“We will become vastly smarter as we merge with our technology,” says Ray Kurzweil, Google’s Director of Engineering. “Let there be a digital future, but let it be a human future first,” counters Shoshana Zuboff, author of Surveillance Capitalism, an analysis of “the scandalous abuse of digital capabilities” in our information civilization. Today’s philosophical assessments of the role of technology are torn between such extremes. The same is true of the worlds of art and architecture, inhabited as they are by techno-optimism as well as extreme scepticism. At a moment when we can no longer imagine a world without technology, it is vital to ask how we—the human inhabitants of this planet—imagine the world and its technologies?
Editors
Nick Axel
Daniel Birnbaum
Nikolaus Hirsch
Are Friends Electric? is a collaboration between e-flux Architecture and Moderna Museet within the context of its exhibition Mud Muses: A Rant about Technology.
Lars Bang Larsen is an art historian, writer, and adjunct curator of international art at Moderna Museet, where he most recently curated Mud Muses: A Rant about Technology.
Dare Brawley is a researcher and designer and is currently assistant director of the Center for Spatial Research at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia University.
Adam Greenfield is a London-based writer and urbanist. His next book, on the theory and practice of municipalism, is forthcoming from Verso in late 2020.
Brian House is an artist and Assistant Professor at Lewis and Clark College in Oregon. In 2018-2019 he was a Mellon Associate Research Scholar at CSR. His work with computation and sound has been exhibited at MoMA, MOCA, ZKM, and Ars Electronica.
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun is the Canada 150 Research Chair in New Media at Simon Fraser University. She has studied both Systems Design Engineering and English Literature, which she combines and mutates in her current work on digital media. She is currently Visiting Scholar at the Center for Media@Risk at the Annenberg School of Communications, University of Pennsylvania.
Florian Idenburg is a co-founder SO–IL, an architectural practice in New York. He is co-author of the forthcoming Human(s) Work (Taschen, 2021).
Koo Jeong A is an artist who works on the reinvention of spaces with site specifc works. Her works frequently include architectural elements, drawings, fictions, poetries, publications, installations, sculptures, films, audio works and architecture projects.
Laura Kurgan is Professor of Architecture at the Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation at Columbia University, where she directs the Center for Spatial Research (CSR) and the Visual Studies curriculum.
LeeAnn Suen is an architect based in Boston, Massachusetts. She is co-author of the forthcoming Human(s) Work (Taschen, 2021).
Sven-Olov Wallenstein is Professor of Philosophy at Södertörn Högskola in Stockholm.
Kim West is a critic and researcher, based in Stockholm. He holds a PhD in Aesthetics from Södertörn University, and is an art critic for the Nordic online arts journal Kunstkritikk.
Jia Zhang is a Mellon Associate Research Scholar at Columbia University's Center for Spatial Research. Jia recently completed her PhD at MIT Media Lab's Center for Civic Media where her dissertation addressed personal uses for public data using interactive visualization.
