Het Nieuwe Instituut

Bratton's lecture examined the consequences of the widespread digitalisation for our cities. He sketched the way in which cities could develop in relation to algorithmic perception, sensory perception, cognition and physical automation. 'What we currently rank under the term "artificial intelligence" will not only transform in what is deemed "thinking", but also in terms of architecture, design, politics and programming.'

Benjamin Bratton is Associate Professor of Visual Arts and Director of The Center for Design and Geopolitics at the University of California, San Diego. He is also Professor of Digital Design at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland. He is a sociologist, architecture and design theorist who is well known for combining philosophical and aesthetic research, organisation planning and strategy, and for his publications on the cultural consequences of digitalisation and globalisation.

Following the lecture, Koert van Mensvoort and Carola Hein presented their reactions. Carola Hein is Professor of the History of Architecture and Urban Planning in the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment at Delft Technical University. She studied at the Institut Supérieur d’Architecture de l’État La Cambre in Brussels and the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Hamburg, where she gained her doctorate. Her current research interests include the communication of architectural and urban-planning ideas via international networks. Artist and scientist Koert van Mensvoort is preoccupied with new technologies and in particular the concept Next Nature: technology has become so ubiquitous and complex that we experience it as nature. Van Mensvoort studied computer sciences at the Eindhoven University of Technology and design at the Sandberg Instituut in Amsterdam.