Your Body is a City with Benjamin H. Bratton

Type: SYMPOSIUM
Date: 7/15/2011
Time:
Location: The Tateuchi Democracy Forum
Address: 111 N. Central Ave.
                Los Angeles , California

Your Body is a City (Friday)

07.15.11, (Time TBD): The Tateuchi Democracy Forum

 •  Moderator:  Benjamin H. Bratton, Associate Professor of Visual Arts at the University of California, San Diego, and Director of the Center for Design & Geopolitics at the California Institute of Telecommunications and Information Technology. 

•  Cities, we presume, are defined by density: social density, economic density, and the density bodies (of multiple species) interweaving and reproducing in close quarters.  Jungles too are defined by density, but cities, despite the  cliché, are less like jungles than they are like the bodies that inhabit them. These bodies (us) in turn are megacities built of blood, neurons, miles of nerve tissue, marrow, microbes, organs and cavities, multiple internal and external layers of skin. 

•  What kinds of bodies do we see at Little Tokyo Design Week? What cities for what bodies, what bodies for what cities: what design?

•  The body of Los Angeles is defined by its openness, by its irregularity, by its illegible explicitness. It is a coastal parking lot. The body of Tokyo is defined by its closures, by compossiblity, by its comprehensiveness. It is, after Hiroki Azuma, an animal database. 

•  This symposium will present a collection of perspectives on urbanity/embodiment --programs, philosophy, poetics--  and sketch a new zoology for our machine ecologies of flesh and form.

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