MEDIUM DESIGN Culture is very good at pointing to things and calling their name, but not so good at describing the interactivity or chemistry between things or the repertoires they enact. On the flip side of some dominant logics that give authority to declarations, solutions, or master plans, medium design alter dispositions or the matrix of activities in organization as well as the stories and spin that make those changes contagious. Applying a design imagination in these forms of interplay offers special aesthetic pleasures and political capacities that access some underexploited powers in both digital and spatial information systems.

KELLER EASTERLING is an architect, writer and professor at Yale. Her most recent book, Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space (Verso, 2014), examines global infrastructure as a medium of polity. Another recent book, Subtraction (Sternberg, 2014), considers building removal or how to put the development machine into reverse. Other books include: Enduring Innocence: Global Architecture and its Political Masquerades (MIT, 2005) and Organization Space: Landscapes, Highways and Houses in America (MIT, 1999).  Her research and writing was included in the 2014 Venice Biennale, and she lectures and exhibits internationally.

RESOURCES A selection of readings related to the lecture, see links below.

• Keller Easterling Articles and Books

• No You’re Not, e-flux architecture

• After Belonging: Objects, Spaces, and Territories of the Ways We Stay in Transit

• Selected readings (CMU G Suite login required)