Benjamin H. Bratton

Benjamin H. Bratton
Benjamin H. Bratton in his studio in La Jolla, California.
Born	November 3, 1968 Los Angeles, California
Notable works	The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty (2015)
Website
www.bratton.info

Benjamin H. Bratton (born 1968) is an American sociologist, architectural and design theorist, known for a mix of philosophical and aesthetic research, organizational planning and strategy, and for his writing on the cultural implications of computing and globalization. He is currently Professor of Visual Arts at the University of California, San Diego and Director of The Center for Design and Geopolitics think-tank at Calit2, The California Institute of Telecommunications and Information Technology.

Bratton was born in Los Angeles, California in 1968, and holds a PhD. in the Sociology of Technology from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Before moving to University of California, San Diego, Bratton taught at the Southern California Institute of Architecture in Los Angeles from 2001–2010, and is now Visiting Faculty. He taught in the Department of Design | Media Arts at UCLA from 2003-2008. He was previously Director of the Advanced Strategies Group at Yahoo!. He founded University of California, San Diego's Speculative Design undergraduate major. Since 2014, he is Professor of Philosophy of Design at European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland. In 2016 he succeeded Rem Koolhaas, as programme director of Strelka Institute a Moscow-based think-tank and post-graduate program in architecture, media and design.

Among his most recent work, his article "On Geoscapes & Google Caliphate: Except #Mumbai" examines the correspondence of political theology and planetary computation as modes of political geography. His lecture, "Surviving the Interface: the Envelopes, Membranes and Borders of Deep Cosmopolitics" considers the emergence of new forms of sovereignty derived from shared digital and urban infrastructures, and the challenges they pose to conventional understandings of architectural partitions and national borders. In his article, "iPhone City (v.2005)" Bratton was early to demonstrate the impact that cinematic user interfaces for mobile social media would have on urban design. His current work develops a political theory of planetary-scale computation and draws from disparate sources, from Paul Virilio, Michel Serres, and Carl Schmitt, to Alan Turing, Google Earth, and IPv6.