 2.5 particulate matter, which have a range of impacts on the respiratory endocrine reproductive system. And it shows that, you know, for the majority of the time, the emissions are directly overhanging majority black communities. But importantly, in certain wind conditions, those clean shift direction and are also substituting majority white communities who themselves have voted against construction in their own neighborhood voted for construction a majority black community. So it really helps to reveal a key key that Sharon Levine likes to say and it's that toxic air does not obey political borders. From here, we knew that we needed to travel back in time in order to locate burial grounds and so we source maps from the US Coast Survey and the Mississippi River Commission. From 1878, 1894, these are post-bellum maps, but they help to bring visibility to the calcified land use practices that are actually still largely in place today. So we scoured these maps and we learn the spatial logic that dictated the organization of the typological sugarcane plantation in the lower Mississippi River Delta. On some of these maps, anti-bellum cemeteries are actually maps, albeit using an inconsistent symbology. And then we pulled aerial photographs from six decades starting with the 1940 aerial image set, which was the most important because it was the closest to the end of the cartographic map series that we found. So it enabled us to continue our spatial analysis into the 20th century to the point right before the advent of the petrochemical era. And here we were able to identify a number of, we were able to travel forward in time from the 1940s then into the petrochemical era up to today, bringing us up to the present when satellite imagery takes over. So in these maps and aerial photographs, we were able to identify where burial grounds were in the post-bellum map and see what they looked like in contemporary satellite imagery, mostly appearing as you saw in that photograph at the beginning of my talk in the form of groves of trees. And indeed we were able to identify over 1000 sites that need to be that demand further ground research and careful archaeological survey to determine whether these are possible burial sites or sites of otherwise cultural and historic significance, for example, the remains of the ruins of the slave quarter and sugar mill complex. Those over 1000 sites that we identified in the 1940 aerial mosaic have been reduced to just over 300 sites by the time we get to the contemporary satellite images. And that's because many of these sites and this is a sample of six groves that are highly likely to be anti-bellum black burial grounds based on their location in relation to the slave quarters and other structures on site. They have been over time encroached upon by industrial development or otherwise ongoing plowing over the course of the last decade. And this plight, this practice of erasure of black cultural, spiritual, and historic sites also applies to black communities. Fence line community, excuse me, three town communities that grew up adjacent to the sites of their former enslavement have become today's fence line communities, like the community of lions here, which has been encroached upon by marathon petroleum companies, Corporation and Cargill Inc., which now owns almost all of the lands of the former lions community and has completely surrounded through historic cemeteries. These ones here actually have crypts on site indicating that these are likely anti-bellum cemeteries that remained in continuous use in the post-bellum era. And somehow, there somehow marathon petroleum corporation actually owns a quarter of one of these cemeteries. I tried to gain access to these two cemeteries when I was last home, but the public road has been blocked off by the corporation. And finally, we, and when I say we, I mean your colleague, Salman and Malachi, brilliantly use software called Graf Hopper, in order to factor in all of these different spatial logics that we identified in our research, in order to determine which areas of the 60 kilometer area, which portions of the plantation are most likely to hold anti-bellum cemeteries. And so we were able to place our anomalies identified in the 1940 aerial set on top of those, on top of that probability field, and place it in relation to, in this kind of gray outlined in red, planned industrial development in order to see which possible anti-bellum burial sites are at most risk from the continued encroachment of harmful industry. And this work has now been used in various legal suits, including an ongoing legal suit against green field development, which is trying to construct an industrial grain terminal, exactly on this site here. And, most recently, a Louisiana judge responding to the demands of Sherry Maureen and other local residents that, you know, their ancestral land, their communities, their living communities not being paroled by this development. The judge actually said that the land that has been worked by historically enslaved people that has been watered by the blood, sweat, and tears of them is sacred. Unfortunately, because Louisiana is under civil rather than common law, there is no precedent set by this legal decision, but it is impactful all the same because, most importantly, it opens on to a realm of value that is not computable, that is incalculable, much like when we have conversations about the loss and damages as a result of environmental degradation and climate change, we have to grapple with the fact that the harm caused by the fossil fuel industry, the harm caused by slavery is utterly incalculable. So, when we make demand for reparations, when we use computational analysis to make demand for the repair of harm done through financial settlement, we have to understand that that financial settlement can only help to improve the condition of life for the living. It is not to be all an end all. Ultimately, we need something much more. What we need is a new value system, a new cosmology that actually works against the violence of segregation that conceives of ecological reintegration with our more than human communities that reintegrates black human beings within the body of humanity, reintegrates race humanity within our wider ecological bodies. And only then can we start to repair the harm that has been done through this, this, the continuum of extractivism over the past 300 years and set ourselves on a new course for the future. Thank you. Thanks so much. Emani. And so Elaine. Welcome. Hi everyone thanks so much Emani for powerful, really powerful presentation. Thank you so much for the invitation to speak. Excited to be in conversation with Laura, Laura's practice has really inspired my own for many years. So it's a real gift to be here. Thank you. I work in the fields. Actually, let me share my screen. All right. I work in the fields of feminist science and technology studies or STS environmental humanities and digital arts. I don't see those as a distinct fields but as porous and reciprocal methods for engaging with complicated phenomena. I don't see the arts or my creative practice as an end product of what comes after research, rather it's very much something that shapes the research. So I see art as a method. I am going to talk about crops. These are likely not the first things that come to mind when you think about computation. So I'm going to walk you through some of my work with two particular crops. The first is a flowering grass that most of us here call rice. Over the last 10,000 years different varieties of rice, we can call them cultivars for short. Different varieties have co-evolved with people species, machines and landscapes. They now feed half of the people in the world. They cover about a quarter of the world's land surface, and they're one of the largest sources of methane, which is a greenhouse gas. The second crop is the American chestnut tree once dominant in forests of the eastern United States. It's now nearly extinct, but it's returning in the form of a transgenic crop in the next few years. So I consider these two crops as living organisms that are also techno scientific machines, as well as data. And by that I mean their genomes that are sequence edited and patented. Those are hybrid beings, and they call for hybrid modes of critical inquiry and creative analysis. So what happens to these two crops has huge impacts on how we live and die, yet we know little about them and the assemblages through which they come into being. So I'm going to start with rice. In 1960, the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations launched the International Rice Research Institute, or IRI in the Philippines, a former colony of the United States and Spain. Learning from experiments with wheat in Mexico, scientists at IRI developed what was called miracle rice or new varieties of fast growing high yielding crops. The chemical rice relied on what were called modern inputs or a new package of imported chemical fertilizers. It would be interesting to see actually how many of those come from Louisiana, and the petrochemical corridor that Imani just mentioned. But they relied on imported chemical fertilizers, pesticides, irrigation networks, and of course, farm work loads. And it was well coined and it's stuck. IRI 36, the most widely planted varieties seemed supernatural. It's yields were six times more than the average yield of one to three tons per hectare. And its grains were ripe for harvest in 100 days. That's less than half the time of many local varieties. So by the early 1970s, miracle rice varieties were all over Southeast Asian fields. This switch from local varieties or land races exchange between our collectives to miracle rice distributed by crop institutes and government agencies was called a green revolution. This leading because it actually was a turn to industrialized Western facing food science and agro technology. Scientists like to say that rice was or is the engine of this green revolution. But what keeps rice in place is a belief in productivity or yield calculations of yield, which means the highest number of grains in the shortest amount of time became the primary metric, the primary measure for a successful cultivar. This meant that rice breeders could develop a list of key traits, a kind of algorithm for producing what could then be tracked as better and better cultivars. So this algorithm. Now a material expression of a belief in yield now defines and drives most of the world's monoculture monoculture monoculture fields and infrastructure. This algorithm is visible in the bodies of today's rice plants. They are short, they have sturdy stems or stalks and they have upright leaves, they have larger brains to name just a few of these trends. That algorithm and these crops give shape to many of the fields, many of the fields, like you're seeing here around the world. What is less visible is the erosion of genetic diversity in rice fields. This loss or the disappearance of local farmer land races also defines rice fields today. So we'll take a look at some of these kind of absences. So writing about rice in Indonesia and anthropologist James Fox made a striking diagram of genetic erosion or the loss of biodiversity. So I'm going to walk you through this diagram quickly. Fox traced back to one parent called China. It's a Chinese variety grown in Java in 1914. That's the yellow highlight on the upper left, and then moving towards the right, you're going to see various crossings made between 1940 and 1980. The crossing of China with a Bengali variety, Latin cell by the Dutch Indonesian breeding program in 1940 is one of the most significant events in crop histories, the crossing produce sturdy stem quick growing varieties, one of which was called 20 years later, but that was crossed with a short Taiwanese variety made a DGWG that crossing produced I or eight the first miracle rice from Erie. By 1975, half of Philippine rice fields were planted with genetic derivatives of China. By 1981, more than three quarters of Philippine rice fields were planted to the same Erie varieties. 90% of those fields were sewn with just one variety. And that was IR 36, which you see on the screen. So genetic erosion, coupled with a heavy reliance of the inputs like fertilizers, they're not going to get into today. But genetic erosion turned fields into factories, putting significant pressure on long standing coordination between people and multi species assemblages. A factory schedule came to be inscribed onto rice fields. So production manuals for rice reduced its life cycle as a plant into the single timeline that you see here. So instead of multiple temporalities operated rice fields you suddenly get one point in time that matters and that's the time of harvest. So the shift to monoculture or monotemporality had disastrous effects. So multi species assemblages responded to these new pressures. Ordinary insects that live with rice, like the brown plant hopper that you see on the left side of your screen flourish with the explosion of chemicals and genetically similar plants. So what you see on the right side of your screen is actually now rice fields that are that have what's called hopper. Bacteria fungi and viruses also evolved relentlessly. So breeders pathologist and other scientists at Erie now describe their work as a kind of arms race, quote unquote. And it's an arms race against these more than human agencies. We can say that these arms races are now what's reshaping and recomposing our crops. So the reduction of rice as a living plant into a food producing machine has huge effects. We inherit them live, live in and consume those effects, which we can perhaps call the yield based algorithms of the Green Revolution. So I'm going to leave rice fields for now. And I'm going to shift to the second crop, which brings us closer to where we are today in the east coast of the United States. This second crop the American chestnut elaborates on computation in a different way. What you're seeing on the screen is the American chestnut tree. And I first became intrigued with this tree in 2019. This is a mushroom walk with the New York Mycological Society in Cassana Park and Flushing Queens which used to be the center of horticulture in the United States. So one of the club's best mycologists on this walk, whose name is Tom Bigelow, casually mentioned that we were foraging on the former grounds of plant nurseries that had supplied the trees for New York's first parks. That includes Central Park in Manhattan and Prospect Park in Brooklyn, designed as some of you know by Frederick Olmsted and Calvin Ful. In the 19th century, there was huge interest in exotic ornamental trees from Asia. Also the year of colonialism course. Nursery shipments to Queens included Chinese and Japanese varieties. So inadvertently the shipments carried this hitchhiker. It's a bright orange fungus. Which American chestnuts had never evolved immunity. So in less than 50 years, billions of American chestnuts succumbed to fungal blight. What had been known as the beloved Queen of Forests is now nearly extinct. It's considered functionally extinct in the Eastern United States. So these are some of the photos that I've just found online to show how massive the trees were. The mushroom club and I were walking in the presence of ghosts. These were the ghosts of American chestnuts under lost multi species companions. And I wanted to meet them. So over the next few months I pieced together accounts of the blight and efforts to control the spread. The biologists and foresters I learned that the fungus releases an oxalic acid that seeps into the tree through breaks in the bark, enabling the fungus to eat its way through, and eventually strangled parts of the tree growing above ground. Now bacteria in the soil keeps the fungus at bay protecting the roots. So one tree at a time forest canopies changed, while tree roots underground remained intact. Now from historians and humanists, I read of the impact on people's livelihoods as blight swept through Maine to Mississippi and all along the Appalachus. So from indigenous scholars, like Neil Patterson, who's a member of the exploration nation and also director of the Center for Native Peoples of the environment that's soon in Syracuse. So from indigenous scholars I learned that the devastation of chestnut forest coincided with longer histories of genocide, dispossession and the forest assimilations of native peoples, particularly the Haudenosaunee confederacy, including the six nations of the Onondaga, the Mohawk, the Seneca, the Cayuga, Oneida and Tuscarora. So these are maps from Neil Patterson showing those overlaps of Haudenosaunee and chestnut assemblages up until the 18th century. By the early 1900s, American chestnut trees were dying, they were becoming ghosts as if in solidarity with the silence languages, the dismembered bodies, and the repressed dances and dream worlds that once animated and inhabited them. The livelihoods that were being lost to blight in the 20th century were those of Dutch and British settlers and more recent immigrants from Ireland and Germany, who had left behind crop failures, famine and disease in search of better futures on this side of the Atlantic. So loss is differential and even and unjust. So the question arises then, with whose loss and whose grief should I or we engage? And for whom would this work matter? As I dug deeper and learned that a different trajectory had opened in the 1990s, geneticists at SUNY ESF, it's College of Environmental Science and Forestry experimented with ways to bring the trees back. This is Bill Powell of Powell Lab at ESF. And he led this group that's kind of solved the puzzle over the next two decades, opening up a path to de extinction or chestnut restoration. Using bacteria to introduce a blight tolerant gene from wheat into chestnut embryos, they genetically modified the American chestnut, giving it the ability to produce oxalic oxidase. It's a protein that can detoxify the fungus's oxalic acid. So this transgenic embryo was named Darling 58, which is what you see on your screen here. They're the Darling demonstration trees. They were named Darling 58 in honor of its first backer. So the long process of securing government approval has begun. To deregulate the transgenic tree teams have been testing analyzing and computing multiple variables and field stations, experimental plots and labs and you're seeing some of those here from field work in 2021. The agencies now oversee this move for deregulation. That's a Department of Agriculture, the EPA and the Food and Drug Administration, which in itself is an index of the trees ontological multiplicity as a crop as a companion species and as food approval from all agencies would permit what's called open release and that means plantings of the Darling trees in lands where they can cross freely, right, they can cross with a few remaining American chestnut trees that have managed to survive in the wild. That ideally would produce some blight tolerant offspring while maintaining genetic diversity. So ESF has not patented the tree and they haven't sought to privatize it. These are there are close ties between ESF and the American Chestnut Foundation, which connects volunteers in 30 chapters in states like New York, New Jersey and Connecticut. What I mean is to give the transgenic chestnuts away so it's to circulate them and have the transgenics freely make their way find their own companions without human monitoring. So government approval for this is expected within the next five years. So the chestnut tree being once the dominant tree is kind of going to significantly impact the forest that it's going to now be introduced to. And here really with a call to participate. So crops like rice and the American Chestnut embody different computational logics and more than human agencies and crops cover a significant part of the world. So how they live and die matters greatly, and they require new kinds of methods, algorithms and modes of representation, as well as cultivation. These processes with rice and chestnuts that I've described are ongoing, and they're parts of huge projects, which I can get to in discussion. I'm able to trace how they work in order to imagine how to farm and feed other rice. Thank you very much. Okay, thanks so much, both of you. I cannot put an amazing dialogue between between these two presentations and, you know, such kind of different, different and similar uses of of computation and and the understanding of the of the harm that that computation has done in the past to do the measuring and transformation and algorithms that are ruining things, but at the same time using some of those same tools to recapture and reclaim and to bring and to bring diversity back. So Imani I think you know it was so powerful how you showed. It was almost I often tell my students you know you don't just look at data you have a hunch about the data and the trees where the burial sites were is was, you know, only something that a local that a local community knows and understands right in relation to this larger landscape and so the imperative to actually put that on a map to do whatever it you know to to start the reparations in the future. And then, you know, the same with you Elaine the, the, you know, just the, the efficiency of the factory rice, and then the death of the trees but in some ways using that same DNA the DNA methods to revive and to re diversify and to diversify the forest to fresh so I don't know I just wonder if you have questions for one another about about methods because there's so many. There's so many similar themes but you come at it from such different disciplinary angles. In terms of how you make that how you make things because you know Elaine I know you actually make projects. You know with computation but this one is so much more analytical and going into the background of how things are made. And the same with you and money. To start perhaps just one quick clarification, or perhaps a nuance and wrinkle in the understanding of how the burial grounds were located so one of the biggest problems in Louisiana about all of these former plantations remain private property. In fact, there is not a way for locals to investigate all of these sites on the ground on their own, it would require the permission of the land owner, many of whom are industrial, you know, corporations developers many of whom have their properties on the market for industrial development and are seeking industrial development on that property. And many others, you know, who are who are you know just maintaining you know contemporary agricultural corporations and all want to be disrupted by the discovery of any kind of a cultural site on their property, which would impede their own plan for industrial development. So, there is really, you know, very little incentive for property owners in Louisiana to grant access to local residents and local residents have in fact been chased off properties by men and pick up trucks with shotguns as you know it's done. So, you know, the first the knowledge that there are burial grounds on these plantations is definitely very deeply held where they are, and, and how to find them remain, you know, an ongoing research question for, you know, the few remaining local genealogy. They know that sometimes they can find burial grounds and overgrowing plots, but there is a deeper reality and reason for these plots to be vegetated to actually hold trees of really specific species like Magnolia and and it's because in place people planted those trees to mark those gravesite. And this is some knowledge that is not so it's it's not so widely known any longer something that yeah lost over time and is actively being recovered. That's, well, yeah, that's even more powerful than that you're actually bringing that knowledge back through the same mechanisms which you know which erase it through the same processes. Yeah. Elaine do you have any questions? Yeah, I think maybe just to add, I was quite interested in, you know, interdisciplinary sources, where you go to find data for things that have been made invisible, right, or that have been erased. So I think looking to alternatives for future crops, or future ways of feeding or building the world, right. And so I'm quite interested in collaborations. Another thing that I did not mention is these rice fields actually have both the miracle rice varieties commercial varieties, as well as traditional varieties right so it's not a past that's ended and now introduction of new kinds of varieties in very many ways as those coexist. And so there's a kind of the use of genetic sequencing to actually find out what how are these working together, how are these claims for yield actually substantiated. And so I think kind of, as you said Laura again of the very same tools of computation that have led to these environmental degradations, how to kind of repurpose them in order to look for new kinds of collaborations I think those are hugely interesting. Yeah, scientists at the rice research Institute, and very, very different conditions from from what Imani is working with. But for me it's kind of thinking about, you know, breeders and geneticists and do we have frameworks for actually thinking about the complicated realities that now make up our landscape. So I think things are coexisting. They're not one in the past and now we get to kind of move into a clean slate, right, or they're really messy and we've got to find ways of articulating. Right. I'm trying to think of how to ask this question Elaine like, I wonder how you feel about the transgenic has met as we think about the very rich and complex, you know, human and plant matrices that make up the, you know, the path of this plant and its relationship with, you know, indigenous peoples in the area, and we think about trying to bring it back through, you know, genetic, you know, manipulation. You know, it's, there are so many questions that come up in terms of, you know, how like, what is this plant like what is this chestnut can it really be said to be the like regenerated, you know, chestnut of old. What does it mean to have a human kind of, you know, like the human footprint or like, you know, like, like, fingerprint on another species and its existence right it's genetic existence it's ability to like be in the world I guess I wonder. You know, and of course, there, there is so much, you know, there, there are attempts to experiment, you know, with manipulating human genes and it's incredibly ethically, you know, fraud, right, but not so much so with non human species and so I just wonder how you, you know, kind of these these different questions and and yeah like ethical kind of conundrums but also kind of like I guess eco philosophical kind of conundrums. Yeah, I should mention that there is also a transgenic rice. It's called golden rice and that has actually been approved and is set for release in the Philippines also the next five years. So where do I stand and I, I think as a researcher who thinks critically and also creatively. My position is actually that we need to get involved in these conversations that it's difficult to use the same critiques of the past to think about these novel organisms that are getting approved. So many of the fields and rice, many of the rice fields and also for us are so disturbed are so degraded that in order for something to survive. They need a huge amount of fertilizers for example. So organisms come with their worlds and they come with their assemblages. I think my position is, how do we kind of embark on the kind of projects that I think you're doing right how do we actually situate them how do we map out all their different entanglements. So we can start to see if it gets planted in this location. For whom are we actually planting it. I think those are really specific questions that we haven't even started to ask. We're still at this kind of binary of traditional varieties are perhaps good and fertilizer dependent ones or transgenics are bad or perhaps the reverse. So we kind of address the whole spectrum of assemblages that are now getting introduced. Again anthropogenic disturbance is so widespread that we need more sophisticated ways of collaborating and working across different kinds of institutions. So if I have a solution, I have much more of a call to pay attention to these indeterminacies, and how do we map those indeterminacies and erasures. How do we make more complex connections visible. So we can make decisions moving forward. I think I think it's a very it's a it's a super long debate that would that could ensue from from the from, yeah, from the from the positions. So, yes, yes. Okay, we have many questions from the audience. How do we I'll just kind of queue some up so I'm upset I said it live on accident. So I have a question from Diogo here that I'll just read out it says hi thank you very much for your presentation. I have a question to a money. How are you managing data rights of archival material into open source archives databases that allow this information to be accessible to the communities and allow future processes of reparations to be developed supported many thanks. In terms of data rights. I mean like so a lot of the materials because of their age are, you know now in the public domain. The problem with them is how to where they live in the world like, you know, and how to kind of collate them and bring them all together in one place. So for example, you know, slave schedules are actually now all owned, as well as like the very sentences are are owned by these. Like, not 23 and me like these kind of like ancestry comm type corporations and you can access them all for free, and you can download them and they're the new archive of, you know, this, this information which is quite bizarre so it's nice to kind of you know, remove and reorganize those materials from one space to another actually, you know, like a data repository is one goal of the project that hasn't yet been actualized. There's a whole range of slave narratives a project that was conducted by the Works Progress Administration in 1939 1940 with, you know, the kind of last living people who were enslaved in their lifetime and those were all supposed to be passed over to the Library of Congress and so they're all public access except for some reason the Louisiana documents never made it to the Library of Congress which is quite typical if you know anything about Louisiana. So not surprising but like that's an effort of trying to like go through all the various institutions that now hold those and bring them together. So in the radiological report, you know that we also use as a key resource are held by the Louisiana Division archaeology, but they're inaccessible. They're supposed to be public access publicly accessible, but in order to access them, you have to prove to them that you are quote unquote legitimate researcher, which means, ultimately that local residents are often barred from getting access. So these are, I mean, like kind of major systemic issues with, you know, data access there's you know one can say like that such and such a material, the maps as well I mean it's like really a matter of who has archived them, where are they how can you access them even if they are ostensibly publicly accessible doesn't mean that you can actually get your hands on them so yeah it's a big issue and I think in terms of the question for about reparations. So there's a local genealogist Lenora Gobert has been trying to trace the individual to our actually within the burial plots through court records and church records and it's the same situation where you know sometimes will be granted access and sometimes, you know, you will not and it really depends on, you know, like, sometimes, which, you know, archivist, you know which person you speak with. But there's a lot of systemic racism kind of encrusted in these archival organizations that prevent this kind of work. So, so yeah, like, I mean, kind of democratizing access to these types of materials getting you once hands on them and then making them, you know, holding them in one place and making them accessible is like we do a lot of work toward supporting struggles for reparations. Here's a question for Elaine. I come from a state that continues to follow agricultural policies rooted in colonial sorts of monoculture, and it's become detrimental to both socio economic conditions and soil quality degradation. How would you show the opportunities in different types of agriculture and address it at a policy level. Wow, that's yeah. Yes, big question. I can talk about, I'm not sure where you're from. But I can talk specifically about location in the Philippines, for example, where we are collaborating with the Philippine rice researchers and breeders and also local farmers. We're trying to compare how actually farmer land races do all inputs and outputs considered versus monoculture fields and how they do. Surprisingly, those kinds of studies had never been done, because it was always assumed that the output that grain yield was the single measure and that modern varieties, meaning these commercial varieties were the way to go. Nobody had had has done extensive studies on what actually the ecological relations are with farmer land races. So, collaborating with somebody who's trying to genetically sequence the fungal ecologies microbial ecologies of land races, and using that as, as collecting data, right. Also, former collectives who are calling for a return of their land races. So to start to use those data to then intervene with policy level. The government of the Philippines actually started a new program where they're giving out free seeds. The seeds are giving out are the ones that are associated with high yield, because they need to give farmers income. So we can show that all things considered working with farmer land races actually have kind of these sorts of, let's say benefits, you know, to use a really loaded word, then we can start to intervene at the local level, and maybe start to distribute seeds that have more kind of, you know, better ways of working with the landscapes. Sorry, that's just trying to answer your super big question but please email me are really happy to talk about this more, but trying to answer just from from my, my experience. I have a, I have another question here from Dan Miller this question is to both of you. So when researching through or alongside historical and spatial visualization. How do you think about integrating methodological narrative and what you publish and present. Another way of putting this might be, how do your maps visualizations diagrams also teach a viewer about how they're made about their tenant sources assumptions possibilities and about how you practice. So to give like one, I think, pretty clear example with these navigational charts. So, first of all, you know, we were trying to find cartographic resources that would help us to, you know, recover, you know, the spatial and spatial planning to keep out of plantations. In order to do so, you know, we located and we were told to look at these postbellum maps so like, what does that mean it means that in order to understand the, you know, the organization of slave plantations we had to go to a suit like a set of resources that were actually produced after slavery had already ended. They were produced during a period called reconstruction, which actually quite literally means plantations were undergoing major socio economic upheaval and restructuring that men in many cases that the slave quarters sugar mills other structures on the site where in the move closer to the river because newly emancipated people were not interested in living a mile and a half deep in the middle of sugar cane fields and so you start to and as you kind of peruse these maps you realize that you're looking at three areas kind of held simultaneously. You have some plantations that still maintain an anti balance spatial layout with the slave quarters and sugar mill at the center of the plantation along the central axis. You have some where those slave quarters have been moved closer to the river as formerly enslaved people are now working as tenant farmers on that property. The sugar mills start to become consolidated so they disappear and you see one sugar mill with, you know, with two other plantations with no sugar mill on them so they become sugar factories. So you realize that, you know, in a way like you have to kind of look at the entire suite of maps at one time. And in order to understand the antebellum, you know, late like layout, you have to understand what it is you're looking for and you have to eliminate the postbellum characteristics from your analysis. And so it requires, you know, it requires you to have an understanding of plantation organization that, you know, comes from resources beyond the cartographic records you have to speak to historians you have to do quite a bit of reading you have to look at various, you know, agricultural schedules and so on and so forth. So cartographic resources in any type of archival material any any any type of, you know, cartographic record, you know, is going to be extremely limited as you say has been produced, you know, to achieve a certain aim in this case actually parting the Mississippi and the plantations along, you know, either side of the river banks are somewhat incidental, the burial grounds on them even more incidental, you have to realize that as these maps were being kind of were being drawn, they were drawn by surveyors who actually travels from plantation to plantation along the river. Over the course of many years, many seasons where the conditions on site with a very dramatically, if it were flooding, would he have actually gone and visited this one plantation maybe they're in data from that plantation. If it was too hot when he has made it two miles back in the middle of sugar cane fields to find this burial ground. There's no landowner if that slave master has been, you know, economically ruined by emancipation, leaving, and now vacant property would he have been granted access at all. Sometimes he would have encountered, you know, perhaps, you know, a sharecropper, who, you know, happened to point out, oh, there's a burial ground, you know, two miles deep into these fields. So the cartographic record is really, you know, just a record of, you know, one kind of person's journey, their access their contacts, the environmental conditions, like all of these, you know, incredibly complex factors that are then kind of drawn as a matter of fact that have become the historic record. And in reality, it's incredibly fragmented. And I guess like the most kind of faulty kind of aspect of the map is their attempt to hold the Mississippi River in place. The river is constantly evolving. And you can actually see this when you georeference the map on top of a satellite image, you can see where, you know, the river was in 1878 and where it is now and it does shift, even with the levees to try to constrict it. So, you know, there are a lot of precepts and assumptions that kind of go into the drawing of these maps. And in order for them to be of any value, you have to be aware of them, right? And you have to be able to read through them. And then you can really monitor for an incredible amount of information about how people at that time were thinking, you know, we're operating and we're inscribing those assumptions, those logic into the earth itself. Okay. Elaine, do you remember the question? Yeah, I think it's another really big question. I can give a really short answer, which is that how I made decisions on, I think, which to present. So I should say the Rice project is about a 10 year project. So there's tons and tons of materials. I chose the one that actually kind of fit Lauren Adams prompt, which is to think about computation. And I also decided to present their research, rather than the projects that are kind of, you know, the visual projects that have come out of this research. It's just, it's a 20 minute presentation and yeah, I had to pick whether to do the research side so I could really talk about the logic of yield and the algorithms that go into creating physical forms that we see in our fields and forests. I think choosing, I think, for me and this may be a larger conversation also with Imani, I think choosing a point of view and a voice that's really situated. I'm very careful about satellite views or maps, which were used in colonial projects in order to tax farmers in order to translate lives into machines for profit. So those are, I think, primary considerations when I, you know, when I do present the materials just locating myself and kind of trying to enter the conversation in a, you know, kind of very humble way. Yeah. Okay, I think, I think I'm going to, there are so many really interesting questions here so I think I'm going to, Adam we can assemble these and email them to Imani and Elaine because I think they'll be interesting for you and if you feel motivated then please, you know, then please respond otherwise, you know, the students who are in the audience, at least you know we will, we can have conversations regarding your questions in class because I know a lot of, a lot of my students are here that, you know, there's, there's generally, there's, there's generally other formats so please email me if there's something that you really really want to have answered that I can also try and answer. Okay. So these are easy to capture right. Yep, definitely. And thanks everyone to put these are really great. Yeah, sorry, we can't get to all of them. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. All right, so we have to move on because thank you so much, Imani and Elaine and I hope we, we stay, we stay in touch and Imani when you do come to New York you can come to the center and see our historical New York City project because we've dealt with like mounds of historical historical kinds of data that I think might interest you in relation to your to that historical work you're doing in Louisiana. But I know that Farzan and Sam Sam is in Australia, very late at night and Farzan's in Athens, attending to a show that he's just opened. So welcome. So Farzan is, is going to yeah and feel free okay Farzan is going to go first. He is an assistant professor in architecture at Cornell University's College of architecture and planning where he directs the real time urbanism lab, and he's the director of Farzan Farzan. He's an interdisciplinary design studio working across architecture, urbanism, computation and media. He's also taught before at GSAP, and, and is very familiar with the approach to computation that we're presenting here. Design is an artist and educator whose work deals with data surveillance cops natural language processing and automation is currently an assistant professor in the Department of design at university at UT Austin. And again, both of these two are doing more urban kinds of work which is why they're paired and the gender divide was just chance so no, it's nothing. Too, too much to read into that so. Thanks so much for both attending at such late times of the night, but Farzan take it away 20 minutes each and the same thing will try to get a conversation going between you and then we'll open up to questions from the audience. Thank you so much for the invitation. Thank you, Laura and Adam and it's so nice to be virtually back at GSAP and thank you for previous panelists it was so exciting to hear your conversation. And as Laura mentioned, my name is buzzing lock the jam and I run an interdisciplinary practice called buzzing buzzing. And today I'm just going to show you a series of projects actually just thinking through this question of, you know, how computation impacts my work and my project and I want to talk about a series of collaborative projects I've had that have somehow transformed into thinking about computation in relation to architecture and urbanism and media. Let me just get my zoom screens all tidied up so I can see my presentation. Perfect. Great. So like many of the audience today I work in multiple modes and media. This consists of researching with data sets, designing with algorithms fabricating with robots. Engineering interactive spatial media systems, building diverse audiences across digital platforms. Producing films that subvert the codes of social media, creating exhibitions that push the limits of discursive and immersive aesthetic forms, and making models of smart cities and their control syntax. Through my practice I try to destabilize techno, the technology token grounds that dominate innovation discourses in architecture and society. And so by that I mean I examine how new media network infrastructures and the techno sciences influence the politics of architecture and the city. I develop a method of working that uses design as a means of critical research and spatial practice. For instance, much of my recent work stems from an investigation into modernism's response to new technology and computation. But I apply this research to the most contemporary of design practices working with new media, virtual reality, advanced fabrication, and new spatial media in an interdisciplinary form of what I call applied technology studies. I work in this way to understand and try to redesign the relationship between computation and the multiple scales, mediums and spatial logics of late capitalism to understand how computational media determines our situation. What shapes the codes of our social interactions powers the data driven decision making of the buildings we inhabit optimizes the unequal distribution of goods and resources in our cities and automates the production of human subjectivities. Algorithms, archives, cities and subjects. These are the arrangements of concepts and sites and terms through which my practice operates, showing how all four code produce each other and defining the spaces and architectures of each. Just in terms of, you know, I think like totally honest biography, I actually had a very conventional pathway during my first decade in architecture, working for design practices in Australia and Europe on large public projects shown here, where I really investigated how new digital processes could impact the logistics design and construction of architecture. During the next decade, my part led me to question our inherited disciplinary conventions, and the techno utopian solution nearing at the heart of the computation and invasion project architecture. And so my intervention into these discourses and practices is to build connections between history and theory through design to use computation to understand the processes and power structures that limit condition and govern what types of architectures and forms of human behavior are permissible. And to ask who benefits and loses from existing arrangements and how the relationship between the computer, its military origins and commercial forms of capitalization have come to bear on the imagining design and management of cities. So today I hope you know just to give you a sort of overview of some projects from my practice. I hope I will show you how my practice has evolved from exuberant form making to an exuberant form of practice through a series of important collaborations with other independent designers and scholars to make the seemingly abstract technological transformations visible material and manipulatable to design. So I'm going to do this, but first mapping the evolution of my research inquiry through key collaborations with the individual shown here at this timeline. And so I'll get into that in a second. And I just want to offer a few sort of theorizations of the work maybe where I'm going to present four projects and that offer different interventions through design into this techno solution that I'm going to discuss as I'm talking about and so I'll talk about a project where I'm thinking through a counter model, a project where the subject is a method and the method is the subject. A project is really attempting to render visible certain abstract and invisible relations and a project that's attempting to amplify overlooked and under examined histories and and so let's start. Projects, you know, over these years my projects I've been really interested in projects over practice and continued conversations of entrenched positions. This project here your groups from 2014 with Leah Dennis, a graduate of this school from Leah Dennis I really learned to be sensitive to the codes and conventions of digital platforms and the importance of visual design. I'm Mitch McEwen this project we work on together I learned that curatorial design methods can be direct, fast and impactful, and the building information modeling desperately needs black imagination. From this project with Eva Frank, who was a curator supported my my hair before she supported my project and took the biggest risk in gaming my first commission. And from her, I've learned to continue to create the institutional spaces the practices like my need to operate in this project with Glenn, Jaffa, Caitlin and Leah. Mycelin also a professor here at Columbia I learned to closely read the terms of service agreements and the rewriting one is both a political act and a design problem. I'm Mark Wasuda, who is a professor here I've learned too much. But I've learned really to always be sensitive to system logics to always locate abstraction and material objects and practices and to not just explain, but entertain but also vice versa. From Caitlin Blanchfield this project I learned the importance of bringing science and technology studies in dialogue with several colonial studies. And this project with Felicity Scott and also with my, I think Felicity Scott also a professor here, her scholarship has opened up a disciplinary space for my practice to follow. And lastly, this collaboration with Adrian LaHood. Adrian really showed me the importance of reciprocity, vulnerability and the urgency of creating spaces for others to operate in. And so I know that was just like a lot of projects and a lot of things I'd learn but these are really sort of more formative computational collaborations for me. And so to now just talk through a few projects, and to think about this concept of a counter model as a different way to think through the computational project and so this project share is a collaboration with all of these people here. So we know that digital technologies of the so-called sharing economy have been transforming our cities for the last several years, and they've also been transforming our understanding of domestic space and housing as infrastructure. With this project I want to talk about the ways in which personal spaces are now image through the proliferation of sharing and digital intimacy through social networks, and how these have formed spatial organizations that use different platforms, media and technology to create individual environments of accumulated spaces, images, objects and relations. And so share is a collaborative project with Caitlin Blanchfield, Glenn Cummings, Jeffery Colvin, Lea Mycelin for the 2016 Oslo Architecture Triennale. It was a response to an open call to develop a public project for the city of Copenhagen in response to the digital sharing economy and to platforms like Airbnb. What we quite simply share is a digital platform, screenshots shown here that allows users to list and reserve objects by the minute, whether in the home or in public. Users define their own terms of exchange, whether monetary or otherwise, and through the listing of domestic objects and public spaces, share connect city dwellers to things they need places they desire and to one another. We design, developed and deployed this app as a counter model to the Airbnb platform. And the app is a counter model with technical features similar to the Airbnb app, but with some modified terms of exchange that gives agency to users, and rather than to Airbnb. And so in this sense it presents a counter economic model for sharing spaces that go against the platform capitalism and circulation. Now, and this is an exhibition shot of it. So this next project modern management methods is really thinking about the subject as a method and thinking through method as the subject of a research and inquiry. And it's a collaboration with Caitlyn Blanchfield, and was presented the shed in New York in 2019. And so I want to talk about an example of a project this one that analyzes architectural and historical processes. And so modern management methods is a research project that asks how the value of a building is produced through instruments of expertise management ideologies and historical narratives through an unorthodox survey through unorthodox survey practices and x-ray. So we use the imaging techniques of conservation and the documentary production of heritage preservation and archive to show how scientific methods attempt to produce stable notions of history and value. So the project was looking at two different buildings of two different modernist buildings, the bison house sibling in a Stuttgart designed by Le Corbusier shown here, and the United Nations headquarters in New York City there was also Le Corbusier was involved in that. So I'm looking at both of these projects because they had undergone different renovations and they were, and the renovations as part of those renovations the historical image of the buildings were preserved the exterior sort of iconic modernist legacy whereas the interiors had been upgraded with new types of technologies and brought up to different forms of preservation and different forms of technical capability. So for us with this project I want to emphasize here how we thought about how representation and imaging tools could also allow us to see a building its history and its reconstruction differently. And so we really x-rayed the moments in the buildings where these new technologies or these new upgrades to the capabilities of the building could be visible. And we sort of had this with documents from a maintenance manual that was used to preserve to manage the building as well as documents from the UN archive the chronicle the capital renovations. And so here the x-ray was a critical tool of image production and it means to understand the documentary effusion of institutional bureaucratic processes somewhere between information image then this method offers a view of modern architecture previously unseen looking behind and through in a novel section and so the x-ray within the UN we identified all these moments where the Malians and the curtain wall had been redesigned after 9 11 to bring it up to new a blast through sort of security capability and so the x-ray these sort of vignettes and details of the building showing here revealed the risk and securitization of a building and its physical and digital level. And so when new technologies kind of started to get installed. Awesome. So this next project is about thinking through how we can render visible certain computational logics in the city. And it's a collaboration, a long time collaboration with Mark with pseudo who is also a professor at Columbia and actually we're in Athens together working on an exhibition to just open. So here's Mark and I clearly entering the eco zone in song. And so this project analyzes the rhetoric of the smart city movement and its historic foundations in modernism and computation to understand the agency of architecture within an algorithmic urbanism. The ambiguity and criticism surrounds this hazely defined metropolis is the smart city and opportunistic label easily applied to any urban development we've seen sort of smartness everywhere. Is it a coherent global movement or a clever repackaging of essential utilities by technology companies. The smart city of heart infrastructure and machine logics gave way to one of networks and communication. The smart city is a shift to a kind of urban form, not just connected by neural networks, but determined by them. And while the smart city may be still, you know, one of the most powerful forces shaping the future of 21st century cities. What exactly this means is still largely unknown, I believe. So this, this project is a series of exhibitions called control syntax rear and control syntax on dough and I'm just going to walk you through the first one. So control syntax rear really started when we were asked to examine what the sort of implications of architectural space like this is. This is the center for operations rear, a new kind of cybernetic smart city space that was built in the lead up to the 2016 Rio summer games. And so our project controls index rear models of traffic route through Rio de Janeiro from Kepa Cabana beach, shown in the bottom to American a stadium shown in the top. But both, you know, beach volleyball and soccer competition sites for 2016 summer games. So core as it's more commonly called was built in 2010 in reaction to a landslide call was planned to anticipate and respond to future disasters and infrastructure failures. Equal important it was intended to demonstrate Rio's commitment to improve urban administration and traffic management. Core was heralded as an urban feedback system and control center that will combine disaster response urban sense and monitoring and a form of intelligent traffic administration to would speed circulation during the crush of the summer Olympics. The technical and conceptual armature for core originated in IBM's smarter cities initiative cause primary tasks to monitor assess and represent metabolism the city, and to respond to actual or potential interruptions to drain slow or block it and these are some photos from the exhibition was first installed the head noise to shoot in Rotterdam and later was shown a storefront in New York City. And so through the logic of the IBM code around which it is built core measures abnormality abnormality according to four escalating scales of intensity. Incident event emergency or crisis. And so how the scale is registered and represented and how it determines response form the foundations of Rio's control syntax. And so overlaid on the traffic route of control syntax. It also traces a decision path through cause decision making matrix. And so the model aligns the material traffic infrastructure of the city with the immaterial syntax of cause urban management code. At first glance cause control syntax appears banal and managerial, yet it is also charged with potential crisis. For example, if protests erupts, then traffic will have to be redirected to avoid paralysis. If buildings explode routes will need to be cleared to usher response teams, explosions fires, protests, landslides, rallies and sudden tropical storms combined with faulty traffic lights, accidents, spill trucks, burning buses and critidian congestions as elements of the core control syntax. And so the control room shown here for the one we looked at in Rio and another one that we looked at in Songdo is the active demonstration of urban sensing information extraction feedback and management a theater of control. And so this reformation of urban vision, the saturation of the city with sensors and cameras together, we provide the spatial, physical, informational and political armature of what we are calling smart city control syntax. Okay. So last project, how am I doing for time I can't see. Let me know if I'm doing okay. I think you're good on time. Take the time that you need. We're not, we're not necessarily pressed. Beautiful. Thank you. I appreciate that. So this last project is a little bit of a shift and it's actually a project that I made for the architecture League of New York after I won a prize that I had been trying that I had applied for close to I think eight years, what used to be called the young architect's prize and for eight years. I was constantly unsuccessful. And so in my last year of qualification because I was no longer so young. I was very lucky and honored to receive this prize and so it was this moment where, you know, certain things that maybe I had been doing at the fringes of architectural design practice proper and thinking through, you know, some of the sort of design techniques that I just showed was, you know, being recognized and there was a kind of a moment of professional recognition and stability that I was undergoing and so kind of intersected with a few other shifts and changes in my life at the time. So in this moment of professional sort of recognition. I somehow start to think through the technologies that were surrounding me in my domestic space but also the technologies that had shaped my entire biography and history. I was thinking through the relationship between the technology at the home and the technology of the state and how immigration and smart home sensing devices what was the sort of relationship between each other, but I was also thinking about that through my own body in some way. You know, I think a lot of the work I do is very invested in in a deep sort of engagement analysis of sites and to understand, you know, without a side without a kind of a way of reading things like an algorithm or things like control through physical objects like sensors or through actual material form. Here I decided that I would try to read some of these infrastructural network technological systems through my own how they were registered through my own body. And so this project might domestic routines comprises a film and a physical installation and the installation displays a catalogue of readily available smart products sourced from IKEA, Amazon and wise and so I'm showing this the installation here and so recursive routine connects these proprietary systems and custom in a never ending performance of detection and response. The film presents a composite image of rising up again yours truly and my home rendered through the attentive vision of the smart home industries. And so it reveals how regimes and monitoring have produced a neurotic domestic subject simultaneously obsessed with seeking ever more representations of his domestic life, while securitizing himself against the fears lurking in the American suburban imaginary. So domestic routines may seem banal, even scripted and contrived. This exhibition captures a feedback loop between domestic design data collection and the insidious possibilities of convenience I'll just show you a little bit from this. I was trying to, you know, as I was sort of saying I'm trying to connect archival images that my mother took of my upbringing from my domestic spaces with archival images that had been automatically created by smart home. Okay, should have come there for a sec. So, so the film has this, you know, it's online I can share the link but it has a series of different sections that basically came out of five weeks of installing different smart products in my home. And it leads up to this final sequence that you're seeing here where kind of a digital avatar myself is playing out every single possible permutation of forms of interaction and domestic behaviors that I could have with these different smart home technologies from Ikea wise Google and Amazon and so you can kind of see here. I was interested in how a lot of these, you know, listening devices that enter our homes are packaged up as incredibly cute innocuous friendly objects and so here I was attempting to kind of create some sort of connection between this sort of cute aesthetic that is sort of being pushed into by, you know, technologies like concepts like the metaverse of technology like digital twins, and to sort of connect that to a sort of a surveillance cinema aesthetic. So, that's kind of it. I sort of try to show a bunch of things very quickly. But I hope in conclusion that today I've maybe made a case for how design reveals and can intervene within the way new media network infrastructures and technological ideologies influence the politics of architecture in the city. And I also hope that I've shown that this creates opportunities for critically engaged and experimental design practice. Thank you very much. Thanks Farzan. So you can probably hear drilling in the background over here but Sam. Hey, thanks so much and great to see you Farzan and Elaine and everyone. Great. Yeah, so thanks again so much for having me today. I'm just going to note that I am, as was mentioned I'm calling in from Alice Springs, Australia, and it's currently extremely early in the morning for me. I kind of actually even like knew it was going to be early but then I messed up the timing even so it's even earlier than I thought. But anyway, in any case just like, you know, all this is just to say like, you know, please bear with me. If I'm a little bit, a little bit misspoke, you know, misspeak or something. But yeah, just as like a quick introduction. I'm an artist, a teacher I do a lot of work with on the internet and about the internet. And I work a lot with a technique called web scraping. So in this talk, I'll kind of go over, you know, what web scraping is, why I'm interested in it, and then show you a few projects that I've made using using using this technique. You know, simply put web scraping describes, you know, a series of techniques for automatically downloading and processing web content or converting online text to other media and to structured data that can then be used for, you know, variety of purposes. In short, you the user, right, writes a program to browse the web on your path, rather than doing doing so manually. Right. This is extremely common practice in Silicon Valley, where the data from open HTML pages is transformed into private property. And in some sense becomes like the raw material from which empire is built. So, you know, Facebook notably began as like the very horny web scraping project called face mash that allowed Mark Zuckerberg to rank the hotness of this classmates, but also like no Google and all their search engines are at heart. Web scrapers right. And you know what scraping is used a lot also to train these like sort of like, you know, large machine learning models that you see every day like chat to PT, or stable diffusion right there all kind of like web scraping projects. The first automated automated scraper was called the wanderer. This is like a screenshot of this sort of like announcement about the wanderer. This is a project that was born in 1993 shortly after the creation of the web itself. And it was made an attempt to track and understand the early webs exponential growth right so Matthew Gray who wrote the project announced that quote I have written a pearl script that wonders the WWW collecting URLs, keeping track of where it's been and new hosts that it finds eventually after hacking up the code to return some slightly more useful information. I will produce a searchable index of this right. So why, why did someone need to make this like why what is the point of the wanderer right, and it's really like a consequence of, of kind of like the other some fundamental realities about the web fundamental realities that we still face today, right. So the web is both organizationally inscrutable, right it's, it's decentralized it's on indexed by default, and at the same time it's open, right so HTML, the market language that the web is written in the, or rather the presentation there of the web is written right that's both legible to humans, and of course to machines right so so like that you know, like, you sort of like need, because the web is an index, you need to write web scrapers to understand what the web even is right. The web is like basically meant to be script. So this is like kind of fundamental openness right this openness of HTML was always an intended goal of the web right kind of like an original utopian selling selling point that that encompasses this like vision of open and shared information right. Like it's funny to quote Tim Berners-Lee when you're talking about the web so I'm going to do it. He writes, suppose all the information started computers everywhere were linked, I thought suppose I could program my computer to create a space in which anything could be linked to anything else. All the bits of information every computer at certain on the planet would be available to me and anyone else there would be a single global information space right. So that openness, that openness of the web has always been contested and unfixed right. There's that fundamental tension between the open web, that vision of universal shared access to knowledge, and the artificial scarcities that are imposed by capitalism right in the form of intellectual property law data hoarding patents and so on right. And I think it's like sort of in that tension that web scraping allows us to do some interesting things. Okay, that's one to sort of what is what when we're talking about the web what are we really talking about. Again, when sort of in the early days of the web. Most, most sites were just HTML documents right when you looked at a web page and HTML file was literally copied from the website server to your computer. And while this is, you know, still true today at times. The majority of what content you that you look at is stored in databases right so when you look at a site when you look at the page, a web server processes your browser's request, it reads from a database. And then it generates HTML and sends it back to your browser, or it sends back data which is then covered from the HTML. In this sense, what pages aren't just simple documents, they're actually the front ends of databases, right, and databases are you know what are databases. They're very very simply put they're like lists of things right. Big lists right. As readers of websites we have access to small parts of the database that makes it up right to some portion of the lists that constitute it, but we don't have the ability to like directly query the database to sort and filter it in any way we want to and we definitely don't have the ability to write directly to databases, you know, or delete directly from them. So our access to the many databases and make up the web is mediated it's controlled it's made it's made scarce. And what web scraping does is it gives us an opportunity to read a base the web right we can we can recreate the databases from which the web is generated. There's always an active reverse engineering. And this is sort of true and I think two senses. On the one hand from web scraping with kind of like you have to learn how the web is built on a technical and infrastructural level. Right. But maybe more interestingly, when you kind of do a web scraping project you also learn how the data that's carried by websites operates on an economic social and political level. And every website is quite different to scrape some are really easy to scrape so we're really hard to scrape and that kind of very difficulty is really directly related to the website's business model right to how much the owners of a site considered their data valuable or proprietary. And of course this is, you know, this can be like an ironic situation right because frequently the databases that make the web, you know, are populated with data that we provide or data that's about us in some way. You know this might be data that we provide like intentionally like, you know when you, when you post text and media to social media, or it might be data that's provided about us without our knowledge or agency. In their case, I began to call my own work with web scraping like scrape ism, which is this kind of word I made up but you know the idea of scrape ism is that it's the practice of web scraping for artistic, emotional and critical ends rather than business and government. It's a process of decommodification and we database saying a process of eliminating artificial scarcity and it's meant to act as a as an inversion. Right. So sort of work always leaving data in our wake data that turns into someone else's business model or someone else's machine learning model or someone else's you know in the worst case, right means of repression right but we're kind of like all in held together and power also leaves its traces online. And through, you know, collecting processing filtering and sorting these traces certain truths can become visible they can kind of crystallize into something. Right. So with that mind. I'll just walk you through a few projects that have made they're kind of like this umbrella of scrape ism. The first is called New York apartment and I'm actually just going to pop out of the slides for this, because it's easier just to show it as a website, which is what it is. And what is New York apartment New York apartment is sort of like represents like the totality of real estate, you know, of housing as commodity in New York City right. This is a collaboration with my frequent collaborator Tika brain, and was a commission for the Whitney Museum that created a digital art collection called art court. So to make this project. I wrote a web scraper and it downloaded every single for sale real real estate listing in in New York City, and then kind of combined it into this one like nightmarish space. If you combined every single apartment in New York at the time of the scrape, it would cost $43 billion they'd be like 65,000 bedrooms 55,000 bathrooms 36 million square feet, and we sort of break it down to the kind of like component parts of a real estate like the first section contains like every single question in all of the listings right like. Are you looking for a charming well priced one bedroom home in a sought after area you're looking for a cozy elegant home close to all that is healthier to New York are you looking for a deal are you looking for a great investment home are you looking for a loft like open space with both light view luxury condo services are looking for a beautiful open views and so on. And then we have like all of the images from all the listings so 20,000 images of bedrooms right and tethered in internet at the moment so it might be a bit slow on my end. You can kind of flip through them with a randomized each time sorted algorithmically so sometimes you get mistakes like this. And what's interesting about these do I love these images because sometimes they're sort of these staged homes, and sometimes it's very clear that it's just like a person with a photo you know, 17,000 images of bath bathrooms, kitchens and rooms living rooms doorways closets exteriors and my favorite the 2000 images of the gyms. Right. All of the sentences and all the listings that begin with the phrase the apartment I won't read them. So, you know, part of, of course, like apartment listings are floor plans so it downloaded all the floor plans and then sort of figured out a way to isolate the doors and windows and doorways from the floor plans, and then kind of combine them all together into these nightmarish 3D spaces that you can kind of like explore so this is like all the apartments in New York City kind of like laid out as a giant giant kind of like rats maze and then we have it laid out as like a high rise and and a pure mid sort of very thin towers well explore video tours and these are like these sort of automatically generated super cuts of different things that people say in apartment video tours maybe the play will work we'll see it's just sort of automatically and there's a bunch of these I won't play them all I do like the one that says pre war also made up Pre-work, elegant pre-work, air pre-work, antique pre-work, pre-work, pre-work, pre-work, pre-work, pre-work, pre-work, pre-work, pre-work, pre-work, pre-work, pre-work, pre-work, pre-work, pre-work, pre-work, pre-work, pre-work, pre-work. Okay, that's good enough. I have to take noun combinations. Of course the mortgage calculator. I mean, you've got to have a mortgage calculator right? So it's like, you know, like, you know, if your salary is $56,000, your estimated monthly payment would be $252 million, right? So on. And then it ends with this listing of all the real estate agents in New York. Originally, we had this so that you could actually, like, all these people right from here and I had a big button that would put you all into, like, this, like, massive iMessage group chat with every single person. But then the Whitney made me change that. So right now it just emails me if you go there, which is fine. Okay, so next up is a quite similar project really called Get Well Soon. And it's like that sort of New York apartment project is about housing as commodity. Get Well Soon is about healthcare as a commodity. Again, a collaboration here with Tia Brain. We were commissioned to make this right before the start of the pandemic. And rather the pandemic had started, but hadn't hit America yet. And it's kind of like giant e-card, it was the concept made from well-wished script from the website GoFundMe.com, right? So as I'm sure you all know, GoFundMe is like a crowdfunding website that used primarily to raise money for medical expenses. And of course, it's also like this direct consequence of the sort of absence of a proper healthcare system in the US, right? To make it, we again wrote a scraper, we scraped GoFundMe by searching for various disease names and then we downloaded the comments from the fundraiser pages. So this is like 20,000 sentences grouped and sorted alphabetically. And it's a kind of like, I guess I'd say like a kind of like contradictory archive, right? Like on the one hand it's this archive that is containing these really genuine and at times quite beautiful messages of solidarity and hope, right? And on the other hand, it's an archive that only exists because of total systemic failure, right? So in that sense, it's an archive that shouldn't exist. Okay. And I'll just add also this project is accompanied by an essay on kind of the kind of language of care and the language of revolution from Johanna Hedva, who's an artist and writer based in Berlin and who writes a lot about ability and I think really worth the read, which you can see if you just go to the website. Okay. Finally, I'll just show one more, which is actually like an older work, but I think it makes sense to put it at the end here. This is like color crime risk zones. This was a collaboration with Francis Singh and Brian Clifton that I made when I was working for the New York City magazine. And, oh, there it is. Right. So I lost my notes for a second. Oh, there it goes. Okay. Right. And so like if the, if the sort of previous projects, you know, are sort of these like moments in time, right, these archives, kind of like moments in time of different kind of different commodity, right? I think I think that like a kind of another way of thinking about web scraping is like the ability as you're collecting all this material is to create what you might think of as like rather than a passive archive, like an activated archive that's kind of put into practice, right? Another way of saying this is like machine learning, right? So what color crime risk zones is this machine learning system that attempts to do predictive policing targeting what color crime, right? So predictive policing, probably most people are aware of it at this point, but if you're not, it's a predictive policing system attempts to make predictions about where and when crimes will occur based on where and when crimes have already occurred, right? So this is an interface as an example for a real predictive policing system called Hunch Lab. In this instance, the software is predicting that this is a high likelihood of larceny in that green square, right? And, you know, the predictive policing like all machine learning contains incredible bias based on training data. So predictive policing is particularly dangerous, right? Because the consequences are really dire, and also because the data that is used is generated by systemically racist police departments, right? I think it kind of creates these feedback loops, right? So kind of a bit in response, my colleagues and I decided to make this, you know, our own predictive policing app that would use the exact same techniques and methodologies that real predictive policing apps use, but we flipped the data set. So instead of using data about street crime, we put in data from FINRA, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, and FINRA is the non-governmental organization responsible for regulating the financial industry in the U.S. To get the data we scraped thousands and thousands of PDFs that look like this. Looking for instances where FINRA had fine organizations and individuals for financial malfeasance. This actually was the hardest part of the project was just getting the data, which is sort of an interesting thing to think about. This is what it looks like. It's a map of New York City, right? The rectangles indicate locations where the system is predicting a high likelihood of white collar crime, the redder and darker the square, the higher the quote unquote danger level. Clicking on different squares gives you more information, right? This might include like the type of crime that the system believes will occur as well as the severity of the crime when you're by financial firms that might be institutional suspects. We also show a composite image of a most likely individual white collar criminal suspect, which is a facial average of high level financial executives who work in the area scraped from LinkedIn. So like, you know, the joke, it's like the individual compositions are all unique, but they also merge together into like a single white collar criminal suspect. The map covers the entire US. And there's also an iPhone app, which sends you push notifications when you enter a high risk zone for white collar crime so you can stay safe. And that's, you know, I think I think that's that's all I'll just end it there. I have like a lot of other student projects, but just for the sake of time, we'll close it there. I'll just note a few things. One is that I did an online show recently at distant gallery slash scrapism, which has a kind of like longer version of some of this presentation and something I thinking behind, you know, what what web scraping as a kind of critical art practice looks like. And then if you're interested in kind of like learning technical level, how to do web scraping, I've got some resources at scrapism that la v.io. That are sort of in part taken from a class that I teach at the school for a lot of computations includes text and and also video lectures. Okay, great. So I'll stop it there. And just say, thank you. Thank you both so much incredible, incredible range. Incredible range of things and Sam I just love how much you how much work you get just from this one action which is the scraping and, of course, because the internet is so so chaotic and you know contains so many things then the the projects. You know, are really dictated by ideas you have about the kind of data that you know is there to be collected in mind and right so there's kind of a feedback loop between this one thing that you've done and then all the things all the things that you can possibly do with it. And I think that it's just endless I just it's such such great work. And then Farzan, you know, your trajectory is so different because you so ground yourself in in architecture which of course, you know, we are here in a, in an architecture school and so I really wanted one of these presentations to be directly related to that but the, the new work that you use really opens out so many different different methods not only because of the collaborations but because of what you learn through the different techniques and what what you learn from the actual technologies as well as the collaborations and then there's that feedback loop to, you know, to the work and so, you know, in that sense the last project is so funny but it's so purely descriptive of the methods that you use for a lot of your other projects right which is taking these simple devices and critiquing them for their own biases and these. So, so I'm just curious what, how you to position your own. Yeah, whether you have questions for each other because in, I thought the presentations were going to be quite similar but actually really far apart in terms of the scope of methodologies. Yeah, it's not a it's not a question but just maybe to add a little bit about the range of the, you know the range of techniques that come out of the singular trajectory through your work. Yeah. Well, I, I actually stumbled upon like Sam's website one like late night, like seven eight years ago. And I didn't know Sam at the time and I think I found your website through your github repository for one of your web as form courses. And then I actually found your video jerep tool which is I think where you're making all these supercuts where you will identify in specific term. I found this bot you'd set up there was watching is a CNET that you know is watching that political channel and you're sort of like doing supercuts each day for what was the most frequent term that politicians were saying on TV at that day. So I thought your work was absolutely extraordinary in terms of the way you were connecting different automated tools and hitting strange media archives and just revealing something to us about the logic of those things by just putting it on this like so collection sorting frequency counts like often I think so much of your work is about frequency in some way right that if something is free and if something is visible. If something occurs that reveals to us something about popularity focus bias patterns and so the way that I've just watched your work evolve to really kind of think through the web as a form and as this new archive. And so I was thinking about something when you were talking about the open web and I hadn't seen you give the sort of historical context of the scrapers and project which I really enjoy it. I was thinking about Alexander Galloway is kind of when you're talking about the open web right like he's kind of theorization of like DNS versus versus TCP is that the right protocols and the DNS is this like centrally controlled protocols IP is something that's distributed right and then within these is these kind of structural logics of the web right then you can shut down an entire calm at different levels. But then everything else is meant to spread and I don't know so I was just, I know you probably have like so many thoughts on this but I was kind of curious about. I guess like in my work I would be like okay where is the building where DNS happens right like I would be like where does DNS happen or like who manages that protocol or what institution historically was it where you know this argument and this this sort of stand that came to emerge and that I would try to do I would try to locate the architecture of DNS, both as a historical concept that emerged through institutions but also where that is actually physically located now. Whereas I think through your work you're looking at sort of what archival forms of media that produces but I was curious about how you think about the structural logics of the web in this way. Thanks. Yeah, I mean I definitely think it's really interesting to think like I think the Galway stuff is, if he keeps talking like actually a little bit of a lower level than the level I'm engaging at you know like I mean like to talk about the sort of like protocols of like, you know, like what like DNS is as a protocol it's actually a little bit more decentralized than what you're describing you know like when you like make a new domain name and it propagates and it takes like a few hours to go around you know it's actually kind of like spreading around the internet which is kind of interesting. But the thing that I've been thinking a lot about and I didn't really kind of get into that much with in the talk today but I've been starting to sort of like look at these sort of questions of like data databases and our access to them as a kind of like bureaucratic mediation right and thinking a little bit about like, like, like, James C. Scott's like you know seeing like a state right and thinking about like how like these, these sort of like front ends act as a kind of there's a kind of like a dual level of mediation that's happening right because like so much of like what we kind of like the way that we engage with the world is like mediated through these giant corporate websites that kind of take on state like roles even if they aren't the state right you know so like GoFundMe is healthcare service for a lot of people right like LinkedIn is job placement right and you know you can kind of list can kind of like and like truly is like housing you know housing services right so like you sort of like these really sort of like life structuring things happen through these corporations and they happen through the front ends of websites right and those front ends of websites are sort of like computational have computational rules about interacting with the back ends the databases behind right and so for me it's become really interesting to think about like the ways in which like these different interfaces are actually really really materially structuring our lives through their access rules right and that's like that's how I'm starting to think about like the web and also sort of the relevance and like the power of doing something like what like data collection like on on a you know you could call it like artisanal data collection right you know I have a question is the is everything that you do allowed allowed to be done like how how well for instance chat GPT change what you do is that a kind of a scrape would you call that the same kind of scraping or I mean it's not scraping obviously but it's related right well I think like like everything I'm doing nothing I do is is there is like really like illegal there it's definitely definitely violates like websites terms of service right yeah so you know the consequences for me typically are like like maybe I'll get like fans from a website or something you know right which isn't really the end of the world or no once you have your data sets yeah yeah yeah yeah um you know so that you know the GPT thing is interesting though because they at least in the GPT yeah GPT 3 is using a data set called the common call right so it's really hard to like it's really easy to make well it's pretty easy to make a web scraper that just goes for a single website right so if you want to like you know for some reason like get all the courses that are offered at Columbia and Columbia doesn't have just like a list of them as a text file that they'll send to you right like it's pretty easy to like write a web scraper that will just get all those right and it's not going to be too hard if you want to get like every single class that's that's offered at every single university in the world right that that becomes a much larger problem right and so and it's also like if you want to make a search engine it's really really hard to make a search engine right because it's really hard to make a system that just downloads every single website the content off of every single website right and so people have you know are working on this project called the common crawl the common crawl actually does it's crawling the web and it's downloading as much as it can right so it's sort of like if you wanted to make a let's say it could open source alternative to Google you might start not with trying to build your own data set of all of the internet or all the web rather you might use the common crawl as like a starting point right and it's fascinating extremely large data set right of just like the whole not the whole internet but like a lot of the internet and so chat GPT uses uses that common crawl as its basis right and it's so I think Ted I think I think it was like Ted Chang that the science fiction writers are like you could sort of imagine that chat GPT as a kind of ultra compressed image of the web. And that is in fact what it is really that's a really good way of thinking about what it is right it's just, you know this sort of prediction tool that's just like showing you the next, you know, character word or token or whatever that it that it finds that it finds on the web. And, you know, it's also not illegal really you know I mean it's, it's, it's perfectly, you know within sort of the bounds of, of, of, I guess, like acceptable acceptable use I mean I think the claims that are being made about things like that are highly like improbable and ridiculous. But like the, you know, but that's, I guess that's sort of a different question. Yeah. Okay. There's an audience question that I think I'll ask to Sam just because we're kind of on the same topic but I'll just say first for me Sam I was like very aware of your work for and looked at it a lot, appreciate it a lot. But I wasn't never heard you speak of it before and I didn't really know your definition of scrapisms were like for them was saying and I just really appreciated the idea that web scraping gives us the opportunity to sort of read database the web. And then you said and it's kind of like you're constantly putting intention to open the web and the artificial scarcity and that's imposed on us in multiple ways. Okay question. Sam, when combing through so much information on the internet. How do you decide when to stop can you elaborate more on ways you figured out how to effectively consolidate and prioritize certain info that has been gathered. Um, I guess. I don't know I mean like, like some of these projects sort of like have a very clear. Like I have like a really clear goal with them. Right. So you know, for like the apartment project or something right. I'm like okay I want to get a slice of everything in New York. And I don't want to like what you know one way of doing that would be to like to be like the data set will update every day or week or hour or whatever you know but I was like it's too, it was too, it was too much to, to build that infrastructure and also it didn't really add to the project I don't think necessarily so that became like a slice in time. So that website doesn't update it just stays, it just stays what it is right. And, and again like it's for it's both for like sort of like technical reasons but also just because I think it sort of makes it a kind of nicer. Yeah like a sort of nicer little, little, little archive, but like a lot of them and you know so that there was a very clear goal, like beforehand and then the goal helped me like kind of like limit, limit the scope, the scope of the scope of the project. I also think like, I just let the outputs really shake. You know, like this sort of like I don't always know what the outputs going to be when I start kind of collecting something. And so, I kind of let you know maybe I'll download a bunch of stuff you know and then I'll experiment with making something and then I'll, and then I'll, I'll, I'll see if it feels like it's going someplace if I need more, or if it's, if it's kind of can, can be finished, you know, at that point. And so I think, I think it just, I don't know you just sort of, you just sort of feel it. I know that's not a really satisfying answer. Yeah. You know, I mean, I think there's no perfect answer for it today that works as well as any. I have another question. This one is, I think both of you might have a take on it, but maybe it'd be great to hear from far as and first on it. The question is, how do you guys navigate bias in your research certain tools and softwares have bias built into them based on the subjectivity of those who invented the tools. There's also bias and what information has historically been prioritized as for the history. How do you navigate this. That's a great question. Yeah, I'm interested in, you know, I think I've learned this also a lot from Laura's work actually thinking through like what are the default conventions of certain tools that we inherit. And so, I'm, I'm quite interested in understanding the history of some of those tool makings. Kind of a lecture today, I like the lanes kind of formulation like you show the research or do you show the projects and so today I showed the final outcomes I just show the projects and I didn't show so much of the research. But what's driven a lot of the outputs is actually thinking about some of the tools that we use within architecture new ones like gaming engines and doing a kind of genealogy of that software in some way. And so, I'm part of what I'm looking at within the real time urbanism lab is the sort of explosion of new forms of real time visualization tools like gaming engines like concepts like the metaverse urban concepts and tools like the digital twins. So I trace the emergence of a lot of these tools back to the early sort of paradigm of real time computation that comes out of Cold War era projects like the semi automated ground environment. So, a lot of what I'm interested in there is how military values like flexibility adaptability modularity. And start to shape our design values, you know how many times in studio have you heard that things should be flexible or adaptive or modular and that these are also computational programming concepts. But these are these kind of come out of a military vision. And so, some of the research I've been doing that's looking at things like synthetic population simulations and other forms of real time urban. So one of the most emerging tools is that I'm looking at how really sort of subtle forms of militaristic values things like data collection, things like attempting to exploit opportunity and mitigate risk. And then there's sort of the, I don't know whether it's biases or frames or values that these are the kind of ways that the tools we use for urban design or for all forms of management of cities that they've entered in there. I guess it's like, I don't know, in my own work, I don't really think about bias. I think about, I try to locate and orient myself in some way. And so that's why I didn't quite sort of nail the argument. The reason why I was saying that I, that last project happened when I received some sort of professional recognition was that at that moment I decided to turn the lens on myself and to sort of register certain things through myself and to, I don't know, somehow pull that apart. Maybe I just went into total psychoanalytical mode, but I was trying to understand some of my biases. I don't know if that makes sense and make work about it. Yeah, great. Yeah, I mean, I think it's really, it's a great question. And I think that like one thing that's really fun to think, well, first of all, like, like, I guess, like, there's like sort of like the question of tools, which is really, really interesting to think about. And one thing I like to do is like, I really like to use like open source, open source tools and like, and if possible to contribute, you know, like to like get back and contribute and make my own open source tools and materials right. And, you know, this is certainly not a way to eliminate bias or anything but I think it's a way to forward the, it's like, if kind of like at least just sort of forward what you what the political project is that you're that you're working on and not to like pretend that there's no political project behind it, you know, and so that's really, I think that's really, that's like really important and interesting to think about. And then, you know, otherwise I think it's really interesting when we're thinking about like, particularly like bias and like machine learning stuff, right. It's, you know, you look at like this sort of like racism or misogyny or whatever like in a tool like chat GPT, right or like, like in these sort of like, you know, really, really classic examples right or kind of like, oh, there's a photo of like a nurse or something and you ask like stable diffusion or something and it'll always be the sort of coded feminine, right, you know, and these are like these very like just like crude, you know, the sort of the crude sexism just like built into the tools and it's just like 100% because like, you know, it's because the training data is is is also sexist right or racist and and and I think that like one thing that, you know, so it's like a mirror, it's just it's it's it's effectively a mirror. So one thing that I've been thinking that I've like been sort of exploring and some of the works not all of them is this idea that like, well, you know, what if you actually did like kind of like look through like the whole training set, like what if you did like what would it mean, for example, as like an individual to like read the entirety of the common crawl, right, or, or look at every single image in like Microsoft Cocoa or like, you know, like if you do that. Yeah. Yeah, you can just download the whole thing. Yeah, yeah, I mean it depends what the training data is but you know like, like, you can you know like you can look through like you can get I mean it sort of depends. And it's also interesting because sometimes it's almost as if like they'll be like fit sometimes they'll be like a facial recognition, let's say, training set like, and they won't let you download it. Yeah, you can sort of prove that you're on the up and up or something right you know, but then it's interesting that well who gets access to these, these things and why, you know, right and like who was like a legitimate user of a of a of a of a data set. Yeah. Right. Yeah, it's interesting thing like well what if I did just go through them and and I am like, I had a project a few years ago that was like going, like, let you subscribe to the Enron email archive which was like a famous data set used by people making like, you know, it's all it's older now there's better things to kind of use but like, you know, it was like a training spam filters and like a lot of like natural language processing stuff right. And you read through these Enron emails, right because they were it was an early example of like, like a big text based data set. Right. That like anyone could could have access to that was just like real, real regular people regular people just sort of like, you know, chatting away and it seemed to be sort of like neutral language in some sense and then you read through it and it's just like these like incredibly wealthy, very, very white like sort of corporate criminals like chatting with each other about their weekend plans you're like well this isn't exactly is actually is it neutral language you know this isn't really like, you know, but but but there's something like really fascinating about about actually like putting, you know, sort of turning the human gaze on to something that's like, typically processed by machines. Right. And I think that that's always like a worthwhile, worthwhile exercise. Yeah. Yeah, Sam. Another question for you. I think your work has like triggered a few questions in the audience about kind of like what are the clear lines between various things so there's two things here that I'll pull out. The first is just like, what are the clear lines between scraping and quote unquote hacking, I think you kind of already answered that in a way but if you have any specific thoughts on that or are there even clear lines. And then another one from Rashmi who said that was fantastic Sam. Do you have any trouble with using images of people from LinkedIn for the composite of the likely suspect. If you call a crime app I'm supposing by trouble there he means like any kind of weird ethical feelings around sort of reusing these pictures. No, not in that I mean I'm just like if you're sort of like listing yourself as like a high level financial executive on LinkedIn I think it's okay to use your image, you know, but like, but you know like, I mean sure you could have, you could easily imagine and these tools are used for like really, really like scary negative things right so it's like you know like that facial recognition company or a review AI, which just does, you know, it's a cop software right that they're making they do they scrape social media accounts and they use that to make facial recognition that they sell to law enforcement. Right. So there's like the, you know, these there's nothing like fundamentally positive about about like these tools or the scenario that we've found ourselves in right. And you could make make systems and data sets that that are like, yeah, like truly scary and harmful. Right. I, I obviously like tried to never do that, you know, and I think that like that sort of like I have like a political project with my, with my, with my work that hopefully, you know, prevents me from, you know, causing harm, right. But it's something that you have to constantly pay attention to. And obviously it's, you can, you can, you know, it's possible to make mistakes, right. I forgot what the other part of the question was. The other part of the question was, is there, I think the person who asked the question. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean like usually like, I mean, I think that like companies might like want to eliminate the sort of distinction depending on you know, if it's in their interest to do so but like, really it's like sort of like unauthorized access versus authorized access. I look at a website like I have authorized access to look at the website because I'm able to look at it right you know like, it's like you have authorized access to like, look at Google images because you just go and you can see them right like you're not doing, you're sort of like penetrating a system right network, you know. And I, I don't think I've ever done any work myself of like actually like kind of like trying to get in there and like, you know, go someplace where that's like not kind of already public I mean part of the premise of the work is that like, you sort of like, what you need to know is already kind of hiding in plain sight. That said, I do, I have like, I have really liked using data that is leaked, right, or or hacked or whatever. I just don't do the hacking myself so if you're interested, if people are interested in that you know like interested in sort of exploring leaked like hack data sets like, you know, the kind of successor to wiki leaks is called ddo secrets, and I definitely do recommend just sort of taking a look at what's what what's there and sort of having a having a poke around. By the time it's leaked it's not like illegal or anything to like go and visit the website and like download the material. And it's, it's, it's a, you know, it, it's a sort of interesting, it's a really interesting political project that those folks are are barbed on, right. That's, that's worth, worth a look. So I'll pass it on to the person because I've been talking too much. Now I was just thinking about the blue leaks archive that came out a while ago. And I think the intercept was doing some good work there and that one was during the sort of hide of black lives matters protests. A series of fusion center websites were compromised, I think they were using like WordPress or Drupal or something and there was a kind of update and and so what came out of this blue leaks archive wasn't sort of the sensational sort of documentation of war crimes that happened in the wiki leaks but it was for me was a kind of what I found really sort of fascinating but problematic was that there was all these PDFs and Photoshop like terrible posters advertising like training sessions for different security personnel and police officers to come in to train against like eco terrorists attacking a wind farm or something. Just like think about that eco terrorists attacking a wind farm. Yeah. And so it was this like really strange kind of like banal institution you could see that environmental activism was being sort of recast as domestic terrorism. And then within a kind of like a really sort of innocuous sort of Photoshop pamphlet police officers were being invited to come and train for that possible future scenario. And I think recently with the killing of an environmental activists. You can see how sort of those types of training. I'm trying to remember where they have them you can see how those types of training scenarios play out in your life. The point I'm trying to make is that I'm kind of interested in these structural seemingly banal logics that kind of come into visibility which is how does something like training sessions. Automate and tune your vision or your lens or your bias in the same way that our rhythmic tools mind that we can read an institutional logic in the same way that we can read algorithmic logic. That's what I have to say about leaks sorry. Laura I think you're a unit now if you're speaking. I think maybe maybe it's a good time to to have some closing closing comments because very getting very late full Sam and and far as well it looks like the sun is the sun has come up for Sam now. Oh wow. What time is it. What time is it. It's now 615. Oh my goodness. Okay. Okay. Well thank you so much for your two hours Elaine are you still there is are you. She might not actually be computer. Okay. I just you know from from my perspective just inviting the four people together. It's really interesting how you know the people are not architects have really addressed themes of spatial you know I think Sam so much of your work is looking at you know apartments and you know white collar crime as played out in parts of the city, you know, and Farzan's work sort of starts in architecture and goes to all these other places and there's Elaine. Yeah, I just loved your computational crops, you know coming from a completely different perspective from feminism and art and then, and then Imani brown from anthropology to forensic architecture, you know, and coming sort of backwards into asking questions through computation so they just fall very, very different practices you know come from a different spot starting point and going off in different directions. In the future and I think that's really what we wanted to bring to the students because our program is so much you can enter the program from any you don't have to be an architect to enter. The program you can come from computational design you can from computer science to anthropology, you know anywhere and beyond and, but address questions of spatial spatial practices so. So I just wanted to really thank you all. They were really amazing series of, of presentations if you have anything you want to just add on your welcome. Yeah. I'm just going to say just quickly thank you to all the attendees and thanks for submitting questions as well. We've got a ton of great questions we did not get to get to everyone but thanks again for all those that submitted. Yeah, maybe send the questions at least to all the panelists so that you know the range because they were actually really interesting things got brought up. It's just hard to read all of them out loud. All right. Thanks so much everyone and we're going to keep inviting you to things so. Consider yourselves as part of our broad network of critical computation people there's there's actually not such a huge network in the world and we really need to all support each other in our work so consider that an open invitation. Okay. Thank you. Thanks everyone.