- This connotation of “ hyperobject ” — as in hyperlink, a human-computer interaction mechanism in the guise of a physical object — is very different from that already defined by Timothy Morton in Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013).
- For this foregrounding of the agency of interfaces, the project that might define the political design ends of the spectrum may be Aldo Van Eyck ’ s urban playgrounds for children. Thanks to McKenzie Wark for this comparison.
- “ What if the architectonic in Kant were not an overarching system but something that has itself to be constructed anew, in each case, in relation to fresh problems — something looser, more flexible, less complete, more irregular, a free plan in which things hang together without yet being held in place? ” John Rajchman, Constructions (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998).
- As already noted, Koolhaas captured this exact dynamic in his Delirious New York study. See Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan (New York: Monacelli Press, 1994).
- Franco B. Berardi, Neuro Totalitarianism (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2014).
- Logistics here refers to both the expert mobilization of things, but also the aestheticized image of mobility in action. For the latter, logistics is a technical imaginary for the world in choreographic motion, an image that in turn becomes a technique for organizing the world as a distributed, generalized complex of distributed, integrated interfaces.
- A possible methodological framework: Interface design is less about the design of a thing than of a condition of transference (that could become a thing) and can take at least three main forms. First-order interface design produces the conditions of interassemblage between people, things, or places — making it good, smart, fast, flexible, sustainable, and so on. This is how urban planning and public policy are also interface design. Second-order interface design produces images of interassemblage that give order, predictability, and clarity to how people use systems. These images are very powerful guides — so powerful that they really are the interfaces to what they represent. This is how graphic designers are interface designers. Third -order interface design produces the image-instruments of interassemblage that allow for the system to be governed, controlled, and optimized according to plan. These are maps of a system that, because they are interactive maps, become tools to engage that system.
- For a more in-depth discussion of assemblage not as a rigid system but as a temporally fragile coming together and falling apart at once, see Manuel De Landa, A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity (London: Continuum, 2009).
- On the aesthetic engine of cosmograms, see Melik Ohanian and Jean-Christophe Royoux, Cosmograms (New York: Lukas & Sternberg, 2005). The visual language of the logistical sublime has a specific graphical and photographical style. It is a dramatic mix of the now overly familiar landscapes of Andreas Gursky, Edward Burtynsky, Bruce Mau, and Jennifer Leonard, Massive Change (London: Phaidon Press, 2005).
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