Keller Easterling. Extrastatecraft

Friday, May 22, 2015, 7 p.m.
Lecture in the framework of the opening of the exhibition
Spuren spuren
WKV / Querungen
Language: English

Abstract
Repeatable formulas like spatial products and free zone cities make most of the space in the world, and some of the world’s most radical changes are being written in the language of this almost infrastructural spatial matrix. It generates de facto forms of polity that can outpace law, and it is the secret weapon of some of the world’s most powerful players. Infrastructure space is itself an information system—a spatial operating system for shaping the city. However unlikely it may seem, this space can bring to our art a new relevance, as well as additional aesthetic pleasures and political capacities. Exposing evidence of this operating system is as important as acquiring skills to hack into it with expanded techniques of form-making and surprising approaches to political activism.

The word ‹infrastructure› typically conjures associations with physical networks for transportation, communication or utilities. Yet today, the shared protocols and standards – from technical objects to management styles – also constitute an all-controlling infrastructure.

Bio
Keller Easterling is an architect, writer and professor at Yale University. Her most recent book, Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space (Verso, 2014), examines global infrastructure networks as a medium of polity. Another recent book, Subtraction(Sternberg Press, 2014), considers building removal or how to put the development machine into reverse. An ebook essay, The Action is the Form: Victor Hugo’s TED Talk(Strelka Press, 2012) previews some of the arguments in Extrastatecraft.

Other books include: Enduring Innocence: Global Architecture and its Political Masquerades (MIT, 2005) which researched familiar spatial products in difficult or hyperbolic political situations around the world and Organization Space: Landscapes, Highways and Houses in America (MIT, 1999) which applied network theory to a discussion of American infrastructure.

Easterling is also the co-author (with Richard Prelinger) of Call it Home: The House that Private Enterprise Built, a laserdisc/DVD history of US suburbia from 1934–1960. She has published web installations including: Extrastatecraft, Wildcards: a Game of Orgman and Highline: Plotting NYC. Easterling’s research and writing was included in the 2014 Venice Biennale, and she has been exhibited at Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York, the Rotterdam Biennale, and the Architectural League in New York. Easterling has lectured and published widely in the United States and abroad. The journals to which she has contributed include Domus, Artforum, Grey Room, Cabinet, Volume, Assemblage, e-flux, Log, Praxis, Harvard Design Magazine, Perspecta, and ANY.

Spuren spuren is a project by
Asli Serbest, Mona Mahall and Adelheid Schulz

Supported by
Universität Stuttgart, Institut Grundlagen moderner Architektur und Entwerfen,
Akademie der Bildenden Ku?nste Stuttgart (Klasse 2G),
Wu?rttembergischer Kunstverein