This short book is the first in a new series from Strelka Press, one that parallels the institute’s 2017-19 program, The New Normal. Several more titles in the series are forthcoming.
As the new program director, I traveled last October to Moscow, Kazan, St. Petersburg, Yekaterinburg, Helsinki, Berlin, and Copenhagen to introduce our research plan. The text here is an expanded transcript of that presentation (with a lot of overdubs).
It is part manifesto and part syllabus. It lays out why we would undertake an urban design program with such a strong emphasis on emerging technologies and speculative philosophy; or conversely, why we would convene a think-tank on emerging technology and speculative philosophy that takes urbanism — Russian urbanism, in particular — as its assignment. The talk is aimed at inviting applications to join us in Moscow, and the book is meant to invite a wider audience into our project.
The urban design proposals we produce will experiment with soft and hard infrastructures, fact and fiction, future and past, and how they may converge or diverge in unexpected ways. The program itself is also an experiment. It will mix seminar, studio and technical workshops in an alternating sequence of modules that closely link conceptualization and prototyping, one folding into the other. We will find theoretical insight from technical experimentation, just as speculation will be a technology for discovery and debate.
The New Normal is planned as a multi-year effort. For each cohort it brings together architects, programmers, interaction designers, game designers, artists, philosophers, filmmakers, novelists, economists, and “free-range” computer scientists. The outcomes will be new design practices and projects, and also, as I discuss below, a new glossary of terms with which we might articulate what does and does not count as our “new normal” condition.
We discover the most creative ideas by pursuing our unique sort of hyper-functionalism, taking nothing for granted and thereby finding uncanny possibilities. Speculative urbanism (which covers much more than cities) is where the future of design may realize the design of the future.
— December 2016.
“A fire broke out backstage in a theater. The clown came out to warn the public; they thought it was a joke and applauded. He repeated it; the acclaim was even greater. I think that’s just how the world will come to an end: to general applause from wits who believe it’s a joke.
— Kierkegaard
“The ape regards his tail; he’s stuck on it. Repeats until he fails, half a goon and half a god.”
— Devo
During my first visit to Moscow after becoming program director at the Strelka Institute, one particularly significant thing did not happen. I have been thinking about it not happening a lot lately.
On an errand to buy a SIM card, I happened to pass the Russian White House, the scene of the failed 1991 coup that brought Boris Yeltsin to power and which is — as much as any one event can be — the symbol of the end of the Soviet Union.
It was also, thanks to an early Relcom link sending updates to the outside world, in some sense a launch event for the Russian Internet.
By coincidence, as I was walking I noticed the date — August 21, 2016 — the 25th anniversary of the end of the coup. I am not one to stand on ceremony, but for someone who grew up in California in the midst of the Cold War, finding himself in Moscow on that day to witness such silence was eerie. There was nothing at the White House to hint at the anniversary. Nothing much about it on TV either, certainly not on the state television channels. At the site of its occurrence, the anniversary of this “revolution” was an unmarked non-event.
I had been to Russia many times before. The first time was as a teenager visiting the city then still called Leningrad, and I have had the chance to reflect (in print and otherwise) on the deep, strange interrelations between Russia and my home, California, particularly the space race and the rise of algorithmic governance, attempted and realized. Both have their unique politics of amnesia. For the beautiful and banal La Jolla, it is phones, drones and genomes. For Moscow, it is a century or more of unmourned, unprocessed utopian regimes. Now, it seems these may seek some awkward (and illiberal?) convergence. We are the passengers of that convergence, and, I wonder, something else?
The think-tank we are hosting at Strelka takes urbanism — quite broadly, but still specifically conceived — as a medium whose messages are both determinant and up for grabs. To begin, I will share some of the initial thoughts on the program’s research theme that I wrote up earlier this summer, and discuss some of what we hope to address and to accomplish.