Machine Landscapes

Architectures of the Post Anthropocene

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• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781119453017
• eBook ISBN: 9781119453093
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

The most significant architectural spaces in the world are now entirely empty of people. The data centres, telecommunications networks, distribution warehouses, unmanned ports and industrialised agriculture that define the very nature of who we are today are at the same time places we can never visit. Instead they are occupied by server stacks and hard drives, logistics bots and mobile shelving units, autonomous cranes and container ships, robot vacuum cleaners and internet-connected toasters, driverless tractors and taxis. This issue is an atlas of sites, architectures and infrastructures that are not built for us, but whose form, materiality and purpose is configured to anticipate the patterns of machine vision and habitation rather than our own. We are said to be living in a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene, in which humans are the dominant force shaping the planet. This collection of spaces, however, more accurately constitutes an era of the Post-Anthropocene, a period where it is technology and artificial intelligence that now computes, conditions and constructs our world. Marking the end of human-centred design, the issue turns its attention to the new typologies of the post-human, architecture without people and our endless expanse of Machine Landscapes.

Contributors: Rem Koolhaas, Merve Bedir and Jason Hilgefort, Benjamin H Bratton, Ingrid Burrington, Ian Cheng, Cathryn Dwyre, Chris Perry, David Salomon and Kathy Velikov, John Gerrard, Alice Gorman, Adam Harvey, Jesse LeCavalier, Xingzhe Liu, Clare Lyster, Geoff Manaugh, Tim Maughan, Simone C Niquille, Jenny Odell, Trevor Paglen, Ben Roberts.

Featured interviews: Deborah Harrison, designer of Microsoft's Cortana; and Paul Inglis, designer of the urban landscapes of Blade Runner 2049.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• About the Guest-Editor
• Introduction: Neo-Machine Architecture Without People
• Further Trace Effects of the Post-Anthropocene
• Invisible Images: Your Pictures Are Looking at You
• Calibration Camouflage: Hyphen-Labs and Adam Harvey: Hyper Face
• Territorial Robots: Jenny Odell: Satellite Landscapes
• Where Tomorrow Arrives Today: Infrastructure as Processional Space
• A Place for Everything: Ben Roberts: Amazon Unpacked
• Human Exclusion Zones: Logistics and New Machine Landscapes
• Where the Internet Lives
• Museum in the Countryside: Aesthetics of the Data Centre
• A Benediction for the Amazon Wind Farm Texas: Where the Landscapes of Resource- and Data Extraction Meet
• Tending Goats and Microprocessors
• Fringes of Technology and Spaces of Entanglement in the Pearl River Delta
• Regarding the Pain of SpotMini: Or What a Robot’s Struggle to Learn Reveals about the Built Environment
• No One's Driving: Autonomous Vehicles Will Reshape Cities, But is Anyone Taking Control of How?
• Disciplinary Hybrids: Retail Landscapes of the Post-Human City
• Ghosts in the Machine: Space Junk and the Future of Earth Orbit
• ‘I’m a Cloud of Infinitesimal Data Computation’ When Machines Talk Back: An interview with Deborah Harrison, one of the personality designers of Microsoft’s Cortana AI
• Emissaries: A Trilogy of Simulations
• Not For Us: Squatting the Ruins of Our Robot Utopia An Interview with Paul Inglis, Supervising Art Director of Blade Runner 2049
• Counterpoint: Ambiguous Territory Design for a World Estranged
• Contributors
• EULA