Lectures

On March 20, 2024, Antikythera Director Benjamin Bratton gave a public lecture at the Design Innovation Institute Shanghai. The lecture was jointly hosted by Berggruen Institute China Center and NYU Shanghai’s Center for AI and Culture at the Design Innovation Institute Shanghai. 

Planetary scale computation — and the accidental megastructure of The Stack — is a foundational infrastructure of global society. The Stack imagines computation not only as data and algorithms but as the basis of global systems that connect cultures and ecologies. The production of information has been a crucial factor, but the emergence of artificial intelligence, brings new models with increasing complexity and potential creativity. How can philosophy, design and science-fiction collaborate to conceive new futures?

From scientific simulation to VR/AR, from anthropology to zoology, simulations are everywhere –  they are a vital practice without a vital theory. In collaboration with University of Southern California’s Center on Science, Technology and Public Life and Center for Generative AI and Society, Antikythera Director Benjamin Bratton presented what a general theory of simulations might need to account for, a project that will continue to unfold across 2024: shadows, stagings, scenarios, synthetic experiences, models, demos, immersions, ruses, toy worlds, miniatures, and projections.