With this book Paul Virilio inaugurated the new science whose object of study is the "dromocratic" revolution. Speed and Politics is the matrix of Virilio's entire work. Building on the works of Morand, Marinetti, and McLuhan, Virilio presents a vision more radically political than that of any of his French contemporaries: speed as the engine of destruction. Speed and Politics presents a topological account of the entire history of humanity, honing in on the technological advances made possible through the militarization (...) of society. Paralleling Heidegger's account of technology, Virilio's vision sees speed—not class or wealth—as the primary force shaping civilization. In this "technical vitalism," multiple projectiles—inert fortresses and bunkers, the "metabolic bodies" of soldiers, transport vessels, and now information and computer technology—are launched in a permanent assault on the world and on human nature. Written at a lightning-fast pace, Virilio's landmark book is a split-second, overwhelming look at how humanity's motivity has shaped the way we function today, and what might come of it. (shrink)

Historically, the dynamic between philosophy of artificial intelligence and its practical application has been essential for the development of both, and thus the encounter between theory of AI and architectural/urban theory should be a site of considerable productivity. However, in many ways, it is not. This is due to two primary factors, one arising from each side of this encounter. First, legacies of overly-anthropomorphic models of AI permeate design discourses, where issues of how well AI can be constrained to social (...) issues of philosophy of mind exclude more foundational and cross-cultural questions about artificial intelligence as material process in the physical world that could inform new philosophical insights. Concurrently, the mobilization of investment in “Smart Cities” discourses dominates the space of application of AI at urban scale in ways that prematurely fixes solutions in the skeuomorphic image of architectural and urban conventions. To break this impasse, we held a series of think-tanks, workshops, and design charettes that brought together leading figures in philosophy of artificial intelligence, urban design, and commercial AI platforms. The goal was to re-think from first principles how alternative philosophical models of AI as a distributed, discontinuous, landscape-scale technology in a direct encounter with the applications in contexts of ecological sensing, automation’s impact on urban form, and issues of algorithmic governance. The design brief for this research establishes a generative framework for conceiving how embedded machine sensing and intelligence is already changing urban form and could change it in the future. The framework focuses on issues of urban zoning and architectural programming, data modeling and governance, platform cognition and design, and how these inform shifts in dynamics of public and private institutions. (shrink)

When advanced technologies of globalization that are closely associated with secular cosmopolitics are opportunistically employed by fundamentalist politico-theologies for their own particular purposes, an essential irresolution of territory, jurisdiction and programmatic projection is revealed. Where some may wish to identify an ideal correspondence between a global political sphere into which multiple differences might be adjudicated and the visual, geographic representation of a single planetary space, this conjunction is dubious and highly conditional. Instead multiple territorial projections and competing claims on space (...) are also generative of the very qualities of the spatial as a political medium altogether. For example, the well-publicized use of satellite-based mapping and telecommunications tools, such as Google Earth, by the terrorist group that attacked Mumbai in November 2008, raises several knotty and important questions about how contrary comprehensive images of the world can make use of one another in ways that undermine the ‘unitotality’ of global territory. It is not that Google and Jihad are ‘equivalent’ or even ‘translatable’, but rather because they are not, they are in practice interoperable. Instead links between urbanism, cosmography, and the socialization of planetary software networks demonstrate the centrality of design to the ongoing fashioning of the territory of territories, the geoscape. (shrink)

Dans cet article, l’auteur présente de façon synthétique ce qui définit l’approche de la planétarité qu’il a mise en œuvre au sein de son programme triannuel The Terraforming mené au Strelka Institute de Moscou. Son approche accélérationniste contraste avec les sensibilités actuellement dominantes dans les pensées écologistes européennes.