The Algorithm in the Room

The Algorithm in the Room: An Evening of the Post-Geographic brings together an interdisciplinary group of designers and thinkers to discuss relationships between algorithmic and spatial practices. The algorithm in the room is the unspoken technological subject that reorients our understanding of design outcomes, ethics/politics, and authorship. Yet to concretize the algorithm, to try to peg down its functional uses within design is to misunderstand its potentially slippery (and productive) role as a bad collaborator. Feral and unpredictable, it provokes human, systemic, and urbanistic response. Via conversations and through digital, video, and screen-based works, this symposium and exhibition looks to raise difficult questions regarding the politics of predictive/automatized software, its architectural and urban impacts, and the aftereffects of recalibrated design agency.

Speakers include: Jeff Maki, urban strategist and Joanne McNeil, writer. Videos exhibited by John Szot Studio, Tim Durfee + Ben Hooker, Jenny Rodenhouse.

Jeff Maki helps organizations working at urban scale deploy technology to improve customer experience and operational outcomes. He is especially interested in public-private partnership, the role of the arts and culture in placemaking, and new approaches to service delivery—particularly transportation. Past clients include MTA/New York City Transit, NASA's Ames Research Center, The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, The City of New York and others. http://www.jeffmaki.com/

Joanne McNeil is a writer interested in the ways that technology is shaping art, politics, and society. She is currently working on a book. She writes about things like broken iPhones, virtual assistants in airports, the Chelsea Manning trial, and the future of novels. Her essays and reviews have appeared in the New York Times, Domus, Dissent, Frieze, The Baffler, Modern Painters, Wired, The Los Angeles Times, Saturated Space, Dirty Furniture, The Boston Globe, n+1/Occupy Gazette, and other web and print publications. She is crrently collaborating with Eyebeam on OurNet, developing student workshops on networks. http://joannemcneil.com/

Jenny Rodenhouse is a multimedia designer and artist. Working within the field of interaction design, her research examines the merging of the interface and the landscape. Her projects explore the experiences, environments, and communities that may develop from the merging of these large scale systems [virtual and physical, artificial and natural, local and global]. Appropriating the test site as a design medium, she creates sites of experimentation that act as ways to prototype alternate realities. Through her conceptual and applied design practice, she collaborates with companies, startups, computer scientists, designers, architects, and artists. http://jennyrodenhouse.com/

John Szot is an award-winning architect living in New York. His work related to building design has been exhibited internationally. In addition to his practice - John Szot Studio, he has held teaching positions at Columbia University, University of Texas at Austin, and Parsons New School for Design, and currently teaches architectural design at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York. His forthcoming book Buildingness will be an independently-published volume of drawings, images, and writings related to the work of his studio is slated for release in 2018. http://johnszot.com/