Benjamin Bratton
Benjamin Bratton is a sociologist and theorist whose work spans contemporary social and political theory, philosophy, art, design and computer science. Bratton is the Professor of Visual Arts and Director of the Center for Design and Geopolitics at the University of California, San Diego, where he also founded the university's new Speculative Design undergraduate major. He is also Program Director of The Terraforming think-tank at Strelka Institute in Moscow. He is also a Professor of DesignTheory at the European Graduate School, Distinguished Visiting Faculty at SCI_Arc and Visiting Professor at NYU Shanghai. His research is at the intersection of computational media and infrastructure, design research management and methodologies, classical and contemporary sociological theory, architecture and urban design issues, and the politics of synthetic ecologies and biologies. Bratton is the author of several books, including The Stack, which develops a comprehensive political philosophy of planetary-scale computation. He is also the author of dozens of essays, articles, and book chapters, in both academic and popular publications.
Benjamin Bratton Professional Experience / Academic History
Professional Experience
-
Professor of Visual Arts, Director of Center for Design and Geopolitics
Academic History
-
Ph.D., Sociology of Technology
-
B.A., Sociology, Critical Theory
His current projects focus on the political geography of cloud computing and massively-granular universal addressing systems.
Current research includes digital urbanism & media architecture, and contemporary continental philosophy & aesthetic theory.
Research also includes design Research management & methodologies, classical and contemporary sociological theory, history of the social sciences, organizational theory, and interaction and interface design.
VISITING LECTURE
He is a regular visiting lecturer at numerous universities and institutions, including Columbia University, Yale university, and Pratt Institute.
He guest lectures at Bartlett School of Architecture, University of Pennsylvania, University of Southern California, and University of Michigan.
He also guest lectures at Brown University, The university of Applied Arts in Vienna, Bauhaus-university, and Moscow Institute of Higher Economics.
EARLY CAREER
He was the Director of the Advanced Strategies Group at Yahoo! before expanding his cross-disciplinary research and practice in academia.
He taught in the Department of Design/Media art at UCLA and at the SCI Arc, where he continues to teach as a member of the visiting faculty.
He was a Director of Information Architecture at Razorfish in Los Angeles and New York.
BOOKS
The Revenge of the Real: Politics for a Post-Pandemic World (2021)
The Terraforming (2019)
The New Normal (2017)
The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty (Software Studies) (2016)